Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-17; Matthew 1:18-25
Advent 4A
Signs and angels mingle with kings and carpenters this week, demonstrating yet again God’s propensity to participate in the messiness of our lives and world.
God refuses to leave us to our own best judgment, even when our actions spring from righteousness, demonstrating yet again that our ways, no matter how well intended, are not synonymous with God’s ways.
Joseph takes center stage on this fourth Sunday of Advent. Several adjectives get ascribed to him. He is dikaios: just/righteous/upright. Joseph knows the requirements of God’s covenant and he follows them. He is, to the best of his ability, in right relationship with God. Hence his unwillingness to put Mary to shame, perhaps. Joseph is also called a son of David, descended from the house of David. This lineage is particularly important to the writer of Matthew’s Gospel, as evidenced by all the verses earlier in Matthew 1 listing name after name after name, connecting Jesus to Abraham and David. Matthew will quote the Isaiah text appointed for this Sunday, making sure the readers do not miss that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the fulfillment of prophecy. Kings and carpenters connect in this divine narrative with God choosing whomever God wills to get to the coming Christ child.
God chooses Joseph, righteous son of David, to be Jesus’ earthly father. Why Joseph? Only God knows. This aspect of the story echoes many other biblical happenings, too. God’s choice of human agents baffles not only the people God picks, but often everyone around them as well. Sharing this familiar story invites us to wonder: Through whom God is working in our time? Are we open to the possibility of an unexpected source of divine wisdom and word?
Sunday’s Gospel reading reminds us, too, that God moves the salvation narrative forward through the mundane and chaos of our lives. God’s ways of redemption and reconciliation, relationship and righteousness do not align with our own, no matter how faithful and stalwart and well-intended we may be. God uses whomever God wants to further divine plans and often in ways none of us would readily choose. All this in this story and we have not even made it to the angel’s appearance.
Joseph, just and upright, son of David, makes up his mind as to what he will do in the face of this unwanted reality. Like us, Joseph prayerfully discerns the next right step in an impossible situation, a situation in which there is no good choice, but only what feels like not the worst one. He will dismiss his pregnant wife – the one who is carrying a child who cannot possibly be fathered by him – quietly. His envisioned future with Mary is upended. His anticipated life with her is no longer possible given the painful circumstances.
How often have we found ourselves like Joseph, bereft at the obliteration of what we anticipated, invested in and hoped? The college acceptance does not come. The dream job ends. The engagement is broken. The health challenges take away beloved hobbies or heretofore ordinary activities. The divorce happens. The arrest becomes public. We struggle to accept the new reality and then muster all the energy we can and attempt to manage the unwanted turn of events. We even seek to do so faithfully, carefully, with as much fairness and moral integrity as possible. While we may not be able to make the best of it, we can at least try not to make it any worse. We triage the situation as we wonder about or dread what comes next.
I read this story from Matthew and imagine the tension and stress of Joseph and Mary, plunged into circumstances not of their own making but that impact them totally. I read this story and think of many I know wrestling to make sense of impossible, uncontrollable, inexplicable experiences. I read this story and remember people of faith – just, upright, fair, righteous children of God – who in the face of difficult relationships, heartbreaking news or tragic events responded with grace and mercy and love, when lesser reactions would have been seen as justified. I read this story and am reminded that God may well do something salvific through some of life’s most chaotic happenings.
Part of what makes Joseph righteous is his willingness to set aside his own upright plans and embrace the strange message from God that appears to run counter to previous divine commands. The radical part of this story that we often miss amidst pageants and poinsettias is Joseph’s decision to jettison what he fervently believed was the right and faithful thing to do and instead step into the new thing God was doing. This only foreshadows what will come: Jesus will eat with sinners. He will heal on the Sabbath. Gentiles will be engrafted into the covenant. Jews and Gentiles will eat at the same table. God will continue to upend expectations and do so through unlikely people in ways the self-righteous will find offensive.
Joseph and Mary show us a faithful response to the present and coming Kingdom of God. Righteousness entails humility, the willingness to set aside deeply held assumptions, the ability to abandon our own plans and step into God’s disturbing, dizzying new thing, the strength to take a stand and make a choice that runs counter to common wisdom or cultural norms or even religious rules, the courage to imagine that God is at work even when we are reeling from the loss of what had been our hoped for future.
Joseph could have ignored the angel’s instructions, chalked up that night visitation as only a strange dream. He could have dismissed Mary quietly and still been considered righteous, perhaps even more so for his unwillingness to allow Mary to suffer the deserved consequences of her perceived actions. God, no doubt, would not have been thwarted and Jesus would have still been born. Joseph, however, would have missed witnessing the coming of Emmanuel. Joseph would have missed experiencing divine redemption firsthand. Joseph would have missed nurturing the Son of God’s growth in the world. Joseph would have missed knowing without a doubt that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s hopes and imagination far exceed our own. Joseph would have missed the Kingdom of Heaven right in front of him, his righteousness intact, his plans accomplished, but his life not nearly as abundant as God had planned for him. Instead Joseph took a risk and embraced God’s dream.
This week:
- Have there been circumstances in your own life or in the life of your congregation that seemed catastrophic? How did you and others handle them? Did you, or do you now, see how God was at work in them?
- How do we discern what is the righteous, faithful thing to do when we face difficult decisions, individually or corporately?
- When have you experienced divine guidance? What form did it take? What was it?
- Can you think of other stories in the Bible when God worked through painful situations in people’s lives?
- How do we open ourselves to God’s Word spoken to us and spoken through others? Knowing God uses whomever God chooses, how do we anticipate that God still speaks in our context?
- What religious rules or cultural norms do you value the most? Would it be possible for you to set them aside if God’s new thing required you to do so?
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