Advent 4-A 12/18/22

Matthew 1:18-25

Joseph, as far as we know, was an ordinary person, a regular Joe you might say like you and me. He was a young man engaged to a young woman, in the small town where he lived – pretty normal. She probably would have been 13 or 14 because that was when girls got married in those day. He would have been a little older. In fact, they would have probably been engaged since they were kids. It was an arranged marriage, that’s how it worked in those days – his father and the girl’s father would have set it up. It was a thing between families, done for generations among the people of Israel, not among kings and princesses or anything, among the ordinary people. Joseph was a righteous man Matthew tells us. That would mean that as an faithful Jew he would have kept the Sabbath, the dietary laws, he would have gone to temple with the other young men and read scripture.

And he would have learned that the God, the God of Abraham and Sarah, our ancestors in the faith, worked in and through the lives of ordinary people like him. In brothers like Jacob and Esau, who fought with each other and betrayed each other but who God could work with to build a nation; mothers and daughters-in-law like Naomi and Ruth who stayed devoted to each other in some very difficult times and who God used as an inspiration to people of faith. A shepherd boy named David, who God chose through the prophet and out of whom God made a great warrior and a great king. These people, by the way were all examples from Joseph’s own family, they were his ancestors, Matthew tells us, his family.

As happens to ordinary people sometimes, maybe even some of us, Joseph found himself in a mess, his life potentially ruined by something he had no control over. That girl who he was engaged to get pregnant somehow. And he was not the father. Matter of fact, she had just come back from spending 3 months in the hill country of Judea with her kinswoman. Hard to put a good construction on this, as Martin Luther said somewhere.

According to human values, and in fact the law of his day, it would have been perfectly understandable if Joseph had made a big deal fuss this. Had been enraged or scandalized or horrified at this betrayed and denounced Mary publicly. That would have been totally justified by the law, human law. And she would probably have been stoned to death for adultery. And some people would have felt good about it, that that was the right thing to do.

But just the same way God had been at work in Joseph’s ancestors, so God was working in, and through, Joseph. And being a righteous person, Joseph went with it. So, he and God decided it was not good to expose Mary, but just to break it off quietly and move on. Maybe he just loved Mary too much to do that – I can see God working in that.

But that wasn’t all.  God spoke to Joseph in a dream, as God is wont to do, speak to us in our dreams, and in his dream in which an angel appeared to him and told him, well, the Christmas story. How Mary really was a virgin, and had not been unfaithful to him, but how the baby was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and somehow God helped Joseph to accept that as the truth. And more, that this child would be the savior of the world. And the baby’s name would be Immanuel, “God is with us.”  God is working in us, and through us, all of us ordinary people. That would actually be who this child was.

As so, through this child Immanuel, also known as Jesus, now, God keeps on working through and in ordinary people. I remembered Miss Eber, a deacon in my home congregation near Times Square in NYC, an old school deacon, who wore a blue uniform and a hat every day and who dedicated her life to service to that congregation and who died at the age of 94 after being mugged on her way to church from her little apartment around the corner. An ordinary person but definitely God was with her.

Ronnie, say, an alcoholic who has to struggle every day to stay sober, not to mention put food on the table for her kids, single mom, but by the grace of her higher power has the strength to answer the phone at 2am when the person she is sponsoring in AA needs to talk because she is afraid, she’s going to take a drink. God is definitely with her, working in her, through her. Or even my older brother, who swore he was an atheist, but as loving and kind a brother as anybody could ask for to me. God was definitely with him even if he didn’t know it.

I imagine all of us can think of ways that God works in ordinary people, even ourselves. Maybe, this week, as we think about the coming of this child that can help us remember how God is at work. We don’t hear much about Joseph after that. Couple of stories.  He did what God told him to do, he married this girl, and God was with them. The child was born, and from that time on, nothing was ever the same again.