"The Good News of God-With-Us"
Matthew 1:18-25
We don't know very much about
Joseph. But in today's account in
Matthew, Joseph was a central character.
Matthew tells us that Joseph makes the disturbing and painful discovery
that his fiancée is pregnant. According to first century Jewish law,
their engagement—or betrothal—was the first stage of the marriage
contract. For all intents and purposes, then, Mary and Joseph were married, but
hadn’t yet moved in with each other or consummated their union. That would have taken place a few months
later, when there would be a feast to celebrate when Joseph took Mary to his
home.
We’re so used to hearing the beautiful
story of Jesus’ birth that we risk not hearing what Matthew is telling us
here: this is an unplanned pregnancy.
Joseph knows he isn’t the father.
In their patriarchal culture, the
birth of the first born son was all important-- and crucial to the family line
and property transfer. He’s supposed to
believe that Mary’s baby is from the Holy Spirit?
In our own time, when a lot of people raise children without
benefit of marriage, the issue of legitimacy may sound a bit quaint. But the heart of this story is much bigger
and more profound than that. The heart
of the story is about a just man-- a
good, decent, conventional, law-abiding
man of first century Palestine-- who
wakes up one day to find his life turned upside-down. His betrothed wife is pregnant, and decent,
conventional men of his time did not marry girls who are “found to be with
child by someone else.” It would have
been obvious to anyone in the neighborhood that Mary had betrayed his trust and
the very order of things.
Mary's pregnancy forces Joseph to consider his options.
He’s a righteous man, which means that
he loves God and tries his best to follow God's laws in his own life. So he turns to that law for guidance in what
to do with Mary.
According to Jewish law, Joseph had two options. He could bring charges against Mary in a public
trial. He could accuse her of adultery. This might have resulted in her death, by stoning.
The second option would be to divorce her quietly,
without pressing charges against her. In
the presence of two witnesses, he could write out a paper of divorce and
present it to her.
Joseph had decided to take
the second option and divorce Mary quietly.
Instead of invoking the law, he decides to arrange for her to go away
from the accusing eyes of neighbors, have her baby discreetly, and then each
will go their separate ways.
Joseph must have been having a restless
night, tossing and turning, when an
angel of the Lord comes to him in a dream, and tells him he has an important
role to play in God’s salvation plan. He hears the angel saying, "Don't be afraid,
Joseph. The child she carries was
conceived by the Holy Spirit. God wants
you to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
The way Matthew tells it, everything hangs
on what Joseph decides. If Joseph believes
the angel and obeys, the story can continue.
Mary will have a home and a family...
and her child will be born the son of David.
But what if Joseph doesn't believe? What if he wakes up from his dream and divorces
Mary? Then she’d be an outcast-- possibly killed by her family for disgracing
them and herself... or disowned by them
and left to scratch out her living however she can-- feeding herself and her illegitimate child on
whatever she can beg or steal. She and
the baby would be marginalized and vulnerable.
The child is Joseph's until he says otherwise. Whether or not he is the biological father,
Joseph becomes the child's father the moment he says so, because the issue at
stake is not simply a biological one but a legal one. Jewish law states: "If someone says, 'This is my son,' he is so attested."
According to Matthew, Joseph's belief
is as crucial to the story as Mary's womb. It takes both parents to give birth to this
remarkable child: Mary to give him
life... and Joseph to adopt him and give
him a NAME-- Jesus, son of David, from
whose house the Messiah shall come.
The story is about a righteous man who
looks at a mess he didn’t create-- and
decides to trust that God is present in it.
Joseph's conventional sense of right
and wrong and righteousness gives way to God's.
Joseph trusts and obeys... and
decides to take Mary home with him to be his wife.
This is a beautiful example of
self-sacrificing love and grace. The LAW
stated his options clearly. They both
involved judgment and punishment. But
Joseph is challenged to be bound by an even greater law-- the law of LOVE.
This man who has always seen
righteousness as a matter of following the rules, coloring inside the lines, now trusts in the promise of the angel and
takes Mary as his wife. Here at the
beginning of Matthew’s gospel, Joseph becomes the primary example for true
righteousness and faithful discipleship.
Everything in the drama of Jesus Christ that will unfold from this
moment hinges upon this man and his righteousness.
Can we relate to this story?
We look around the world-- Syria…
Yemen… Darfur and South Sudan… Palestine and Israel… and in our own nation, where many people feel
anxious and hopeless… maybe even like strangers in a strange land.
We see things that are unjust. We are appalled when we hear words of bigotry and hatred. We’re deeply concerned for those who are
marginalized or oppressed.
When we're presented day by day with
circumstances beyond our control, we may be tempted to divorce ourselves from
it all.
But then maybe we hear an ANGEL
whispering in our ears: "Don't be afraid. God is here, in the midst of all this. It may not be the life you had planned. But God may be born here too-- if you'll
permit it."
Can we hear God’s word for us? Don’t be
afraid. Trust in God’s promises. The messy, impossible things we see around us
have the possibility of new life and new possibilities.
For that to happen,
God needs human partners. Joseph and
Mary. And you and me. Ordinary people who are willing to work with God, as
partners in God’s plans for good.
I love the way Barbara Brown Taylor
puts it: “Our lives... our losses... our Lord.
And not just each of us alone, but the whole church of God, looking out at a world that seems to have run
amuck... groaning in labor pains and proclaiming
over and over again to anyone who will HEAR that God is still with us... that God is still being born-- in the mess
and through it... within and
among those who will still believe what angels tell them in their dreams.”[1]
Sometimes that means sleeping on
something, instead of being too quick to
think we know what God's will is. Sometimes it means struggling with difficult
issues. Sometimes it means changing our
minds about what's right and wrong.
We live in a broken and fearful world. But in the
midst of chaos and fear and sadness, the message of Christmas is that God is with
us. God has come to us in Jesus, full of grace and truth, to bring God’s
amazing, transforming love to us.
I’ve started re-reading Rev. Dr.
William Barber’s book, The Third Reconstruction, in preparation for our next
Engage book group gathering in late January, and over the weekend I noticed one
of the first passages I underlined a year ago.
Rev. Barber was talking about the influence his un-educated grandmamma
had on him. He recalls how when he was
growing up, he’d sit in the kitchen as his grandmamma and others would cook
quantities of food for the family and others.
She and some other ladies from church would gather food, anointing oil,
and some money, and they’d say, “We’ll be back shortly. We’ve got to go and hope somebody.”[2]
As a young boy, he thought his
uneducated grandmamma was mis-speaking-- that she mistook the word “hope” for
“help.” He thinks he may have even tried
to correct her error in wording a time or two.
But looking back, he says he sees that
Grandmamma articulated more theology in that single phrase than some preachers
manage to get into an entire sermon.
“As a person of faith struggling to
survive in a society that so often despised her and the people she loved most,
my grandmamma knew that any prayers worth their salt had to be accompanied by food
for the hungry.
She and other mothers of the church
practiced ‘visitation’ as a spiritual discipline, every bit as important as
Sunday worship or Holy Communion. She
knew in her bones that faith and works, belief and practice, were inseparable. And she knew in her careful choice of words
that love in action was not simply about helping people. It was a practice of hope that both enabled
others to keep going and helped her to keep her eyes on the prize and hold on.
Rev. Barber writes, “Though she had no
formal training in theology, my grandmamma knew what the great German
theologian Jurgen Moltmann said so clearly:
‘Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is,
but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.
Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the good of the
promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfilled presence.’”[3]
Jesus is waiting to come into our
hearts more fully this Christmas... to changed
us, little by little... and to fill
our lives with the wonder and joy of God's love… and invites us to work in
partnership with him to bring the kingdom of love into the world.
Joseph believed the good news he heard
from God, and he said YES to God's plan. His heart and mind were changed, and he became
God's partner in the divine salvation plan.
May it
be so with us!
Amen!
Rev.
Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield
Presbyterian Church
Dearborn,
Michigan
December
18, 2016
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, "Believing the Impossible," in Gospel
Medicine.
[2] Rev. Dr.
William J. Barber II, The Third
Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice
Movement (Beacon Press, 2016), p. 3.
[3] Jurgen
Moltmann, Theology of Hope
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 21.
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