Matthew 1:18-25 23 December 2007
“JESUS’ OTHER PARENT”
Don’t you love how seasonal music invades and conquers this time of year? No, I’m not talking about “Frosty the Snowman” or the Yuletide sentiments of Alvin and the Chipmunks. I get enough of that by Thanksgiving. I mean the good stuff.
We sang out the good stuff at the Christmas meeting of the Women’s Fellowship, oblivious to the snowstorm just beyond the windows. We were charmed by Barbara and her bells, momentarily immune to the inevitable slippery drive home.
“Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,
Round yon virgin mother and child. Holy infant so tender and mild.”
“Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind,
with Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind.”
“For Christ is born of Mary, and gathered all above,
while mortals sleep, the angels keep, their watch of wondering love.”
It’s great, isn’t it? But if you listen closely to these carols or a host of others, one thing is missing. Rather conspicuously absent, I should say. Does anyone miss Joseph in these two millennia of Christmas hymnody? Wasn’t he at that silent night, standing by, steadfast, enduring with Mary all of the scandal and rejection?
It’s not just Christmas hymnody. How many of you have seen great cathedrals of Europe? Their stained glass depictions of the nativity would almost make Joseph out to be a deadbeat dad. He’s often not even shown. Cows make the nativity. Donkeys and sheep do too. But Joseph? Flip through a volume of religious art and it’s the same thing. Even in paintings where Joseph does make the family portrait, he is more bystander than full participant, a tag along, a player to be named later. He might seem part of the scenery, but he is not part of the drama.
And then we have the Gospels’ version. Luke barely mentions Joseph by name. As Luke tells the story, it is all about Mary, all about how the angel Gabriel visited her. Luke even gives Mary her own song to sing, our cherished Magnificat. But Matthew tells the tale differently. No sooner does Matthew declare, “now the birth of Jesus took place in this way,” than both the names Mary and Joseph trip off his tongue. Joseph is central for Matthew. No, he still doesn’t get any lines to say or songs to sing. But maybe that is also typical of Joseph. We should think of him as the strong, silent type. We could maybe cast Jeff Bridges as Joseph.
For Matthew the heart of the story is a good and just man who wakes up one day to find his life wrecked: his betrothed pregnant, his trust betrayed, his name ruined, his future revoked, his dreams shattered and lying in pieces about him, like shreds of wrapping paper littering the floor at ten am Christmas morning.
His life in tatters, Joseph must make a decision. For the time-honored Jewish code of law demanded he must break off his engagement. Joseph’s personal sense of honor would seem to demand no less. After all, he is called a righteous man. But Joseph’s sense of righteousness transcends the letter inscribed on the scroll. His righteousness has as much to do with grace as law. Such righteous-ness nested deep within his heart and stored itself in the marrow of his bones.
Joseph knows the terrible cost of publicly divorcing his wife-to-be on the charge of infidelity. And Joseph cannot go to that place and call it righteous. Mary would either be killed, as the law prescribed. Or she would be forced to become a beggar or a thief or a prostitute, scratching out whatever she could to feed herself and her illegitimate child. At the very least, she would be turned out by her family. The cost of public divorce was that Mary’s life was essentially over.
So, to preserve his own dignity, and to spare Mary’s utter ruin, Joseph decided to divorce her quietly. Let’s call it an ancient, ahead of its time, early version of those quick and quiet no-fault divorces. This would let them both rebuild their lives. This would give them both room to put back together the broken pieces. No use hammering the girl, Joseph decided, whatever had led her so far astray.
You too have faced such a Joseph moment in your life, whatever the cause and the context. Your dreams are dashed. You choke on fear and grief. And the more you struggle, the more the fear and grief seem to tighten their grip. You awake at 3:11 am and your mind whirls with it all. The awful and repetitive thoughts circle and your mind spins, exhausting you even before you can even get out of bed.
But once you sink deep enough into this blighted hole of brokenness—I know, I have been there—something like blessing begins to emerge. You can’t always perceive it is as blessing in the moment, but in retrospect it can appear as such. And the blessing appears something like this: sometimes it is only when you are broken enough, bogged down with tiredness and weakness, that you are willing to let God pick up the pieces and put them back together in a new, promising, and unimaginable way. That is precisely where Joseph is on that decisive night. Sheer fatigue and exhaustion make him receptive to a new way, to God’s way.
All of his waking dreams destroyed, Joseph is susceptible to nighttime dreams. And that is where Yahweh chooses to speak. But it is not just Joseph’s dream. It is truly God’s dream for Joseph and Mary and Jesus and for all of humankind.
”Mary is pregnant with the Holy Spirit,” an angel tells Joseph in his dream. “Do not fear. Marry her anyway.” When Joseph awakes, he receives it as a salutation and blessing from God. This despite that others would view it as something far inferior. As my friend Martin Copenhaver writes, “Somehow in the stillness of the night, in the darkest hours, in that death-like state called sleep, Joseph is able to let go of his own dreams in order to dream God’s dreams for the world.”
Now you can see maybe why Matthew has a fondness for Joseph and his plight. In seven verses we hear of a righteous man who surveys a mess he had absol-utely nothing to do with creating. And he decides to read holy possibility all over it. With every reason to disown it all and walk away and find instead a tidier, more controlled type of life, to find an easier and more conventional wife, Joseph instead perceives the promises of God auguring through the chaos and disgrace. He not only claims the scandal and owns the mess. He legitimizes it as a clean and honorable place. Yes, friends, precisely the place where the Messiah is born.
I don’t know what your image of true manhood is. Maybe it is Jerome Bettis or George Clooney, Arnold Scharzeneggar or Clint Eastwood, they are all fine. May I suggest another look at Joseph? Look to him and see someone truly stunning in his selfless, quiet, subtle, understated, content-to-be in the background way.
You know all I said before about Joseph not getting his due in carols, cathedrals and paintings. In a sense, it’s all silly and beside the point. For the point is Jos-eph wouldn’t even care. That helps explain the beauty of his faith and character. Joseph wouldn’t even care. None of it would bother him in the least. It doubtless bothers us fair-minded and inclusive-obsessed mainline church folk more than it would ever trouble him. Joseph is the Gospel’s version of the strong, silent type. He is patron saint of whiners and complainers because he never goes there. Rather he shows us a still more excellent way through our grievance and gripes.
The people I admire most in the world are those who--no matter how much they have been put upon, dumped upon and spat upon--still refuse to act like victims. I have met a great many like that in Dennis Union Church, as you have battled through messes you had no part in making and traced the handiwork of the Lord. I have met some like that in Central America who have never been given a break by any and have been persecuted by powers and principalities, but smile as big as the dawn every morning. Of course, the ultimate example of this is Jesus. Even as they nailed him to a cross, he let God define what his life meant, not his accusers and persecutors. Jesus trusted God’s dream to govern even as he lived a nightmare. At least in part let’s say he got it from his father and mother.
But what about you? You have had moments when life cast you in such a role. You had your plans, your dreams, your own idea of how life was supposed to be. Then one day you find yourself presented with circumstances you did not choose and living a life completely different than the one you had always envisioned. When that moment comes, you ask: “how did I get here? And how do I get out?”
If you seek resolve for such moments, if you desire a way to transcend, and if you are wise enough to know that merely toughing things out only works so long, then look to Joseph and Mary and Jesus. When you are worn down to a nub, when fear and grief surround your dreams at night like vultures encircling carrion, let another dream breakthrough. Listen for the faint sound of the voice of angels. You will recognize it because it will say something like this: “Do not fear. God is right here in the midst of all this confusion and hurt. It may not be the life you planned. But God can be born here just as well as anywhere else in all creation.”
Can you be so bold as to trust God to work through your shattered dreams? If you can, you are not just bold, you are strong. Not just strong, even deathproof. At Christmas, human lives being what they are, we are all invited by the grace and power of God to accept the whole sticky mess of life, and rock it in our arms. And to listen as the murmur and coo of a baby signal all things beginning anew. Amen.
Loving God, we thank you that you have come into our lives and that you act with saving power to fortify what is broken, to reinvigorate all good things that are lost. We thank you for Joseph, Mary and Jesus, as much fugitive family as holy family, and for how the life of your Spirit, Lord, has been poured out through their lives.
Touched by your Word made flesh, how you favor the broken willing to hear your voice, we would embody, incarnate and signify your love to others on earth. May the joy of Christmas, now rapidly advancing, never end, but continue through the ages until at last your reign of truth and justice and peace is fully established on the earth. As we pray for the holy family, we pray for families holy to us as well, for Madeline Stocker, recovering from her broken hip; for Pat Delaney, recovering in a Boston hospital from a heart attack and, we think, from surgery;
