Advent IV, 12/22/2019

Sermon on Matthew 1:18-25, by Paula Murray

¹⁸The birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. ²⁰But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ²²All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ²³“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). ²⁴When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, ²⁵but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

The calendar is quite a tyrant. None of us can change it and the only way to avoid it’s absolutist march through our days is to die or go mad. It does not matter if we look forward to an upcoming date or dread it; the days move with relentless precision one after another. When working on a vital chore it’s due date stares us in the face like an ongoing train, and then wham!, that date is upon us whether we are ready or not. Then, just as quickly, it has passed us by and another critical date looms in the distance.

For all its many wonders Christmas has the feel of an oncoming locomotive. It does have an exact date, the 25^th of December, the date assigned it by the Church. And no, despite what Wikpedia and any other noted forums of “scholarly” debate might say, it is not written in 2000 year old stone that the assigned date of December 25 is the likely consequence of Christians hitching their festival star to the Roman celebration of Saturnalia or the much later feast of the unconquered Sun as an evangelism tool. All that may be no more than 19^th century propaganda.¹ It may well be that the date of December 25 for Christmas came about as Christian bishops and academics sought to establish the death of Christ, which Scripture and conjecture led people to think was either March 25 or January 6. A belief, not supported by Scripture but common in the first few centuries of the Church, was that prophets died on the anniversary of their conceptions.² For this reason the Annunciation of Mary is dated March 25^th, and if we count forwards from March 25 the nine months the gestation of a human infant requires we find ourselves at December 25, the day we celebrate Christmas. So, nine months after the angelic notice comes the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay, as the carol tells us. That quiet, reverent nativity scene in our heads is a very different picture than the one of the Christmas locomotive bearing down on us at top speed.

I bring you this mini lecture on the dating of important holy days for two reasons. First, Christmas does come at us like an oncoming locomotive. Hurry, hurry, hurry we say to ourselves, everything must be done and done well before the end of Christmas Eve. Perhaps we could spend more time observing the absolute wonder of divinity clothed in human flesh if we were not driven to complete the all too down to earth holiday to do list centered on one, admittedly, important day. It is not the specific day that matters so much as is that the customary accoutrements of this time in the Church year be subordinate to the reason for the celebration, the Incarnation of the Son of God. There are 12 days to the Christmas season; we could spread out both the chores and the joys of the festival of the Incarnation by celebrating the 12 days of Christmas rather than just Christmas day in both our churches and our homes.

The second reason I fussed over the dating of Christmas has to do with the connection between the original, long ago Christmas, whatever its precise date, to our present day Christmas. That connection is Jesus, of course, but also two much more ordinary people who found themselves with a ministry that was deeply personal yet simultaneously necessary for the salvation of the world. Mary and Joseph as parent and foster parent were responsible not only for baby Jesus’ everyday care but also played a role in their witness to His nature and His work on God’s and humanity’s behalf.

I have enjoyed our study of the Annunciation of Mary and the similarity of her admittedly unique call to serve as Jesus Christ’s mother with our call to serve our Lord as His disciples.³ God sent the angel Gabriel to a very young woman, likely a teen, and told her that she would be the mother of Israel’s long awaited Messiah. Mary’s first response seems to have been confusion, not fear, since she, though betrothed, had not yet married Joseph to whom she was betrothed. Yet the angel told her that the Spirit of God would “overshadow her” and she would conceive. Courageous and faithful beyond her tender years, Mary accepted God’s call, saying, “Let it be to me according to your word.” Like Mary, we are all of us favored or blessed by God, usually in many ways. Like Mary, we all fear to use those blessings to serve our Lord, and yet, with faith and the further gift of His Spirit and strength, we can commit ourselves to His service. And, like Mary, we can do so even when we do not sense His active presence in our lives.

The last line in the story of the Annunciation is, “And the angel departed from her (Luke 1:38b). To one such as Mary who stood in the presence of one of God’s own most favored messengers, the archangel Gabriel, the angel’s leave taking had to have been both sweet relief and bitter loss. She stood in the midst of the glory of God as reflected from the angel and survived. There’s the relief, yet to stand in the presence of such a being and hear a message for her very own teen-aged self from God’s own lips had to be exhilarating. That’s the bitter part. But the worst part had to be the loss of the sense of the immediacy of God’s presence in her life. Still she endured and she continued as she had promised to do, to receive the infant Messiah into her arms, her heart, and her family.

We get to line up this reading from the Annunciation with this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew. Here we see Joseph, the man to whom Mary is betrothed, troubled by Mary’s report of her impending motherhood. He determines that he will divorce her (a betrothal is more than an engagement but still not quite a marriage). By divorcing her quietly he may be able to limit damage her family’s reputation and conceivably save Mary’s life. But here an angel once again intercedes on behalf of God and Mary. “Joseph, son of David,” says the angel, identifying not only the man he visits but also the man’s lineage, “do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” The promises God made to David and to Abraham before him shall be fulfilled, the angel’s speech implies. The name the angel gives the newly conceived child confirms the implication, for Jesus means God saves.

And God is present. Matthew’s story could be titled the annunciation of Matthew, for like the Annunciation to Mary it is both a reassurance and a call to a specific ministry. The reassurance comes in the form of prophecy fulfilled, and we hear that yet again when the Evangelist Matthew tells us that Jesus’ birth fulfills the words of the prophet Isaiah, “’Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’” which means, (God with us).”

The message of the Incarnation is that God is very much with us. God is so much with us in the sense that He is for us that He willingly sent His Son to become one of us. Jesus, spirit like the Father, willingly wrapped His divine and immortal self in frail human flesh to share our lot, to teach us to see the Father in His works, and to serve God as we have been blessed to do so. And then, in His crucifixion, taught us that we need not fear the difficulties of life, our own sin and God’s judgment on our sin, or even death. God truly is with us, offering us daily the completeness of His mercy and a love that does not falter. We are free from sin and death, free to live in hope and at peace with God and one another, joyously, knowing that we have the love and the strength of God at our backs.

So, for a last time this year, I offer you my hopes that your Advent will be blessed as we all prepare to hear again the message of our Lord Jesus Christ’s birth.

____________

¹Tighe, W.J., “Calculating Christmas: The Story Behind December 25”. Touchstone, December, 2003

²Tighe refers to a work by Thomas J. Talley, “The Origins of the Liturgical Year, the Liturgical Press,1991.

³We used as our reference this Advent a book by Sally Read entitled “Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World”. Ignatius Press, 2019.

The Rev. Paula Murray

E-Mail: smotly@comcast.net

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