2022-12-19
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
December 18, 2022 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Matthew 1:18-25 The Federated Church, UCC
Joseph. When the story of Jesus’ birth is told in the church at this time of year, we tend not to talk or think much about Joseph. The baby Jesus is the star of every pageant, of course. But his mother Mary has a pretty prominent role in the story, too. She’s visited by an angel who announces that she’s going to give birth to the Messiah (Luke 1:26-38). She sings her great song of love for God, the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1:46-55). She ponders all these things in her heart (Luke 2:19).
Joseph, though? He gets short shrift. You barely notice him. In a memoir he wrote, Craig Barnes, a Presbyterian minister, says “when I was a child participating in [Christmas pageants] none of us wanted to be Joseph. He’s not the star.” After watching his church’s most recent pageant, he says, “This year the director of the pageant once again convinced another tall, awkward preadolescent boy to take the part. And once again Joseph spent most of his time standing behind the beatific Mary and her baby looking like he didn’t really want to be there.”
Barnes says, though, that Joseph is his favorite character in the story (Diary of a Pastor’s Soul, pp. 128-130). And I can see why. There’s something so stalwart about Joseph, so faithful, so trusting. As I’m guessing any of us would, he’s sure that Mary has been unfaithful to him. What else could he conclude? She’s pregnant, after all, and he knows he’s not the one who made this happen.
Now you could imagine he’d be furious about this and make a public stink about her apparent infidelity. But no. “Being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace,” says the story, he “planned to take care of things quietly” (Matthew 1:19, NRSV and The Message). Even as he decides to divorce Mary, he comes across as noble and honorable.
Intruding on his intention to pursue a divorce, though, one night he has a startling dream that upends his plans. An angel of God convinces Joseph to stay with Mary. “Mary’s pregnancy is Spirit-conceived,” says the angel. “God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant” (1:20, The Message).
Now we could spend lots of time and attention ruminating on how biologically likely this was or how literally to take this. There are certainly corners of the Christian church that have insisted on an affirmation of the story’s literalness as a litmus test of faith: ‘do you believe in the virgin birth?’ We might want to spend time in another setting exploring this and other questions.
For us this morning, though, those questions are beside the point. As we’ve mentioned before, what matters for us who worship God is not so much the factual accuracy of the biblical saga, but the deeper spiritual import of the stories that are told there. We tell this story not because it’s a literal accounting of a conception and birth. We tell it because, at its core, it tells us something crucial about the heart of human life and life with God.
And we hear this tale on this, the fourth Sunday of Advent, this day when we celebrate the gift of love in our lives. At first glance, it may not seem like a story about love. But let’s look more closely.
When the subject of love comes up, we may well think first of those we care about most. And in the next breath, we may just as well think of the places in which love is sorely absent. We’re acutely aware of the gaps in love that fill the airwaves and social media and, when we’re honest, the corners of our own hearts. Bitter resentments, deep mistrusts, long-standing wounds. And in a wider context, Russian aggression, North Korean muscle-flexing, Chinese swaggering, flawed governing priorities, aggressive posturing—we could go on and on with the list of slurs and animosities and hostilities that fracture this precious and fragile world.
And because of this fracturing, we have at least a vague sense that the birth of the Christ in our midst needs to be, and is, in truth, about love, about bringing together what has been separated. Pop culture, too, gets this emphasis on love. It’s striking to me, though, that the love featured at Christmas on TV and streaming services of all kinds is romantic love. Contemporary Christmas movies are almost invariably about two people who irritate each other, eventually fall for each other, and finally have a tryst under the mistletoe. In Hollywood, love is about romance.
And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I’ve watched more than my share of sappy Christmas movies in which the bickering couple finally finds true love. They’re feel-good movies, and they can be a real pick-me-up. Everything works out in the end!
Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth, though, comes at love from an entirely different angle. Its story of love begins and ends in a noticeably different place. While love for us may be about finding true romance, or, in a larger sense, caring for each other more fully, love in this biblical story doesn’t begin with us at all. It begins with God.
Remember the story: just when Joseph is at his lowest point, knowing he’s completely incapable of making this wildly discouraging situation right, what should happen but God comes to him in a dream. And what does God do in the dream? Reassure him. God. Comes to him. To reassure. This is the MO of the Holy One. Joseph here is beyond any ability to help himself. This marriage in which he had put so much stock turns out to be a ruse. Or so he thinks. What can he possibly do to rescue the situation?
Turns out: nothing. As is so often true for us, as well. How many times do we run into a brick wall as we try to salvage an untenable situation? We’re pushed to the limit by a surly or rebellious child. A parent makes us want to scream. A work challenge puts a pit in our stomach. A spouse deserts us. A diagnosis shatters us. And addiction chains us. A sour mood poisons us. At various times in our lives, and maybe daily, we run into unmanageable situations, problems we simply cannot solve on our own. This is where Joseph finds himself. Until the dream.
Of course, not all of us are going to have dreams that are as reassuring as the one Joseph has in his desperation. The truth of the matter, though, is that the arms of God are around us always. Let me speak personally about this. I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn a good deal of what I once assumed was true about God. For most of my life I have acted as though God’s care for me was contingent on my saying and doing everything perfectly. As long as I was meeting what I assumed were God’s expectations and succeeding at the tasks that were in front of me, I had some hope that God might be good to me. Any attention from God, though, hinged on my excellence and success.
Here, though, is what is so much more deeply true: God’s love is simply poured out on me, as it is on Joseph, without my having to do anything to earn it. I have been touched in recent weeks by a line of the contemporary mystic, James Finley, who reminds us of what we may so easily have forgotten, or never taken in, that “we are God’s heaven.” We may well know God to be our heaven, but have we ever really taken in that God is seeking us and approaching us and delighting in us, such that we are God’s heaven? We are not just incidental to God. We matter that much to the Holy One. You and I? We’re God’s heaven.
When my spouse Mary was in her spiritual direction program a decade or so ago, Joan Nuth, who directed the program, used to begin every class by noting that, just as we live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28), so also God lives and moves and has God’s being in us. That love isn’t contingent on our moral superiority. It is simply given without even the hint of a precondition. We may have let our children down or neglected our parents or failed in our workplace. And none of that hinders God’s love in the slightest. You and I are adored, just as we are.
Another way to put this is something Richard Rohr said in his Daily Meditation just yesterday. The Franciscan priest suggests a phrase we might make our own on an ongoing basis. He said, “God’s love is living itself in me.” It’s a mantra we might repeat to ourselves throughout the day. God’s love is living itself in me. God’s love is living itself in me. It’s what it means, in a sense, for Jesus to come as Emmanuel, God with us.
This, I think, is some of what Joseph hears in the angel’s visit to him in his sleep. While he can’t make his life right, God can. When the angel tells Joseph not to fear and assures him everything will be OK, it’s God’s way of saying, “Everything’s cool.” So Joseph’s central task is to let God love him. It’s my task, too. And I suspect it’s yours, as well. Or maybe we should say it’s really our job together: let God love us.
That’s the first and most crucial love—God’s love for us. And it’s that love that makes all our loves possible. This included romantic love, certainly. But’s also so much more than that. The love that’s enabled in us is the love we share in family and community, in neighborhood and wider world. If I really get, in my marrow, that I am cherished beyond belief, then what else is there for me but to radiate that love, through my own unique gifts, to those in my orbit and beyond. We have the opportunity, the privilege, to share that love, not only with those we adore, but also with the cranky neighbor, the difficult sibling, the trying colleague. God’s love enables and makes possible our love for each other.
It’s this love that undergirds the MeToo movement. It’s this love that inspires the struggle for racial justice and equity. It’s this love that works for the undoing of anti-Semitism. It’s this love that joins in supporting the Thea Bowman Center, the recipient of our upcoming Christmas Eve offering. And it’s this love that, in so many ways, connects us to each other.
Vincent Burke, a now-retired reporter for the Cleveland News, grew up rather poor in a small town in Pennsylvania. One day his father abandoned the family, and Vincent was left with his mother, Elizabeth, and his sister, Patricia. His mother took a job as a housekeeper to two elderly sisters on the next street. The pay was paltry, though. As Christmas approached that year, Vincent wanted a toy truck for Christmas and Patricia wanted a doll, but, with their mother’s minuscule pay, neither gift was affordable.
That wasn’t the end of the story, though. “Mrs. Paulo, a neighbor up the street whom my mother had not even met before, took me into her house during the day so my mother could work. She had arrived at our house unannounced one Sunday and introduced herself. She explained to my mother that her own house was too quiet with her children grown and at work, and that she would love to care for me. ‘You can do me a big favor, Mrs. Burke,’ she proposed. Further, she continued, another neighbor wanted to care for my sister.
“At about the same time Mr. Maruca, our landlord, apparently concluded my father would not be reappearing. So he lowered the rent.
“‘There aren’t as many people in the house,’ is how he justified his goodness.
“As Christmas neared, the small-town people had more ideas.
“My father had worked for Mr. Bundi, a wholesale fruit vendor who added Christmas trees to his offerings for the season. I remember the crisp Saturday morning that saw Mr. Bundi squeezing a tall, shapely tree through the front doorway into our living room as my flabbergasted mother protested meekly his generosity.
“‘Mrs. Burke, show me where you keep your trimmings, and we’ll decorate it.
“Then a few days later came the ‘bonus’ for my mother from the two schoolteacher sisters. ‘But I haven’t worked for you long enough,’ my mother objected. ‘We always give Christmas gifts, Elizabeth dear. Use it for Patricia and Vincent.’
“Under the tree on Christmas morning glistened a box for me from Mrs. Paulo, wrapped in silver paper with a big red bow, and containing a forest-green knitted sweater with a large white stag deer posing on the front. In a red box with silver ribbon was an elegant doll with long auburn hair the very color of Patricia’s own. There was [also] a practical pair of shoes for Patricia and for me, thanks to the bonus. My mother was smiling broadly.
“It was a Merry Christmas for our family of three.
“We relocated to Cleveland some years later. The memory of the people of our little town stayed with us” (The Plain Dealer, Dec. 14, 2022, p. C6).
We are loved beyond belief by a God-with-us for whom we are absolute heaven. And the richest possible life for us is to give ourselves away in love. It is a privilege without equal. May we receive the radiant love of God, and pass it around wherever we go. This is what Joseph did. And it’s what we are privileged to do, as well.