Rob Tennant, Hillside
Church, Chapel Hill, NC
Fourth Sunday of Advent,
December 22, 2019
“How does your family celebrate
Christmas?” You might be asked by an acquaintance as you sip beverages at a
holiday party.
“Oh,” you respond, “we usually stay home, take it
easy. And your family?”
He answers, “We normally travel to my in-laws’ place.”
Normally? Usually? What are we talking about here? We’re talking about the birth of Christ,
that’s what! Words like ‘normally’ and
‘usually’ don’t have a home in this story.
The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the story of God saving the
world. We retell and relive the story
every year, but the repetition doesn’t normalize or demystify what’s
happening. God has acted and is acting
among us.
The story begins with a man and woman in ancient Israel,
about 6BC, betrothed to be married. The
Jewish betrothal was more binding than what we consider an engagement
today.
Today, a UNC senior and his girlfriend walk across campus. They come to the Old Well, he drops to a knee,
and proposes. Through tears of joy, she
says yes, and they’re engaged. After
graduation, she has a change of heart.
She gives the ring back, breaks off the engagement, and that’s it. Tears are shed, feelings hurt, and dreams
broken. The law is not involved. It’s sad, but it happens all the time.
In ancient Israel a betrothal was a legal contract each
family entered. Aside from infidelity,
betrothals weren’t broken. The “giving
and taking of sons and daughters in marriage” was a sign of normal life. One of the ways a prophet would indicate God
was about to bring the absolute disruption of society was to say “No more will
they be given and taken in marriage.”[i] I know I said “normal” does not fit in this
story, but the story starts in the most normal of ways, with a betrothal.
When Joseph learns his betrothed is pregnant, and he has
not slept with her, he reaches the normal conclusion. She’s committed adultery. Sadly, that too, was a common occurrence,
common enough that there was a legal statute regarding it. For ancient Israelites, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy was the law.
Deuteronomy 22:21 states that a woman guilty of adultery will be taken
to the gate of her father’s home, and stoned to death there by the
community.
It’s possible that by 6BC, death by stoning was no longer
a normally practiced punishment for adultery.
Even if that’s the case, Mary the adulteress would be tattooed with shame,
a fate almost like death in a shame-based culture. You can bet that conservative legalists would
watch Joseph closely. How, Joseph, will you deal with this hussy
you’ve taken for a wife? Some people
are sadistic in how eager they are to see harsh punishment laid down on people
who mess up.
Joseph wasn’t listening to the heavy-handed conservative
legalists. He knew the law. He had options in front of him. He could ruin Mary’s name and Mary’s family
name. All he had to do was call for a
public trial, which was within his rights.
But Joseph was a compassionate man.
He may have even forgiven Mary, but staying with her was not one of his
options. He did not think he could go
through with the marriage, so he would handle it all with no fanfare. Matthew writes, “her husband Joseph, being a
righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to
dismiss her quietly.”
Joseph did not know what was coming next. He was operating in ordinary time, in
everyday circumstances. For the sake of compassion, he would suck up the
embarrassment and heartache and he would do it quietly. He may have felt hurt by what he thought Mary
did, but he wasn’t going to hurt her. He
would protect her reputation as much as he could, ending the whole thing
quietly.
The birth of Jesus
is the beginning of the story of God saving the world. Who are the human partners God employed in
this story? One was Mary. We get her side of the story in Luke’s
Gospel. Matthew tells the story from
Joseph’s point of view. He didn’t know
God was watching. He didn’t know he was
about to become the earthly dad in the “holy family.” He was an Israelite carpenter determined to
the right thing even when the right thing seemed to come with no reward. The one option he did not see available to
him was staying with Mary.
Renowned theologian Stanley Hauerwas sees Matthew’s
gospel as an ongoing exercise to help us see the world through Christ.[ii] When we see the world through Christ, we
throw normal out the window. We see
people and circumstance differently, with new eyes. For Hauerwas, Matthew’s account of the birth
of Jesus is a way of describing the beginning of new creation. What does the world look like in the new
creation?
The first glimpse for Joseph comes in verse 20, when the
story jumps from normal to something we can hardly imagine. Circle that verse because it is where
everything turns for him and for us. The
verse begins, “just when he had resolved to do this.” ‘This’ is his compassionate response, mercy
for Mary, unsatisfactory for the punishment-minded legalists, but revealing of
this carpenter’s godly heart.
The next words, “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in
a dream,” change everything. “Do not be
afraid to take Mary as your wife,” the angel tells Joseph, “for the child
conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
From the Holy Spirit; what
does that even mean?
Joseph was afraid.
Angel visits shock the heart. And
this would be just the first of many angel visits and fear-producing steps in
this humble man’s journey. But beyond
the fear, Joseph was invited into something wonderful, a new work of God. As we follow him through the story and
experience it as he did, we too are invited to step into new creation, the
wonderful story of God acting in the world.
We are beckoned by the story as Joseph was by the angel. We may join in this new thing God is
doing. Faith in Jesus is the key that
unlocks the door.
Joseph wanted to do right by showing compassion to Mary,
but he was still afraid of what people would think and say. He was not ready to think outside the box in
which he lived. Without God’s help we
aren’t ready for that either.
Fear drove the legalists to want to punish
adulteresses. If they could righteously
condemn her sin, they wouldn’t have to face their own. We see so much condemnation of others in our
own day, especially in politics and in the blogosphere and other social media
platforms. In America, we have a hair
trigger. We’re ready to pounce with our words of shame for her – she messed up as
a parent; or for him, he’s an addict and commits crimes to get his next fix;
for this politician because I don’t like his policies; or for that coach – he
doesn’t win enough; or for our own child – he’s not becoming who I think he
ought to be. We liberally toss around
judgment. It’s safe.
It’s scary to face our own shortcomings. The outrage we spew in condemning others
protects us from the more real, rawer work of seeing our own sins, seeing the
damage we do, and confessing. What does
the angel then say, after telling Joseph not to be afraid because Mary is
carrying a Holy Spirit baby? “He will
save his people from their sins.”
Israel wanted a Savior.
Around the time Jesus was born, all kinds of people were claiming to be
the Messiah. Joseph along with every
other Israelite knew the rhetoric. A
Savior Messiah will unite the people to rise up and with the power of God drive
the Romans out of the Promised Land. The
Savior was supposed to save God’s people from foreign occupation. They held this expectation because they did
not understand that the real problem wasn’t Rome or Greece before them or
Persia before them or Babylon before them.
The real problem was sin.
The angel promised Joseph that the baby his wife carried
in her womb would be a Messiah to save Israel and the world from sin. Homiletics professor David Lose notes the
simplicity of the story. Jesus was born
of Mary in the normal way, the way all people are born. He would live an extraordinary life, but then
die, just as people die. But, because of
who he was, his death meant anyone who put their faith in him, would never
again need to fear death.[iii]
Jesus was an unexpected Messiah offering salvation to all
people even though it wasn’t exactly the salvation they sought. Joseph played a central role in the beginning
of the story by obeying the angel in spite of his fear. Each time his life turned from the normal he
understood to some new twist he never would have imagined, he ventured deeper
into the story of God.
You and I have our normal Christmas holiday traditions
and practices. We read the story every
year. This year, I think the story calls
us to enter. God acted to save the world
in the birth of Jesus. In our telling of
his story, in our living out our faith in him by showing the type of compassion
Joseph showed, God today draws us and the world into the salvation he
offers. Living the story, we accept that
normal life has come to an end. God has
something we might not expect in mind.
It is better than anything we could ever ask or imagine.
AMEN
[i]
Revelation 18:23 is one example of this.
[ii] Hauerwas,
Stanley (2006), Matthew: Brazos
Theological Commentary on the Bible,
Brazos Press (Grand Rapids), p.24.
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