Sunday, Dec. 9, 11:00 - 2nd Sunday of Advent
It’s the second Sunday of Advent, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s what we’re supposed to tell ourselves. We’re supposed to live and worship as if something big is about to happen, but we’re supposed to pretend that we don’t know what that big thing is. Our children have been helping us with this. They’ve been building this nativity scene for us, but they’re building it only one piece at a time. I love this, because by doing it this way they invite us to focus our attention on a new character each week, and they leave us wondering—who’s next?
These days anyone can show up in a Nativity scene. Modern sets sometimes include Santa Claus, Rudolph, and even some Disney characters. I actually found a set online this week made of S’mores. Each character, including the baby Jesus, was a marshmallow … and the caption underneath the scene read, “and he will be called “snacks are with us.” Well, never fear. … We won’t see Mickey or Minnie on the chancel any time soon. We’re not that kind of church. We can rest easy, knowing that each week our favorite Christmas characters will slowly begin to appear.
Who’s your favorite? Which ones are you waiting for? Maybe you like the shepherds: Simple herdsmen, tending their flocks as angels break into the sky above. Perhaps the Wise men: Three Kings moving toward the star of a brighter future. Or maybe you just can’t wait for Mary to enter the room. She usually doesn’t get much attention from us Baptists most of the year—we keep her statue in the closet so people won’t think we’re Catholic. But now, at Christmas, Mary is the favored one —she stands next to God as the heroine of our story.
And what about Joseph—is there anything remarkable about him? Is anyone really anxious to see him? He did a good job leading that donkey to Bethlehem, and we’re all glad he booked Mary that really nice stable to give birth, but really, Joseph was just Mary’s sidekick—we hardly notice him when he’s here. We don’t notice the wrinkles of grief lined across his forehead. We don’t see the fear and doubt stained within his eyes. We don’t remember Joseph’s pain, and we don’t want to, because Joseph reminds us that the story of Christmas was a scandal.
It all began in a small town called Nazareth. And take it from a small-town boy, there’s no better scandal than small-town scandal. Small-town scandal gives an entire community something to do. You big-city folk may not understand what I mean, but I know there are at least a few people in the congregation today from my hometown, and they know exactly what I’m talking about. In small Texas towns we have three kinds of entertainment: church, Friday night football, and scandal.
When I was a teenager, my youth minister’s wife had an affair with one of the students in our youth group. Now, that was a scandal. For two whole weeks no one in town really cared about football, basketball, or any other sport. For two whole weeks we all had something to pray about— which is, by the way, how good Baptists talk about scandal. We don’t gossip and we don’t slander. We put people on the prayer list. We don’t want to talk bad about them; we’re just concerned, and we want everyone in town to know it.
Well, I’m sure that everyone in the small town of Nazareth knew about the upcoming nuptials of Mary and Joseph. The wedding was actually already under way. The Jewish ceremony was a two-part affair. Part 1 was the engagement or betrothal, and once you’re betrothed, you’re basically married. You’re not living together yet, but you’re committed, till death do you part. Part 2 occurred when the husband took the wife home. When he did this, the marriage ceremony was complete. Well, somewhere between part 1 and part 2, the local news announced that Mary was pregnant. This is when the story gets juicy. Mary had either been sleeping around or sleeping with Joseph, and Joseph knew for a fact that this baby wasn’t his, which meant that Mary was in for a lot more than a little embarrassment. It appeared that Mary had broken the marriage covenant, and the biblical penalty for this was death. This is what’s happening when the gospel writer brings us into this story. Mary is pregnant, everyone knows it, and Joseph has a decision to make. And if Joseph does what the law says Joseph is supposed to do, Mary will either be ostracized by her community, or worse, Mary’s going to die.
What would you do? Your future wife has just informed you that she’s pregnant with someone else’s baby. This is a defining moment for Joseph. It’s in this moment that Matthew first unveils the remarkable character of Joseph. The text tells us that Joseph is a “just” man, which doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s nice. What it does mean is that Joseph was known as a man who followed the law of God to the letter, which shouldn’t be good news for Mary. But we see here that Joseph is a different kind of “just.” He’s not the kind who lived only by the literal letter of the law – he’s the kind who tried to embody the spirit of the law, which actually sounds a lot like someone else we know. It makes me wonder if Joseph taught Jesus more than just carpentry.
Joseph believed that being just also meant being merciful. And so thoughtfully and painfully, Joseph made up his mind. He decided to divorce Mary—but quietly—in a way that would somehow save her not only from death, but also from shame. It was an honorable plan, to say the least, and he would have gone through with it, but before he could, Joseph had a dream. Matthew tells us that while Joseph was sleeping, an angel entered his dream and confirmed Mary’s story. The angel told Joseph that this baby wasn’t just some other guy’s kid, but was, in fact, the one they’d all been waiting for, the Messiah, and even more important, this child was the Son of God. The angel’s instructions were simple; “Get out of bed, let go of your fear, and go make an honest woman out of Mary.’
When the dream was over, verse 22 says, Joseph woke up and did exactly what the angel told him to do. Did you catch that? Did you feel the weight of those lines? This was the first Christmas miracle. Joseph had a dream – A DREAM – and when he woke from it, he married a girl who was carrying someone else’s baby. The shepherds got a heavenly host, the wise men got a huge star, and Mary got a Spirit baby. But all God gave Joseph was this lousy dream. I don’t know about you, but if Christy had come to me a month before our wedding and told me she was pregnant with someone else’s baby, it would have taken a lot more than a dream to keep me from calling off the wedding. No one in Nazareth expected Joseph to go through with this. The only reasonable explanation for him to do this was that the child was his child—which meant that he too had sinned and that he deserved an equal share in Mary’s shame.
One scholar wrote that the greatest miracle of Christmas, one that we often miss, came in this moment, when Joseph believed what he heard and, despite all evidence to the contrary, decided to move forward in faith. He woke up, took Mary home with him, and made her his wife. And this was only the beginning. This was a decision that required great follow-through. Joseph chose the windy road to Bethlehem and the treacherous terrain beyond it. He committed himself to the unique and conflicted task of raising Mary’s son, God’s Son, as his own. Last year’s movie The Nativity captured the joy and pain of Joseph’s reality. In one scene a stranger meets Joseph and a pregnant Mary and comments that there is nothing like seeing your own face in the face of your child. The pained look on Joseph’s face in that moment spoke volumes. Joseph understood that with this baby, he would never know that joy.
Joseph may have never arrived at a complete undoubting faith— at the pure conviction that this whole scenario was really everything he believed it to be. How could he? There had to have been at least one moment in that stable just after Jesus was born when Joseph studied the face of this new baby and wondered about his features. Those cheekbones, that hair, those dimples … he couldn’t shake the painful idea that Jesus didn’t look exactly like Mary, and he wondered again: Whose Child was this? Was this baby really the Messiah, the Son of the living God, or did Joseph just want to believe Mary’s crazy story so badly that he’d invented a dream to confirm it? How could he ever really know?
I’m not so sure that he ever did. Most scholars believe that Joseph died at some point before Jesus’ earthly ministry. If that’s true, Joseph never saw Jesus turn water into wine, He wasn’t around for the feeding of the five thousand, and he didn’t witness the resurrection. I imagine that on this side of heaven, Joseph lived as a committed husband and father who was haunted by doubt. But that doesn’t mean that Joseph was weak. On the contrary, it means Joseph was human, and it means that Joseph was incredibly strong.
This past year, someone published the secret letters of Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa’s life was monumental, sacrificial, and holy, but apparently it was also riddled with doubt. Some critics have used these records of her perpetual doubting to challenge the authenticity of her faith. They’ve pointed to her struggles as evidence that God doesn’t exist. “If someone like Mother Teresa wrestled with doubt for so many years,” they say, “then her God must not have been real”—as if to say that her doubt invalidated her faith. But this line of thinking assumes that doubt is the absence of faith. It’s not. Doubt and faith are actually two sides of the same coin. Frederich Beuchner said it like this: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep faith awake and moving.”
As we move further into this season together, let us move as Joseph moved—clinging to the faint hope of a dream. Like Joseph, we too carry the weight of doubt. We’ve lost jobs and we’ve lost loved ones. Our children are suffering from injury and illness. We have cancer.
And like Mother Teresa, some of us have cried out for God’s presence again and again, only to be left with the feeling that God isn’t there. But that won’t stop us. We’ll keep moving, we’ll keep hoping, we’ll keep believing, because we know that it wasn’t Mother Teresa’s doubt that kept her in Calcutta, and it wasn’t Joseph’s doubt that got that donkey to Bethlehem. We’ll keep moving forward in faith, because somewhere deep in the depths of our soul we have this holy hunch that something mysterious and beautiful is about to happen, and we believe that at the center of our doubt there is more truth than we have ever known. So we move onward. Onward to hope …onward to Bethlehem, onward to Christmas, because we know that when we get there, something BIG is going to happen, and we will never be the same again. Amen.
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