“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.
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