Disappointment But Not Despair: Reflections on Matthew 1.18-25 (RCL Advent 4A, 18 December 2016)

Disappointment But Not Despair

Reflections on Matthew 1.18-25

RCL Advent 4A

18 December 2016

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

            ^1.18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.  When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  ¹⁹ Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  ²⁰ But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  ²¹ She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  ²² All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:  ²³ “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”  ²⁴ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵ but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

         Last week I spoke about John the Baptist as one of the more mysterious and controversial characters in the New Testament.  This morning we encounter another mysterious and controversial figure:  Joseph the carpenter who agrees to take on a role that he could not have imagined.

         In popular Christian imagination Joseph is frequently portrayed as an older man who, after the miraculous birth of Jesus, has no marital relations with Mary and devotes himself totally to caring for the nestling the divine cuckoo has laid in his nest.  After the child reaches twelve, Joseph disappears entirely from the picture.  This familiar image of Joseph has little to no textual basis in the New Testament and is evidence of how later Christians, after the New Testament period, sought to render Joseph a safer, a tamer, a more impotent character.

         The Joseph of my imagination is neither old nor a voluntary marital celibate.  He is a young man with a promising craft who makes a good marriage.  He comes from a good family descended from King David and he is able to arrange a marriage to a young woman whose own family has links to the Temple priesthood.

         Matthew the Evangelist describes Joseph as a ‘righteous’ man who tries to observe the requirements of the Torah and who tries to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.  When Joseph discovers that he has been cuckolded, he has the right to demand that Mary be stoned to death.  Instead, he chooses mercy and compassion rather than retribution, private shame rather than public vengeance, the spirit of the Law rather than its letter.  He does not allow his disappointment to lead him into the black hole of despair where our reptilian brain can overpower our higher mental functions, ‘the better angels of our nature’.

         Into the night of his disappointment an angel brings a dream.  I think that the angel’s message has been dolled up by Matthew, so let me give a more colloquial version of the dream.

         “Yes, you’ve been had, Joseph my lad,” said the angel.  “But even God has recognized that you’ve handled the disappointment well.  So, God wants to let you in on our little secret.  This is no ordinary pregnancy and the Child will be no ordinary child.  You’ve been given an opportunity to play an important role in God’s plan to save humanity from itself.  So, take a risk.  Hang on to your blushing and very pregnant fiancée.  You’ll have some turbulent times ahead, but God is with you, all three of you.  So, wake up, keep calm and carry on.”

         What are you and I to make of this story?  The first thing we can say is that “God guides faithful decisions.” [i]  Even though Joseph could not have ever imagined the situation in which he found himself, the fact that he was a ‘righteous’ man provided him with the spiritual resources to discern a courageous path of compassion in the face of significant societal and cultural pressure to choose a different path.

         We can also say that “God gives grace to scandalous situations.” [ii]  As difficult as it may be to believe, there is no human situation where God is absent.  Disappointment or shame or fear or danger do not have to give way to despair.  I am not suggesting some naïve optimism that everything will turn out ‘all right’.  I know the darknesses that can come upon us and I do not underestimate their power to pull us deeper into the black hole.  What I am saying is this:  for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to love, we can catch a life-restoring glimpse of God’s presence even in the darkest night of our souls.  Life-altering tragedies occur and personal disappointments come to us all, but they need not lead us to believe that we have been forgotten.  “In a world where carpenters are raised from the dead, anything is possible.” [iii]

         And, my friends, we can proclaim that “God is with us.” [iv]  God is with us in the friend or stranger who accompanies on our darker journeys.  God is with us when we must confront our personal failures and seek the forgiveness of others.  God is with us when the future seems uncertain and we doubt whether we have the resources to do even the least of what we believe God has asked us to do.

         After all, Jesus’ last words to his disciples in the Gospel according to Matthew are these:  “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  (Matthew 28.20b)  I am with you, says Jesus, when you face difficult choices.  I am with you, says Jesus, when you face situations that tempt you to despair.  I am with you, says Jesus, when your horizons seem to shrink.  Jesus, Joseph’s son, said this and I think that he learned it from his father, both of them.

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[i] Melissa J. Wagner in Sundays and Seasons:  Preaching; Year A 2017 (2016), 33.

[ii] Melissa J. Wagner in Sundays and Seasons:  Preaching; Year A 2017 (2016), 34.

[iii] Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1966) by James Goldman.

[iv] Melissa J. Wagner in Sundays and Seasons:  Preaching; Year A 2017 (2016), 34.

A Dream Worth Living and Working For (The Fourth Sunday of Advent, 22 December 2013)

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 22^nd 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