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4. Advent, 12/19/2010
Sermon on Matthew 1:18-25, by David Zersen
This is how Jesus Christ was born. A young woman named Mary was engaged to Joseph from King David's family. But before they were married, she learned that she was going to have a baby by God's Holy Spirit. Joseph was a good man and did not want to embarrass Mary in front of everyone. So he decided to quietly call off the wedding.
While Joseph was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord came to him in a dream. The angel said, "Joseph, the baby that Mary will have is from the Holy Spirit. Go ahead and marry her. Then after her baby is born, name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."
So the LORD'S promise came true, just as the prophet had said, "A virgin will have a baby boy, and he will be called Immanuel," which means "God is with us."
After Joseph woke up, he and Mary were soon married, just as the Lord's counsel had told him to do. But they did not sleep together before her baby was born. Then Joseph named him Jesus. (NRSV)
SURPRISES AND PROMISES
The path to God takes many different directions.
Most of the recently published atheistic challenges to Christianity take either the direction of logic or the direction of condescension. I confess that neither of these directions have ever done much for me. You can try to prove your way to the existence of God. This is, however, either boring or very limiting because you're merely using human reason to attempt to understand what is beyond reason and understanding.
You can also use condescension to Christianity's failures to try to demonstrate that, as one author put it, God is not Great. However, the wars waged in the name of God by humans are hardly proof of more than that humans exist. God doesn't need to buy into our atrocities.
I would submit that art, music and literature are very creative directions leading to God. Pondering a provocative work by an artist or listening to an ethereal composition by a musician often lifts me to say "Yes!" to the question of God's existence. I am lead to believe that there is something so profoundly beyond me that I want to know and experience it at deeper levels. Sometimes also in a powerfully written novel, I can read characterizations that are so real I know that the author knows who I am. And, in confessing that, I also realize as that there is something divine in being known by another even better than I know myself. Paul says something like this in 1 Cor. 13:12.
Some say that God is made real to them in seeing their newborn child for the first time. Others think that God takes on flesh and blood when they experience forgiveness or hope and encouragement from a fellow traveler on this earth.
In reading this morning's texts, I'd like to suggest that humor is another direction to God. Perhaps in some form of emancipating laughter you so leave your burdens and cares and human calculating that you know yourself to be embraced by One who is all joy and love.
At a more subdued level of humor, however, today's texts tell us about surprises that three men had at the hand of God. They were surprises that could have caused them to laugh out loud. Their reaction and their response to the surprises are helpful lessons for all of us. They encourage us to take reassurance from the knowledge that no matter how odd or problematic a circumstance may seem to us, God is promising us a future in which we can trust him.
In the Old Testament lesson (Is. 7: 10-16), we are given a comic story, the message of which is for us as much as for Ahaz. Ahaz is the king of Judah, the southern kingdom, and he gets word that Syria and Israel (the northern kingdom) are planning to attack him. Ahaz is anxious about the future and in a dream God tells him to ask for a sign to assure that all would be all right. "Ah, forget the sign," Ahaz says, "I'm not going to put my Lord to the test."
But God's prophet in Judah, Isaiah, says, "Don't go too far, Ahaz. You're trying us, and now you're trying God. Whether you want a sign or not, you're going to get one! And here it is: A virgin will conceive and bear a son and will call him Immanuel. And before he knows right from wrong, the two kingdoms you worry so much about will be gone. And you will need to start worrying about the next powerful kingdom, Assyria." What do you think of that, Ahaz?
Ahaz had a surprise played on him. No matter how much he worried about the future and how he was going to bring it about, God already had the future laid out, and the best thing Ahaz could do was learn about and accept it from God's hand. I suspect that Ahaz, son of Jotham, son of Uzziah, snickered at how much he had worried about "two smoldering stubs of firewood" (7:4).
The Epistle lesson, Romans 1: 1-7, Paul tells the Romans what he never could have imagined he would be saying. He was a Jew, and a Pharisee at that. He had every reason to expect that God would save his people through their faithful obedience to the laws of the Torah. However, surprisingly, Paul had an experience on the road to Damascus. And now he, who at first persecuted the Gentiles, remarkably tells his audience, has received "grace and apostleship to call people from the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith."
I wonder if Saul become Paul ever sat down with a glass of wine at night and just laughed out loud at the surprising serendipity of it all. It was little different than a criminal become pious, than an obstinate legalist become freed to live in a new world of liberty. What God was teaching Paul he is ready to teach all of us.
Finally, in our Gospel lesson for today, Matthew 1: 18-25, we learn about the surprise that God has in store for Joseph, one of the little known characters in the Christmas story. It's interesting how little we know about Joseph and what little attention has been paid to him by artists and musicians. Some years ago in the church built over the spot in Nazareth where Joseph's carpenter shop was reputed to be, I saw a stained glass window of the Holy Family. Joseph was pictured as a relatively young man and for the first time I came to think about him and who he may have been.
In our text for today, he is a man with a dilemma. His betrothed is pregnant and he knows it isn't his child. What to do? There were laws against adultery which prescribed stoning. There was the prospect of divorce, something relatively simple. However, her parents would not take her back, and no other man would have her. What to do? Joseph had a dream, and what a surprise! Don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife. This is the child of the Holy Spirit. All this is happening for a purpose: "A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel."
Shades of Isaiah and Ahaz!
When Joseph woke up, I wonder if he laughed out loud! What a crazy solution to the problem. Marry Mary? Can this really work? Is God's plan for me bigger than my own plan for myself?
Apparently, Joseph's humor was expansive enough to laugh him right into God's future for him?
God's plans for Joseph and Mary were bigger than either could have imagined.
There is something in these stories that we have heard before. Sara was once so surprised by God's promise of a son that when he came, she called him "laughter" (Isaac). Abraham was so surprised to find an alternative ram in the bush in place of Isaac that he trusted God for the rest of his life. And Thomas was so surprised to find the nail marks in Jesus' hands and sides on Easter Sunday eve that he traveled all the way to India to share the good news that Jesus was alive and well and intended to free us to live joyfully in a sprit of forgiveness and hope.
I wonder if you and I can't look at the circumstances of our lives which seem to produce roadblocks and dead ends and ask whether in our difficulties, God is not giving us opportunities to discover the door that leads into the future?
Perhaps we can even go further than that. As we stand at the threshold of another Christmas celebration, we are being asked to smile, maybe even laugh out loud, at the prospect of our being born anew as God himself reveals to us in diapers and donkey's feedboxes and petrified parents in a cave a new truth. What is happening here is another direction that leads along the path to God.
We may not need sophisticated logic to help us appreciate that our universe is more limitless and ultimate that human imagination can fathom. We may never be able to contrive a rational approach to insure that we humans can live together in peace and harmony.
We may need only Azaz's astonishment, Paul's incredulity and Joseph's surprise to realize that we have in their stories a promise. Their experience can be true for us as well.
We are being asked to believe as we look at the wonder of God's love in the celebration before us that this doorway to life's meaning and opportunity can allow us to be lost in wonder, love and praise.
I really feel like smiling. Even laughing. How about you?