Advent 4- Joseph- Rev. Wendy McCormick- Dec. 22,2024
Advent 4: Joseph
Rev Wendy McCormick December 22, 2024
Now that my children are grown, I am no longer the primary provider of all the holiday traditions. I get to see which ones are important to them, which ones they are eager to help with, which ones they are determined to make happen when I say, ‘nah, not doing that this year.’ When each of them got their first apartment, I offered to gift them a little tree. One was thrilled and loved the cheapo little tree till she could afford something better. The other turned me down flat. A bit of a minimalist and infinitely practical, she couldn’t imagine having to fool with storing said tree for the other 11 months of the year. Besides she can come to my house and enjoy the full-on décor, knowing that I put it all up and take it all down.
It is indeed the season of traditions in our homes and families, in our community and of course in church. The tradition of the children’s pageant at 4:30 on Christmas eve, the tradition of Angel Choir alums joining the current choir at 6:30. The traditional decorations that are stored with careful records to make sure they come back each year just the same. The tradition of honoring and celebrating occasions and relationships as we decorate the church with poinsettias.
I imagine most of us have a story – from family or church or neighborhood – about somebody screwing up or skipping out on a tradition that is important to somebody else. These are the roots of church fights and family conflicts, aren’t they? You never really know what’s super important to somebody until you take it away or otherwise violate it.
We’re talking holiday traditions here, which are certainly not life and death. And it’s hard to think of traditions and customs that serious in our time. But in ancient times, traditions could really be a thing.
As we encounter these very, very familiar stories again each year, as we engage in the beloved traditions of reading them and telling the story, we do well to peel back the veneer just a bit to see the underlying traditions and customs of the ancients.
As Professor Mitzi Minor writes in her analysis of today’s lesson, to really enter this story of Joseph and his encounter with the angel, you have to understand arranged marriages in the first century world. No such thing as love marriage. Marriage was an economic arrangement between honorable fathers for the purpose of producing legitimate male heirs for the husband’s household. Period. So the traditions were serious. Very serious. Once the deal was struck between the fathers, the couple was engaged, not yet married, but the contract was already legally binding. They just hadn’t moved in together. There was no such thing as blood tests or DNA sampling. The only way to know that the male heir was a legitimate son of the husband was for the wife to be a virgin when she moved into her husband’s house.
Some of us can remember when a young woman becoming pregnant before she was married was cause for great shame and scandal. Such young women were sent away. Our traditions and cultural norms have changed, but in Jesus’ day it was very much like that only even more extreme. More extreme because the Jewish people were a tiny ethnic and religious minority living under oppression in the great Roman empire. Keeping those traditions and customs alive was about the preservation of their faith and the survival of their people.
As Erin Wathen begins Joseph’s story in "Calling All Angels,” she says, newly pregnant Mary goes to visit her cousin “where they have a lovely pregnant ladies’ retreat while also plotting the resistance and dreaming of how their sons shall one day usher in the kingdom of God. Meanwhile . . . a carpenter named Joseph is about to get the shock of his life.”
Our traditional Christmas story is a mash-up, as they say – a mash-up between Matthew, Luke and a little bit of John. And each of the gospel writers has his own perspective, his own agenda, his own emphases in telling the story. As we considered last Sunday, Luke is very concerned about what Jesus means for the poor and the marginalized, for the voiceless, and even for women. While the overall themes of the story are the same, Matthew’s concerns are different. He is interested in Jesus’ ties to the people of Israel, to the tradition of the scriptures – the law and the prophets – Moses, Elijah, Daniel. It is important to Matthew to document begin by documenting Jesus’ lineage from the house of David. And that is through Joseph. Throughout the gospel, Matthew quotes the Bible – our Old Testament - to show how Jesus both stands in line with the great prophets and traditions of Israel and ushers in something new that emerges from that tradition.
Matthew tells us Joseph is a righteous man, that he is faithful to the law. He is committed to upholding the traditions of God’s people. Very important for Matthew and his original audience. The letter of the law would not be kind to a young woman in Mary’s situation – pregnant before marriage, pregnant before moving into the home of the man to whom she is already legally bound. There is no faraway home for unwed mothers to send her to. Public humiliation for her and the man to whom she is bound are all that awaits. The law and tradition even allowed for her to be stoned. In that context, the first thing we learn is that Joseph is a good guy. Resolving to divorce her quietly is definitely the kindest way he can play the hand.
But these are stories about angels, aren’t they? Luke’s angel has a name, Gabriel, and he visits by day. But Joseph’s angel comes in a dream and is described as “an angel of the Lord.” For us, an angel is an angel. But for Matthew’s audience, this description is important. Because in the tradition, the scriptures, our Old Testament, “angels of the Lord bring messages from God to reveal the God’s purposes for creation.” And that’s what Joseph’s angel is doing. Standing in line with all the “angels of the Lord” who come to reveal God’s purposes.
Still, it is an impossible request, and the angel knows it. Like all the other angels, this one reassures Joseph, “do not be afraid.” Fear not. So much to fear. Breaking with tradition, not exactly violating the law but pushing right up against it in an interpretation nobody anybody knew had every made. Joining this young woman in public humiliation. Enduring the stares and the whispers, the jokes and the mocking and who knows what else. Do not be afraid.
What might we do, Erin Wathen asks throughout our little Advent study, what might we do if we were not afraid?
She writes this about Joseph’s predicament: “In telling Joseph to stay married and raise this child as his own, the angel is essentially calling Joseph to abandon all his values . . . . not exactly a Hallmark Christmas movie . . . . but whatever else may come, [Joseph] awoke the morning after that angelic visit, got up and did what the angel had told him.”
Rev Wathen continues: “That must have been some angel – some powerful being who could speak so simply and make a righteous man forget everything he knows about the way the world is supposed to work, lay down his pride, and take on the life-changing and world-shaping role of nurturing the Son of God.
“Or perhaps it wasn’t all up to the angel. Maybe Joseph himself possessed some brand of inner grit that allowed him to see past the anxiety of the present moment and muster the courage to move forward in faith.” And this is at the heart of Matthew’s perspective on the whole Jesus story. And at the heart of what faith asks of each of us: to see past the anxiety of the present moment and muster the courage to move forward in faith. In Rev Wathen’s words: “the fearful intersection between honoring tradition and being held captive by it; between knowing the past and believing what might be possible in the future; between what has happened in the known world and what it might yet become.”
And isn’t this where the life of faith finds all of us? At the fearful intersection between honoring tradition and being held captive by it.
A new pastor is on the way, one who shares our tradition deeply and broadly but doesn’t know the intricacies of the particular traditions of this place and will not always interpret tradition in the same ways as those who have been here a long time. More broadly, anyone paying attention can see that the ways of doing and being church in our society from 5 years ago, let alone 50 years ago, are not working to perpetuate Christ’s ministry and mission in this world.
A huge shift in our culture, deeply affecting churches, was already underway, and then COVID happened. Wathen’s little book sums it up this way: “Communities of faith, which were already facing challenging realities regarding participation, are now facing an uphill battle for their very existence. Many churches are still reeling from the financial hardships of those fallow years, not to mention the comfort level [so many of our people] discovered with just not going to church. . . . . The world we’re living in is not the world we signed up for.”
If church is but a comfy place to be, where familiar traditions are rehearsed and honored, then its days are surely numbered. But if the church can hear the angels beckoning forward into God’s purposes for creation, and embrace those magic words, “do not be afraid,” we just might join the next great thing God is revealing, instead of slowly crumbling into history. What dreams might be coming our way? Dreams from God’s messengers suggesting what it means for us to incarnate – to embody – the love of God in the here and now – which is after all what Christmas is ultimately about --- God come among us to show us how to embody God’s love in this world, in the here and now, instead of waiting around for some other world.
Maybe Joseph was the first one to do that. To embody God’s love in the particular time and place in which he found himself. To put God’s love and God’s ultimate purposes ahead of slavish adherence to tradition and the letter of the law.
Our world is different from Joseph’s world as Matthew paints it. And yet there are some pretty important similarities, aren’t there? He doesn’t break with tradition. He doesn’t say, “to heck with everything we ever knew in the scriptures.” But neither does he say, “we’ve never done it that way before.” Neither does he say, “tradition is carved in stone.”
This season we wonder what it means for us to honor tradition in ways that are forward-looking, risk-taking, bold, courageous, and, above all, following the beckoning lead of God? That’s how Matthew means for us to read the Christmas story and all of the Jesus story. How do we weave a path forward that honors and serves the God we know in scripture and tradition without getting caught up in minutiae and the letter of the law, without being so fearfully tied to traditions of the past and even the present that we don’t dare look forward.
It’s still terrifying. Joseph moves forward not without fear but in spite of it, choosing to trust God’s purposes and God’s beckoning into the future, pretty much over everything else he knows. And it is perhaps not too much to say that being faithful Christians and being the church in our time and place asks the same thing of us --- choosing to trust God, following God into the future, pretty much over everything else we’ve known. Choosing to look and move forward despite the fear instead of being held back by it.
This is a week filled with beautiful and meaningful traditions. It is the time of year to put anxieties aside and just enjoy beauty and peace and love. And yet for those who don’t just show up once a year for a lovely story, for those of us who are in for the life of faith year-round, this week also signals that God is always up to something and as this special season fades away, God will still be beckoning us to follow, saying “do not be afraid” – Amen.
All quotes from: Calling All Angels, Erin Wathen. Westminster John Knox: 2024.
