RCL Advent 4A
22 December 2013
Saint Faith’s
Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Focus text: Matthew 1.18-25
Click here to hear an audio recording of the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist.
Dear Emilia, Esme and Nathaniel,
I am writing this letter to tell you
about what happened to you on Sunday, the 22nd of December
2013. One day, when you are older, I
hope that you will read it, not just once but two or three times. In this way you and I, even though we will be
separated by time and space, will get to know each other a little better. When you read it, you will know what I, the
priest who baptized you, wanted you to understand about this very important
day.
That Sunday was the Sunday before
Christmas, what the Christian community calls the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the
season when we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus. It was also special because your family
wanted you to become part of a family that is larger than you can imagine. This family, the Christian family, is spread
out over all the world. You have
millions of sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents,
who speak every imaginable language, who live in deserts and jungles, prairies
and mountains, on islands and continents.
Wherever you go in your life, you will always find someone who is a
member of this family, the family of Jesus and his friends.
On the day you were baptized, we read
the story that a writer named Matthew wrote about the birth of Jesus and, more
importantly, about Jesus’ foster-father, a carpenter named Joseph. It’s this story that I want to tell you a
little more about.
Now Joseph was a hard-working carpenter
from a small town in the northern part of the country we now call Israel. As far as we know, Joseph was not a rich man
even though he came from a family that had been very important at one time in
the history of Israel. By the time that
Jesus was born, Joseph was living in Nazareth, some distance away from his
family’s hometown of Bethlehem near Jerusalem.
His relatives were scattered all over the country.
Life was not easy for Joseph. Like most of the people of Israel, Joseph had
to work very hard just to have enough to eat and to have a place to live. Things were made worse by the fact that his
country was not free. Some years earlier,
the country had been divided up among a few powerful families who did not care
about the poor and the hungry. If these
greedy people weren’t enough to deal with, Joseph and the people of Israel had
to deal with the Romans, a powerful empire that wanted to control the whole
world. If the Romans wanted to take your
food or your house or your clothing or even a member of your family, then there
was little you could do to stop them.
Even though things seemed rather hard
for Joseph, some good things happened. For
example, Joseph had a good job as a carpenter.
Many things in those days were made out of wood, so a carpenter was an important
member of the community. He also decided
to marry a young woman by the name of Mary.
This meant that he could start a family and begin to build a
future. You see, in those days, having a
wife and children were very important, because children meant there would be
someone to take care of their parents when they grew old.
Just as things seemed to be looking up
for Joseph, he learned that Mary was pregnant and was going to have a
baby. Now, this was bad news for Joseph
because he knew was not the baby’s father.
It was hard enough in those days to raise one’s own children; why would
anyone want to raise someone else’s? So
Joseph decided to call the wedding off.
But God had other plans for Joseph, for Mary and for the baby.
When Joseph went to sleep one night,
God sent Joseph an angel, one of God’s messengers, in a dream to Joseph. In this dream the angel told Joseph that God
wanted him to accept Mary and the baby.
‘You know how bad things are, Joseph,’ said the angel, ‘but I’ve got good
news for you. God did not plan for poor
people to be put down by the rich. God
did not plan that strong people would push weaker people around. God’s plan is that we live together, learn
from one another and share all the good things of the earth. So here’s the deal: the baby that Mary’s going to have is part of
God’s plan. This child is going to show
all people, throughout the world and for all time, what God expects of every
human being. But this child is going to
need a dad and you’re the one God has chosen.
Are you up to the job?’
Well, when Joseph woke up, he decided
that he was up to the job. I imagine
that he thought to himself, ‘I like God’s plan better than the plans the Romans
have for us. I like the idea that God’s
plan is that we live together, learn from one another and share all the good
things of the earth. If this child is
part of that plan, then I’m in. God can
count on me.’ So Joseph married Mary and
raised the baby whose name was Jesus.
When Jesus grew up, he shared God’s
plan with all sorts of people, rich and poor, men and women, young and old,
people from Israel and people from elsewhere.
Over time lots of people came to believe that God’s plan, the plan that
the angel shared with Joseph, was a far better plan than any other plan they’d
heard of. They decided that God’s dream
was a dream worth sharing with others.
More importantly, they thought that it was a dream worth working for. As a sign that they wanted to share this
dream and work hard to make it come true, the followers of Jesus poured water
over the heads of those who wanted to join up and work for God’s plan. Washing with water was chosen because it’s
one of the ways we wake up from sleep after a long night. We wash our faces and our bodies to prepare
ourselves for another day and to clear our heads as we continue our work to
make God’s dream possible.
So on that Sunday before Christmas in
2013, you were brought to Saint Faith’s Church.
We read some stories from the Bible together, we prayed, we made
promises and then I poured water over your head as a sign that we wanted you to
join us in sharing God’s dream and in working to help it come true. No one expected you to make the dream come
true all at once; we’ve been working on this for a very long time and there’s
still a lot of work still to be done. We
just wanted you to do your part and we promised to support you and each other
in doing this.
Emilia, Esme and Nathaniel, making
dreams come true is hard work. It
doesn’t happen over night. To make God’s
dream come true, a dream of a world in which everyone is loved, a world in
which everyone has enough to eat, a world in which everyone’s specialness is
honoured and helped to grow, we have to work together and that’s what the
church is for. The church, the family of
God, the friends of Jesus, is a community of people who believe that God’s
dream is not only a good one, but a dream that it’s worth giving a whole lifetime
to making possible. Now that you are
baptized, you are a member of God’s family, one of the friends of Jesus. When you join with other Christians ---
that’s our family name --- you are learning what it means to be the person God
wishes you to be and how you can help others become the persons God wants them
to be.
We also have friends who share our
dream who are not Christians. Some have
different stories about God’s dream, but all of us, Christians and those who
are not Christians, have the same hope:
one day we and all God’s children will be free and the world will be
filled with the glory of God.
I’ve been working on this for sixty
years and I am still learning, still finding new ways of discovering God’s love
for me and for the whole world. I wish I
could tell you a whole lot more, but I do have to stop now. I hope that when you read this someday in the
future, you will be know a little bit about what I mean. I hope that you will have been caught up in
God’s dream and that you see that it can come true. It’s a beautiful dream; it’s the only dream
that I think worth talking about, working and living for. And now that dream is yours to share.
Your
friend now and for all time,
Richard
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