Joseph Awoke (Sermon for Advent 4)

“Joseph Awoke”

Matthew 1:18-25

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/18/16 – Advent 4

         When thinking of Joseph, many of us imagine him as upright, just, compassionate, and faithful. When our Sunday school class looked at this story, though, one person asked a question that cast some doubt on Joseph – not on his integrity so much, but on whether or not this carpenter was the sharpest chisel in the tool box.

         Obvious things are happening to Mary to whom Joseph is essentially married. In his shoes, any of us would feel betrayed. I think we’d fully understand his desire to divorce Mary, but it’s divorcing her in order to spare her “public disgrace” that gets troublesome.

         How, asked the person in the Sunday school class, could Joseph possibly think that divorcing Mary will save her from shame and humiliation?

         If Joseph divorces Mary, where can she go that will be safer than by his side? A poor, unwed, Jewish mother in first century Palestine has no attractive options. If the community does not execute her, then she may be able to survive – by begging or by, well, remunerative promiscuity. Joseph knows this, so how is even a “quiet” divorce righteousness?

         Still, who can blame Joseph for wanting to disappear into the shadows? Even God seems to understand Joseph’s quandary. So, “an angel of the Lord” visits Joseph in a dream and urges the cuckolded carpenter not to be afraid.

‘Go ahead and get married,’ says the angel. ‘Your wife will have a son, and you name him Jesus. He has important God-work to do.’

         How does Joseph process all of this? Where does he find the spiritual vigor to accept the bizarre counsel of his dream?

         Both Matthew and Luke include genealogies of Jesus. And while they differ significantly, they both affirm Joseph’s thoroughly Jewish ancestry. Among the implications of the genealogies is that Joseph knows the Hebrew scriptures. And among those writings is the relatively short but extraordinary prophecy of Hosea, who, like Joseph, gets married at God’s command.

         Hosea marries Gomer. The couple has a strained relationship at best, because Gomer was and continues to be a professional in the field of remunerative promiscuity. And she won’t allow something as trivial as a husband to threaten her career. But God calls the prophet to incarnate in his marriage to the unfaithful Gomer an example of God’s faithfulness to unfaithful Israel. Through all the frustration, anger, and hurt both God and Hosea remain steadfast.

         If it seems a stretch to bring Hosea into a meditation on Joseph, remember, in another dream, God tells Joseph to take Jesus and Mary to Egypt to escape the homicidal fear and vanity of King Herod. Learning to trust such things, Joseph does as he’s told. And in Matthew 2:15 we read, “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”

         In the eleventh chapter of Hosea, God begins to declare forgiveness and restoration on Israel. The first verse of that pivotal chapter reads: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son.”

         The final chapter of Hosea includes this promise: “I will heal their disloyalty…They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden…Those who are wise understand these things; those who are discerning know them. For the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them.” (Hosea 14, selected verses beginning with v. 4)

         Raised not only with the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also with the prophesies of Hosea and Isaiah, Joseph finds within himself a deep river of wisdom, discernment, righteousness, and trust.

Dreams can do that for us. They can awaken us to the transforming realities, understandings, and strength flowing deep within us. And that river is always there, always ready for us to be ready for it.

Joseph awakens not simply from sleep, but he awakens to new possibilities in and for his own life, for Mary’s life, for Jesus’ life, and for our lives.

         Awakening. Birth. New birth. These are all metaphors for the same act of grace that awakens us to a dimension of life that exists alongside and within all that appears to be real, all that appears to be decided and final. As Christians, we call that dimension of life the Kingdom of God. And at Christmas, we make the audacious, scandalous claim that God incarnates the Kingdom in the particular person, the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth.

         Now, this is pure gift, pure grace. And “Nothing,” John Wesley said, “is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace.”¹ Grace offends and threatens our increasingly Herodian culture, whose true religion is a merit-based economy, and whose true worship requires consumption and violence.

When unable to process the absolute grace of Christmas, we go physically numb with excess. We eat too much. We spend too much. People who don’t know how to receive such a gift can only exchange presents. You got yours. I got mine. So, we’re even, right? In these exchanges, both generosity and gratitude are all but destroyed.

         An exchange-based Christmas may temporarily satisfy a few wants. True Christmas, however, declares God’s eternal presence in and reviving affirmation of the physical world. It rousts us from selfish nightmares and awakens us to God’s dream for all that God has made. Christmas challenges us to accept a giftedness that conceives a gratitude that gives birth to a generosity that bears witness to the Incarnate Love that heals, enlightens, and resurrects God’s Creation.

When God reminds Joseph of the life-giving river of his own storied faith, the mystified carpenter awakens to the gift of a new giftedness. He receives and begins to unwrap and claim his unchosen and unearned fatherhood.

True Christmas asks things of us that only the grace of God can deliver to us – a fearless trust, a commitment to compassion, and an active justice on behalf of neighbors and an earth under assault by the Herods of the world.

This Christmas, may we all awaken from whatever sugar-plum dreams have anesthetized us to the freeing call of grace. And may we awaken to the Holy Christ who is being born afresh within us even now, for we all have important God-work to do.

¹This quotation appears in the book Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. The selection is entitled “The God We Hardly Knew” by William Willimon. Plough Publishing, 2001. Pp. 141-149.

Remove the Fuel (Sermon for Advent 2)

“Remove the Fuel”

Matthew 3:1-12

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/4/16 – Advent 2

         After weeks of choking on the gray haze of forest fires, and after watching videos of flames consuming Gatlinburg, Lake Lure, and precious woodlands close to home, I almost laid this text aside. John the Baptist ignites the early chapters of the synoptic Gospels with images of fire. And he appears to blister his audience with menacing, even vengeful proclamations.

Over the centuries, the Church seems to have taken its homiletical and evangelical cues from a corruption of John’s prophetic firestorm more than from an embrace of Jesus’ outpouring of Living Water. Jesus calls us to wade courageously into the darkness where the voiceless poor, despised, and forgotten cry for help. He calls the Church to be an eternal flame that reveals God’s creative presence and redeeming activity in and for the world.

Under the influence of wealth and power, though, the Church has built contiguous perimeter fires of self-preservation that shed more in the way of raging heat than guiding light. Inside this self-made hell, we’ve done far too much to point fingers at broods of vipers and to pronounce judgment on useless chaff. Much of the Church’s own fruit, then, has been preaching and practice that aims to terrify people into a scorched and withering conformity rather than to invite one another to gather at the fertile riverbank of shared gratitude, holiness, and wholeness.

         Thanks be to God for Advent, the preparatory season that reminds us that fire does more than destroy. Fire can purify – as you might purify a needle before digging a splinter out of your finger. Fire can refine – as gold is refined to remove baser metals and stone. Fire transforms, too. It takes many years to experience the full effect, of course, but forest fires tend to hit a kind of reset button on an ecosystem. And isn’t that what repentance is all about? Resetting hearts overgrown with deadfall and invasive species?

         Janisse Ray is an environmentalist and writer who inhabits – in body and spirit – the ecology of the longleaf pine forests of the deep south. In her book Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home, she writes that the entire “intricate and intriguing ecosystem [of the longleaf pine] is…bound to fire…Periodic wildfires thwart the encroachment of hardwoods such as oak and sweetgum into the pinelands, so the trees have evolved not only to survive fire but to depend on it.”¹

Beneath the longleaf pines grows a particular kind of grass called wiregrass. “Wiregrass,” says Ray, “has evolved toward flammability to help push fire quickly through the forest, and it needs burning in order to reproduce well. Some of the [flowers] that grow with wiregrass won’t even seed unless they have been scored by fire.”²

         Now, I know that the fires on which longleaf pine forests depend have almost nothing in common with wildfires started by human ignorance and criminal intent. And I do not presume to say that those fires have the same “ancestor.” Nonetheless, from stones and ashes alike, God raises new life and new hope.

         Even in Advent, Sunday worship celebrates first and foremost the promise of Resurrection. And while John does seem to strike steel to flint with inflammatory warnings, I think he is really, whether he knows it or not, shining a light on the conflagration of grace. Speaking of the more powerful one who is on the verge of arrival, John says, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

         Since the Exodus, flame has served as a symbol for the presence of God. Remember the burning bush. At Pentecost, flame becomes the specific symbol for the presence and the refining work of God the Holy Spirit. So, even if John holds the feet of Pharisees and Sadducees to the fire, frightening and shaming them – and others – toward repentance, his announcement of the coming of the Christ declares that God always intends healing and wholeness for the Creation.

For three years, I was a part-time firefighter down in Statesboro, GA. Don’t be impressed. I should have had a big sign on my turnout gear that said, “Hose Roller.” With few exceptions, that was the extent of my contribution. At one of our drills, the director of the local Forestry Commission came and talked to us about wildfire suppression. Things may have changed since then, but at the time, the principal strategy used in fighting wildfires was to remove the fuel. To stop the progression of a burn, firefighters would get ahead of the fire, cut trees, harrow fire breaks, and then start controlled burns that would burn back to the fire line where the two fires would simply extinguish each other for lack of fuel. In the absence of draught and 80 mile-per-hour winds, such tactics usually worked.

John’s baptism of repentance is an act of removing the fuel. In repentance, we deliberately burn away the attitudes and judgments that reduce us to arsonists. We singe off all our pride, greed, fear, vengeance, and despair. Such incendiary rubbish fuels today’s most devastating firestorms.

Having said that, we cannot earn God’s mercy. So, true repentance is always our grateful response to God’s unrelenting grace already at work in our lives.

In the baptism Jesus offers, we begin to agree with God. We agree that we are God’s Beloved. We agree that we are capable of giving and receiving more Love that we ever thought possible. We agree that we are more than we have given ourselves credit for being. We agree that this is true for the rest of God’s good Creation, as well. And we agree to live the new life to which these agreements give birth.

Jesus’ baptism by Spirit and fire refines us and transforms us. Jesus’ baptism resurrects us. It prepares us to receive and share with joy the good news of Christmas by lighting within us our light as prophets of and participants in God’s ever-arriving Christ.

¹Janisse Ray, Wildcard Quilt: The Ecology of Home. Milkweed Editions, 2003, pp. 36-37.

²Ibid. p. 37.