This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 Joseph her husband was a righteous man. Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly. 20 As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled: 23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Emmanuel means “God with us.”)
24 When Joseph woke up, he did just as an angel from God commanded and took Mary as his wife. 25 But he didn’t have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son. Joseph called him Jesus. (Common English Bible)
“The Nativity Scene:
Still Life Comes Alive in Advent,” Week Three
The
blackboards sat out at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan—world headquarters of
NBC—waiting for people to write out on it what kindness meant to them.
A
piece of Christmas kitsch if ever there was one, and to be sure, it did produce
some heartwarming entries: selfless service to others, making everybody feel
like somebody, and even simply, daughters.
But
other entries were, well, a bit trite: doing something nice every day. Paying it forward. Compassion.
Refilling the toilet paper (that one was apparently Al Roker’sfavorite).
And
it got me thinking: can we actually define kindness? Is that something we are genuinely able and
equipped to do? I feel like we should be
able to, I really do. And I say that in
part because of someone like Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph, who does not try
to define kindness with his words—if you read Matthew’s entire account, Joseph
is actually never quoted at all—but with his actions, and specifically his
actions towards his betrothed beloved, Mary.
This
is a new sermon series for the church season of Advent, what we colloquially
think of as the “Christmas season,” but in fact the Christmas season in the
church traditionally refers to Christmas Day and the eleven days afterwards
between it and the Epiphany—the day the Magi arrive in Matthew 2 to worship the
newborn Jesus and present Him with the gifts of gold, frankincense, and
myrrh. Advent, rather, is much like the
pre-Easter season of Lent in that it is meant to be a season of preparation—of
preparing for the death and resurrection in the case of Lent, and preparing for
the birth (“preparing the way for the Lord, (to) make His paths straight,” as
John the Baptist puts it, by quoting the Old Testament prophets) in the case of
Advent.
This
Advent season, we’ll be doing so by going through the characters one by one in
the nativity scenes that we all know and love—the setting of Jesus in the
manger surrounded by His earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, as well as the
shepherds and the angels who herald His birth.
We began with the angels, and not just any angels, but the archangel
Gabriel and His message to Mary that she is to bear a child who will one day
bear the name Son of the Most High. Last
week, we moved on to the shepherds, in their role as the first human heralds of
Christ’s birth, and we heard from the adult Jesus in John 10 on the role a good
shepherd must embrace.
Today
we begin talking about Jesus’s earthly parents, beginning today with Joseph
before wrapping up the series next week (already?!) with Mary. While Matthew’s Gospel focuses on Joseph in
telling the Christmas story, Luke’s Gospel focuses on Mary, so they provide an
interesting contrast of sorts as we go from one to the other, starting with
Joseph.
Joseph
is, like the shepherds we talked about last week, something of a blue-collar
nobody. He’s a carpenter, presumably a
competent one, otherwise you’d find it difficult to imagine Mary’s family
allowing her betrothal to him if he didn’t have enough business to be able to
provide for her (“No, Mary, you cannot marry him, he’s like a Cub Scout on the
first day of whittling class!”). And
even though he is, as Luke will point out, of the house and line of David, he
is nobody famous or rich.
Joseph,
then, is not so different from you or me.
He’s average, ordinary, the Israelite John Smith. But he is equipped with at least something of
a moral compass, and he is required to use it when he discovers that his fiancée
Mary is pregnant (although, not for nothing, but couldn’t Gabriel have just
shown up *before* the Holy Spirit impregnates Mary, so that she and Joseph
don’t have to go through the uncertainty that follows?).
Betrothal
in ancient Israel wasn’t quite like engagement today—our current understanding
of engagement is of something that can be broken off for any number of reasons,
like incompatibility, disagreement over whether to have children, or
discovering that your beloved still collects Beanie Babies.
Betrothal,
by contrast, could only be broken off as a result of infidelity, which is what
Joseph naturally expects has occurred when Mary shows up ready to be the next
star of Teen Mom. Joseph is then left
with, to simplify things a bit, three choices: he can pretend the child is his
and raise it as his own, he can divorce Mary and have her stoned as an
adulteress, or he can divorce her quietly.
If
Joseph does the noble thing and takes the child as his own, he is potentially
sacrificing his family’s entire estate—assets, net worth, everything—because of
the Israelite laws concerning double inheritances for firstborn male
heirs. If Joseph and Mary do not produce
a male heir themselves, then all of Joseph’s family property—his home, his
business, his tools, all of it—passes on to someone not of his bloodline. While it may seem selfish to us today to take
something like this into account when a baby and mother’s lives are at stake,
Joseph has to consider being able to provide for his extended family in a time
when there was no such thing as Social Security or a safety net.
If
Joseph divorces Mary and makes it public—keep in mind that, as I said, the only
reason a betrothal was typically broken off was because of infidelity, so it
wouldn’t be like Joseph would have to spell it out for people—then Mary and her
unborn child are stoned to death, something terribly cruel and barbaric on
face, and something that said unborn child would actually go on to prevent as
an adult when, in John 8, he is presented with a woman caught in adultery,
about to be stoned.
So
Joseph fashions for himself a compromise: he will divorce Mary, but he will do
so quietly, almost in secret, so that while legally, he is free to remarry to
someone with whom he can have a legitimate heir, Mary is at least given a
chance at survival. It will be a hard
life for her—she may not ever be able to marry and to enjoy the financial
security that comes from marriage (and back in ancient Israel, lacking that
stability would decrease your expected life span on its own), but at least she
won’t be killed on spec. While we may
have wanted to see Joseph be prepared to accept this child as his own, this is
for him—with the morality of his time—the most palatable of three distinct
evils.
Of
course, then an angel does in fact swoop in to tell Joseph that everything is
copacetic, and Joseph remains betrothed to Mary after all. So this story is a testament not just to
Joseph’s morality—which may have its limits…he is human after all—but also to
Joseph’s faith, which is not so limited, because he is prepared to risk his
family’s whole estate on what an angel says to him in a dream.
In
the parlance, that takes some cojones.
Of
course, Joseph’s faith in what angels reveal to him in dreams is not limited
solely to something as soul-sized as taking Mary for his wife—he also guides
his family in and out of Egypt on that same divine guidance in order to save
his wife and newborn son whilst King Herod is busy ordering the slaughter of
the infant boys under the age of two in and around Bethlehem in a vain attempt
to kill off the Messiah whom the Magi have told him will be his ultimate successor
as king of the Jews.
But
before we get to any of that, we are first given the great gift of bearing
witness to one of the most profound acts of human kindness in history. Faced with an impossible dilemma, Joseph
strives to do the right thing before any such angelic advice is ever
proffered. His kindness, though we may
try to do so, could not, cannot be encapsulated simply in a word to scrawl in
chalk on a blackboard. Even if he does
not share Mary’s overt courage, he is likely a fitting earthly father for a
divine son.
Because think about it--there may well be a reptilian part of your brain or mine that would want to see someone whom we trusted in that much to suffer as a result of betraying that trust. But Joseph does not reach for that.
So if you were to ask me to scrawl on a blackboard what kindness means to me, I would probably scrawl the words "Matthew 1:18-26." I would point you to this story, of a man who chose dignity over vengeance, and life over death by execution.
And
like the shepherds we talked about last week, he, too was and is a complete
nobody, someone you wouldn’t know from Adam, someone who could have and almost
certainly would have lived and died in complete and total anonymity.
But
for his kindness, he has not. And for
that kindness, a grateful world is forever in his debt.
Thanks
be to God for Joseph. Thanks be to God for the nobodies.
13 days left. Remain devoted, brothers and sisters. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
13, 2015
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