Plan B - Sermon for Advent 4A

Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife,  but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Plan B

This reading from Matthew’s gospel is the birth narrative in full, according to Matthew. It’s not about Mary’s visit from the angel (that’s in Luke), it’s not about the manger and no room in the inn (that’s in Luke, too). In fact, Matthew is the only gospel writer who provides any sense of Joseph’s character for us at all.  It comes right after the genealogy of Jesus, which connects Jesus to Joseph on one end, and then goes all the way back to Abraham on the other.  Then, in this passage, it tells us, basically, why that bloodline connection to Josephis not very relevant, at least at first, since Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit.

We’ll get back to that in a minute.

The passage first sets the stage for us. Joseph and Mary are betrothed. This is a legal term, which means they will be married, and means she is not to be with anyone else from that point on. We can expect that, like many young men about to be married, Joseph likely has plans in mind for their lives together after they are wed, plans involving his work as a carpenter, plans about where they will live, dreams of raising a family together, of his children following in his footsteps someday.

And then the unthinkable, the unimaginable becomes a reality in his life; his betrothed is pregnant.

From the Holy Spirit.

Mary might have told him this, trying to explain to him her predicament, or perhaps he does not yet know this at all, but the narrator is telling us. Because the dream has not yet happened to Joseph. The angel has not yet filled in this detail for him.

How must this have felt to him? What a horrible situation! What will the community think? What should he think about this woman?

We are told he was a righteous man. This means he followed the law. And the law, the Torah, said that a woman who commits adultery when she is betrothed is to be publicly shunned at best, and publicly stoned at worst.

So the first thing we know is that this righteous, law-abiding man makes the choice to step aside from what the law would have him do. Joseph has already decided to take a kinder, gentler, more loving approach to this dilemma; he will divorce her quietly. He will avoid bringing the wrath upon her that would ordinarily be deserved, according to the law. He is “unwilling to expose her to public disgrace”, our scripture tells us, even though that is what the law would have him do.

He is showing mercy, by not giving Mary what it appears she deserves.

So he makes new plans for how to best handle this situation, to bring about the best outcome he can figure out, given the dilemma and the pain it must bring to him. Clearly he wants the best for both himself and Mary, as best as he can imagine it.

And then comes the dream.

We should note that the angel begins by saying, “Do not be afraid.” These are words that will be spoken over and over throughout the gospels. “Fear not.”  Next, he is given the so-called reassurance that “the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” The words after that are even more astonishing, if that is possible: “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

Imagine yourself waking up from a dream, after a troubled sleep in a difficult time of your life, a time when you had a great challenge to deal with, and you had a game plan in mind, but you didn’t really know what was the right thing to do.

And you wake up with a clear message, like this one, a clear direction that’s been planted in your head. And the clarity of the message is completely at odds with the absurdity of it, the total unexpectedness of it, the contradiction of it with everything that makes sense to you.

“The child is from the Holy Spirit. You will name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

What is a law-abiding guy like Joseph supposed to do with this?

Well, the response we see from Joseph centers around obedience and trust. Joseph hears totally unexpected news. Perhaps he recalled the words of the prophet Isaiah that we heard in our first scripture reading – that a young woman would conceive, bear a son, and he would be called Immanuel – God with us. Perhaps he made the connection between that and the Holy Spirit that the angel spoke about, and the name he was given for this child, his son, the name Jesus – meaning God saves. And by taking the action the angel instructed, by Joseph naming this child, Jesus becomes his son. Joseph adopts him by the act of naming him. The child’s humanity and divinity is reflected in these words. Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, adopted by Joseph the carpenter. And we need to recognize that beyond that, Joseph has no idea, has no plan, for what comes next. Even the law does not give him a guideline for this. It’s not as if the whole story line is given to him before he had to decide to go along with it. All that he can do is to step forward in obedience and trust.

How does this story speak to us today? What can we learn from this, about ourselves and about God?

First, Joseph is told by an angel of God, “do not be afraid”, in the face of a situation that was clearly troublesome to him, if not downright frightening. What courage it must have taken for him to stand faithfully by Mary, as the baby grew inside her and people wondered, quietly or out loud, how this could have happened and what Joseph had to do with it.  He is remaining faithful to God, even as he remains faithful to Mary.

So what about us? Do we have the same sort of courage it takes to be faithful to God, even when all the appearances may cause others to be skeptical of us, cause others to wonder why on earth we aren’t following a game plan that makes sense to the culture we live in, the societal norms? Can we remain faithful to a person whose situation complicates our life in a big way? Can we look at our own plans and humbly recognize those places where we are working out of our own fear? Can we put aside our fear, even when nothing seems to make sense?

Second, Joseph obeys the angel in the dream. Joseph has already made a decision, in his own initial plans, not to obey the letter of the law.  Even though Matthew describes him as a righteous man, an upstanding, law-abiding guy (and I mean the Jewish law, the Torah, all those rules we find in the ten commandments and beyond, Leviticus, Deuteronomy), in this case he decides that it is best to act out of care for another person’s dignity, to save Mary’s reputation as best he can, rather than strictly adhering to the law.  Matthew is beginning to show a theme that continues throughout his gospel, displaying the tension between the prevailing understanding of God’s commandments and the new thing that God is doing in Jesus Christ. It’s the same as what we hear when Matthew’s tells the story of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says, over and over,  “you have heard that it was said, but I say to you”.  In this difficult moral situation that Joseph is facing, he chooses to set aside his previous understanding of God’s will in favor of this word from the living and saving God. He attends to the voice of God.

So what about us? Can we accept that the Holy Spirit is still actively at work in the world, even today, making all things new, and that the Bible is not intended to be a rule book, but is rather the story of God’s love and God’s saving action in the world?

Third, Joseph trusts an incomplete plan with an unknown outcome.  Actually, Joseph trusts God’s providence in the face of an incomplete, unknown plan. We have got to think that if Joseph knew the rest of the story – the fact that they would have to flee to Egypt with a newborn to save his life, the challenging child that Jesus would be as he grew, the painful acknowledgement during his public ministry that he was not simply “their child”, not to mention the arrest and the torture and the cross and the resurrection – how could Joseph possibly bear it? We really have to acknowledge that in this case, only knowing the next step was, for Joseph, the only way to possibly take it in and to trust.

So what about us? Are we willing to trust God’s providence when the plan is only known one step at a time? Are we willing to step forward in faith when we don’t know the outcome? Are we willing to accept that an outcome that may seem crazy and hopeless and even tragic may, in fact, be the path to New Life?

As we get to know and understand Joseph a bit better through this passage, let us commit ourselves to becoming more like Joseph – to not be afraid to give up plan A and take on plan B; to claim the good news that God is still making all things new, and that we have a role to play in that, by being obedient to the living Word of God as it is revealed to us; and to trust that, one courageous step at a time, we will live and move and have our being, trusting in God’s providence without knowing the final outcome.

And as Paul wrote so beautifully in his letter to the Ephesians, “Now to God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”