Unexpected Faces

Luke 10:25-37

July 27, 2014

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

This sermon was begun as an exercise in a seminar at the Engle Institute of Preaching.  I own a debt of thanks to the other participants for their insights and feedback. 

Jesus has a way with stories. It is like he reaches into a box of Legos and manages to build the Taj Mahal with whatever he finds there.  He takes our expectations and turns them upside down.  People do unexpected things, stories have unexpected endings, and what we think at the start is the moral of the story rarely is.

The story we have this morning is no different.  And like others of Jesus’ parables there are a lot of doors we can use to get inside.  One of those doors, the one I want to invite you into this morning, is right in the middle of the Samaritan’s face.  He is our way in this morning.

It is the Samaritan’s face that gives us a glimpse of what God is doing here.  That probably seems odd since it is the Samaritan’s acts we most often focus on. After all this is the parable of the Good Samaritan not the parable of the Samaritan’s face!  But bear with me.

So, there he is lying in a ditch beside the road.  Beaten and now penniless, this unnamed traveler has lost everything. After hearing footsteps come and footsteps go, someone finally stops to help!  He must have been incredibly relieved when he finally heard the sandals of one passerby start coming closer rather than just keeping on keeping on down the road. 

Help was at hand.

So he opens his eyes and what does he see?

A Samaritan.

A Samaritan!

It must have been disorienting because Samaritans don’t stop!  Samaritans don’t help!  Samaritans just don’t care!  Right?

Still, the face he sees, the face carried by the feet that did not walk on by, is the face of a Samaritan. 

Needless to say it was an unexpected face to see in that moment.

When it comes down to it, we all have Samaritans. People who have given us every reason to believe that they would keep on walking down the road. People who have given us absolutely no reason to expect anything but the worst from them.

Samaritans come in all shapes and sizes in our lives;

The guy who is fine with you making 70 cents on the dollar.

The person who crosses the street when they see you coming.

The person who would sooner tear you down than build you up.

We all know some Samaritans.

Can you picture yours?  Can you see the face of that person; the one you know will just pass you by?

Let’s go back to thar road for a minute.

Close your eyes and go back with me to that ditch. 

The robbers are gone and they have taken everything; your wallet, your dignity, your feeling of safety.

Lying there in the ditch naked you try to move your legs but they are just too sore.

You try to lift an arm, but the pain from the fists and the kicks keeps you down.

The pain in your ribs makes it hard to breathe and the pain in your head is building by the second.

Footsteps get closer and then drift away as passerby after passerby leaves you there.

Until finally, a pair of feet come closer and closer still.

A hand on your shoulder- a comforting word- your heart stops beating so fast because finally a friend is there to help or at least a friendly traveler.

You breathe a bit easier, you begin to calm down, and slowly you open your eyes to see the face of your savior…

…a Samaritan.

The face looking back at you is the face of your Samaritan who takes you in their arms, carries you to safety, tends to your wounds, ensures your well-being and defies every expectation you ever had.

Kind of like God does.

God works through unexpected faces in unexpected places.

That is one of the miracles and mysteries of the faith that keep it interesting!

It happens throughout the story of God’s work in the world; God using unexpected people to do God’s work and tell God’s story.

Joseph, despised by his brothers, tossed down a well, taken as a prisoner, and left for nothing eventually becomes the second in command and rescues his family from their suffering.  Joseph’s is the unexpected face of a hero.

Or what about Deborah?  In ancient Israelite history women rarely have names let alone good stories, but Deborah was a general.  And not just any general, but a general who manages to lead her people to victory when no one else could do it.  Deborah’s is the unexpected face of a leader.

Then there is Mary.  Young, just married, inexperienced in the ways of the world and wanting nothing but to set up housekeeping with her fiancé Joseph.  But an angel appears and tells Mary that she is carrying a child.  And not just any child, but God born into the world.  Mary’s is the unexpected face of the mother of God.

And there is the Samaritan.  The sole passerby who actually stops and tends to the wounded man.  He stopped when Samaritans don’t stop.  He helped whom Samaritans don’t help.  His was the unexpected face of a neighbor that day.

That is just how God works.  In unexpected places and unexpected faces. 

Sometimes those unexpected faces are worn by the Samaritans in our lives; those people whom we have given no reason to expect any better from us.  Sometimes God uses Samaritans to reach out and show us what it means to be a good neighbor.

We all have those Samaritans, don’t we?  We all have a face we least expect to see in our moment of need.

And if we are honest with ourselves; if we are really honest with ourselves and with God, I think we have to admit that along with the Samaritans we have in our lives, we are ourselves, sometimes, the Samaritans in other people’s lives.

Can you see that person?  The one you just can’t quite connect with?  Can you see that person?  That person whom you have disappointed or failed to quite see as your neighbor?  Can you see the face of the person who, looking up from a ditch after a robbery, would be at least a little surprised to see you lending a helping hand?

Let’s go back to the road that day; that dusty, lonely road.

Like so many in the ancient near east, this road feels like the hottest one you have ever walked. 

With every mile the air is drier, the dust is thicker, the journey seems longer than you expected.

The load you are carrying seemed light in the early predawn when you left home.  This wouldn’t be too bad a trip.

Of course that was before the noon day sun came up and started to bake the earth like your mother’s bread. 

As you trudge on, the load that seemed so light in the early morning has gained some heft with the noonday sun.

There is nothing in the world you want more than to stop and get a drink of water.  Or wine.  Or whatever will get your tongue from sticking to the roof of your dry dusty mouth.

This walk cannot end soon enough. 

Eventually you see a familiar landmark.  You’ve walked the road enough times to know that it is not too much further along the way.  Light at the end of the tunnel.

Then you hear it.  The faint groaning of…something.

A wounded animal you guess.  You feel sorry for the farmer whose livestock is injured but you have places to be.

As you get closer the groaning gets more familiar.  It isn’t a sheep or a goat.  It’s a man. 

You glance over at the side of the road and sure as the sun is in the sky, a man lies beaten in the ditch.

Now, this is really not your concern.  It is not your problem.  You are not the county ambulance service but something compels you to walk over and check on him. You are compelled by compassion the parable says.

You walk over and give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, tell him that he will be alright and begin to lift him off the ground. 

Just then his eyes open and he sees your face; a look of surprise in his eyes.

But…you’re a Samaritan.

Who’s Samaritan are you?  Who is it looking up at you from that ditch?  In whose life might God use YOU to be an unexpected face?

Sometimes part of being surprised by God’s use of unexpected faces in unexpected places is letting one of those faces be our own. 

Sometimes we are the man in the ditch and sometimes we are the Samaritan.

In all times, it is the God of love and grace and hope and friendship and promise who is working on and through us.

So be ready for the unexpected when God works in your life.

And be ready to be the unexpected when God calls you to work in the life of another.

Amen.

Something Worth Sharing

Something Worth Sharing    

Matthew 13:1-9, 15-23

5th Sunday after Pentecost Year A

July 13, 2014

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

and

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            There are two common mistakes speakers at youth ministry events generally make.

            First, middle aged pastors who were never cool in high school cannot, under any circumstances or in any remotely reasonable way, act cool in adulthood.  There is not much in this life as sad as a staggeringly uncool preacher trying to pull off hipster glasses and pop music lyrics in an effort to connect with youth.

            Second, they fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to get through to a teenager is through the door marked “fear.”  This is the school of thought that says you had better scare them straight while they are still in the church or lose them forever.

            The speaker at the Jr. High youth event when I was in the 7^th grade managed to hit those and every other possible pot hole on the road.

            The theme of the weekend was the parable we heard this morning;  the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.

            After impressing us with his grasp of Michael Jackson and Men at Work lyrics which had nothing at all to do with the point he was trying to make, he began the stern warnings against drifting away from the life of the Christian faith. 

            For the most part his talk walked a pretty familiar interpretive path through this text.  The sower, God in the person of Jesus Christ, graciously spreads seed on the ground in the hopes that something will grow.  The seed, of course, is the word of God revealed, and the soil, our lives.  Some seed falls in good places other seed falls on less hospitable ground; the good soil representing faithfulness and rest of the soil varying degrees sinfulness.

After painting the ominous picture of what would happen to us if we failed to live up to our spiritual potential- bad grades, bad lives, bad futures, bad luck, even bad skin (I actually think he even blamed acne on sin!)-  he asked us the question he obviously hoped would spark in us a lifetime of faith in God or at least scare us away from lives of sin:

            What kind of soil are YOU?

            Now it is important to say here that I was a child of Second Presbyterian Church and the pastor there over most of my lifetime was J. Allen Smith.  Allen was known to be many things, fire and brimstone throwing was not one of them.  Allen was a great gentle preacher who managed week after week to take the words of scripture and paint a vivid picture with God’s word.  So when the keynote speaker up on the stage asked us “what kind of soil we were” in the most menacing tone he could manage, it was unusual and it did scare me a little. 

            What kind of soil are you?

            Well, I certainly didn’t want to be the soil on the path.  After generations of feet stomp along, that soil is compacted and as hard as concrete.  Jesus tells us in the parable that the seed that falls there is eaten up by the birds.  

            Didn’t want to be the rocky ground either.  Better than the bare road, but still shallow and rootless.  The seed that falls there fares better than the seed on the road, but it still burns up in the sun as soon as it sprouts.

            Not much more luck with the thorny plants.  The soil there is better and the seeds the sower throws are able to find some purchase, but so are the weeds and the thorny plants.  I guess that is the ancient near eastern version of kudzu growing up trees and over fields.  If you have ever tried to fight back that unholy weed, you know that the seeds cast on that soil don’t have a chance.

            When faced with the choice, there is really only one soil you would want to be in this story- the good soil.  That is the soil that managed to produce 30, 60, even 100 to 1 yield on the crops.  It bore fruit and then some.  That is good, rich, delta soil. 

            That is the soil I want to be.  I want to be the good soil- the soil that bears fruit and makes the story work.

            What kind of soil are you?

            Hopefully I am the good soil.

            I am pretty sure that is the answer the speaker at that youth retreat wanted to hear.

            It is the answer that this parable seems to point us toward giving.

            It is the answer that we long to give.

            And it is a good answer.

            Except for one thing.

            It misses the point of the parable.

            For whatever reason, this parable, which for centuries has been called the parable of the sower, has for centuries been interpreted as a parable about the soil.

            So we ask, what kind of soil are you?

            We worry that though we want to be the fertile soil we will be found wanting and trodden and packed down too hard like the soil of the path.

            We worry about being the right kind of soil, but the parable is not about the soil.

            It is a parable about the sower.

            And this is where our shared interpretive task gets tricky. 

            Making this parable about the soil is uncomfortable, after all we all have those days when our hearts are as hardened as the dirt of a well walked road, but in the end the soil is something that we can at least control.  Whether it means tilling up the hardened earth or throwing away the rocks that litter the ground or pulling the weeds that choke the fruits of the spirit seeking to grow in our hearts, we have some control over the state of the soil when the soil is our own hearts and spirits. 

            If this was the parable about the state of the soil in our hearts, it would be an easy parable.

            Then if it was an EASY parable, it would not be a parable of Jesus. 

            Jesus always has something extra for us; and added layer of complexity, an unexpected lesson, a spiritual word lurking, not in secret, but in plain sight among the parabolic images.

            Yes, the state of the soil in our souls is part of this parable, however what makes it a parable of Jesus worth the retelling is not the admonition to get your soil right nor is it the allegory of the seed as the word of God.  It is instead the word it has to speak about the sower. 

            This is the parable of the sower.

            It is a parable about God.

We may ask, what kind of soil are you, but the parable answers with a question if it's own…

What kind of sower is this?

It is a parable about God; a parable about the sower. 

            As I was working on this sermon, I stumbled upon a passage in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics that has been turning over in my head all week.  As a matter of fact, I was still mulling it last night around 11.

            Barth wrote about this parable from Matthew;

“For this Sower there are not four different fields in which to sow but only one...To the one field traversed by the Sower belong alike the path, the stony ground, the thorny ground, and the good ground. [Men] constitute a homogeneous community in relation to the Word of the kingdom addressed to them.”

While so many of us try to take this parable and navigate the twin rocky shoals of judgment and moral categorization, Barth points us back to the underlying reality that the sower is far less concerned with what kind of soil is under foot than that the seed- the word- falls on it all.

I wish that speaker so long ago had read this passage from Barth before he got up there on stage in front of that room full of impressionable middle schoolers.  Had he, he might have avoided the interpretive cul-de-sac that comes when we make the parable of the sower the parable of the soil.

If the soil is the point, we are left with two less than helpful choices in understanding the sower.  Either the sower is careless- constantly wasting precious seed on unfertile and useless ground- or the sower simply doesn’t care- and the seed, the word of God, can be wasted as long as some of it gets in the right places the rest can go ahead and be eaten, burned up in the sun or tangled in the thorns.

So is it the parable of the careless sower or the parable of the parable of the sower who just doesn’t care?

Neither, Barth reminds us.

This is the story of a sower who, owning the whole field, traverses it end to end and refuses to give up on one square inch. 

He traverses it all because he realizes that each of us wanders from beaten path to fertile soil.  God knows that none of us is ever always good fertile soil- we are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God, Paul reminds us.  The sower who shares the seed, the savior who shares the word, knows that the soil that is one day hardened by the stomping feet of experience or pocked by stones that prevent them taking root, may yet one day be rich and fertile and support new growth so the sower continues to plant it.

This is a parable about the relentless, hopeful, generous sower; the sower who deems each and every square inch of ground worthy of planting.

And that is where we find the good news in this story. 

Not in the adolescent scare tactic to be good soil or else, but in the truth that whether our hearts are as hard as a well-travelled road or as fertile and rich as good delta soil, God continues day after day and year after year to plant seeds of the spirit in us in the eternal knowledge that in God’s good time our soil- our souls- will be ready for that word to grow.

I suppose we could still ask the question, what kind of soil are you?  As long as we remember that this parable gives us only one answer:

We are God’s soil- the medium in which the word of God grows in this world. 

            And God is our sower- always and in every way planting seeds of the spirit in our hearts and lives- never deterred by one unsuccessful harvest, God comes back time and time again, sharing the seeds of the spirit, until each and every heart produces a harvest of 30, 60, even 100 to 1.

            And that, my friends, is good news!

            And in a world with plenty of beaten paths, rocky ground, and thorny fields, it is good news worth sharing.

            Sola deo Gloria!  To God alone be the glory! Amen

Nothing New to Add

Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve Year A

December 24, 2013

First Presbyterian Church Clarksville

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            In 1994, Ursula Askam Fanthorpe was the first woman appointed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.*  The professorship is more honorary than academic.  The office holder is expected to lecture just two or three times per year during the five year appointment.

            Fanthorpe is best known for a volume of poems for two voices co-written by her lifelong companion Rosie Bailey.  Most of her poetry is a reflection on life in England and themes of the cultural changes since her war-time childhood and the subtle shifts in British national identity. 

            One of Fanthorpe’s lesser known poems is titled simply BC:AD.  It is a short simple poem that seeks to capture a moment in time when nothing was happening…

            …and when everything happened.  It reads:

            This was the moment when Before

            Turned into After, and the future’s

            Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

            This was the moment when nothing

            Happened. Only dull peace

            Sprawled boringly over the earth.

            This was the moment when even energetic Romans

            Could find nothing better to do

            Than counting heads in remote provinces.

            And this was the moment

            When a few farm workers and three

            Members of an obscure Persian sect

            Walked haphazard by starlight straight

            Into the kingdom of heaven.

            Once we clear away the holiday add-ons, the holly and the ivy, the wrapping and the tinsel, what is left is a rather ordinary night in Bethlehem when nothing was happening and everything happened. 

            To say that life in that first century Roman province was not exciting is probably an understatement.  Now to be sure, there were problems and life was not easy, but compared to the excitement of Rome, things were pretty calm and quiet and, well, boring.  Things must have been relatively quiet for the Roman authorities to be bored enough to order a census.  Surely there were easier ways to raise money for Caesar.  But, here in this quiet backwater town of Bethlehem, that is exactly what they do.  They decide to count everyone.

            Outside the city, a few shepherds watched the flocks under their care.  It was a day like any other- nothing special at all.  As day gave way to night, the only thing they really had to look forward to was night yielding to day again. 

            Coming to town with her new husband for the mandatory census, a young mother, her time finally arrived, gave birth to a baby.  Despite what the hymn writer would later say, my guess is that like every other baby since the beginning of time, this one did some crying make.

            There in Bethlehem, it was just a night.

            Like any other night.

            Boring.

            Mundane.

            As pedestrian as a night could be.

            It was just a night.  And that, Fanthorpe observes, is the paradox because it was into this entirely unremarkable night that God became human.  Haven to earth came down.  Eternity intersected the daily. 

            Before gave way to After. 

            It was that night, in that moment, when history came to a point- God’s whole relationship with creation came together in one moment.  In his letter to the Galatians, Paul would refer to the event of the birth of Christ as “the fullness of time.” 

            All of the years- the generations- led up to that moment…in the fullness of time. 

            On the pulpit at St. Salvator’s chapel at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland there is an hourglass.  There are all sorts of legends about why it is there, but the likely culprit was a longwinded bishop.  It is placed so that it is just at the bottom of the preacher’s field of view so that no matter where you look from the pulpit, that hourglass is there.  Before the sermon begins, an usher walks up and rather unceremoniously flips the glass, gives the preacher a knowing look, and returns to his seat.  I can say from experience that hourglass is intimidating.

            It did not dawn on me until I was working on this sermon that in a way the hourglass is not just a warning to longwinded preachers.  It is also a pretty accurate symbol of that first Christmas night.

            In that moment when a new baby took his first breath and a newlywed couple became a holy family, the fullness of time that came together in that moment, began to expand again.  Before became After.     

            The miracle of Christmas is not found only in its own specialness, but in what this extraordinary moment can teach us about all the other ordinary moments we live each year.  Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canerbury and now Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, frequently speaks about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary; how even in the most pedestrian moments, God can do extraordinary things.  Williams writes:

"here we are daily, not necessarily attractive and saintly people, along with other not very attractive and saintly people, managing the plain prose of our everyday service, deciding daily to recognize the prose of ourselves and each other as material for something unimaginably greater — the Kingdom of God, the glory of the saints, reconciliation and wonder."

            The birth of Christ in the midst of such an ordinary night gives us a glimpse of what God can do with the ordinary circumstances of our lives; this moment that happened in the fullness of time opens our imaginations for the extraordinary work of God.

            After all the parties are over, the gifts are exchanged, the eggnog consumed, and the last bars of Silent Night are left hanging in the air, life for most of us will get back to ordinary.  No more hectic shopping, no more caroling, no more last minute gift wrapping, just the normal everyday stuff of everyday life.

            The birth of Christ reminds us that it is just such ordinariness that provides the building blocks for God’s unimaginably greater work in our midst.

            If God can work such miraculous things in such an ordinary night, imagine what God can do in the everyday of our lives.  Even the most mundane winter night can be the place that God does wondrous things.

            As I sat in my office doing my best to stare down the blinking cursor on the blank screen, my frustration finally got the best of me and I declared, “Linda, this is my 15th Christmas Eve sermon and I have no idea what to say.”  Linda, who serves dually as our church secretary and the resident sage of wisdom, gave me a wry smile and said, “Nothing new to add, huh?”

            It dawned on me when she said those words that in fact, no. I don’t have anything new to add.  And in truth, there isn’t anything new to add.  This story, in all its miraculous simplicity, says it all. 

            Even in the most ordinary of moments, God can, will, and does do extraordinary things.

            Friends, my prayer for us all is that in this night and every night to come, we may know what it is to encounter the extraordinary in the ordinary and, in the fullness of time, walk haphazard by starlight straight into the kingdom of heaven. 

            O come, o come, Emmanuel.  Amen.

*The connection between this poem and the nativity as well as the Williams quote was made by a writer whose essay I read a few years ago. My notes did not include the writer’s name or where I encountered this helpful insight.  Although this sermon is entirely my own, I want to give credit where it is due.

Joseph Was a Righteous Man

Matthew 1:18-25

Advent 4 Year A

December 22, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville and

Harmony Presbyterian Church

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

          In the Old Masters Gallery of the palace museum in Kassel, Germany there is a painting that you have probably never heard of before.  It is a Rembrandt, but unlike his self-portrait or the Storm on the Sea of Galilee famous for being stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston, this painting is relatively unknown and so nondescript that it almost blends into the background. 

The name of the painting is The Holy Family with Painted Frame and Curtains.  The left side of the painting shows a tired mother holding a clinging child- Mary holding the Christ child.  The mother and child are bathed in the bright yellow light of a small fire in the fireplace.  A cat sits eating the crumbs from a bowl on the floor.  A blanket in the cradle appears ready to receive the child.

On the right side of the painting, barely discernable in the shadows, sits a man- Joseph.  He is sitting in the dark, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward in thought seemingly ignorant of the peaceful maternal scene just across the canvas.

It is, I think, perhaps the most honest depiction of the Holy Family I have ever seen.

Mary looks tired.  Jesus looks on the verge of tears like a real baby.  And Joseph, well Joseph looks worried, pensive, a little panicked, you know, like a new dad.

Joseph does not get much air time during the holiday season.  As we journey to and through the nativity of the Lord, we encounter shepherds, angels, a reluctant young mother, an inhospitable innkeeper and three wise men who bring gifts fit for a king if somewhat inappropriate for a baby.  Joseph is little more than an extra filling out the cast for this holiday pageant. 

As I was looking back over old sermons on this passage and other Advent texts, I began to realize that I have always treated Joseph as just that; a Christmas prop- an extra filling out the cast in the show.

So after five trips around the track on the preaching lectionary, I find myself curious about that shadowy figure in the background of Rembrandt’s painting.

Scripture tells us little about this man.  He does not appear in any of Pauls’ letters or in the early gospel of Mark.  It is not until a generation after Jesus’ resurrection when the gospels of Luke and Matthew are written that we get any mention of the man who was the earthly father of Jesus and even they are conflicted on the details.

Other than his role in the nativity, there are two things the scriptures agree about concerning Joseph.  He was a technon- a carpenter or woodworker and he was dikios- righteous.

Joseph was a righteous man.

The text does not say it, but it is probably a safe assumption that Mary and Joseph were young.  In fact they were probably very young.  While most young people their age today are slogging through high school and studying for their driver’s exam, teenagers in the first century were young adults and 20-somethings, while not exactly middle aged, were far from just getting started with their lives.

As we enter the story today, we encounter these two young people and we learn two facts:

1.      They are engaged.

2.      Mary is pregnant and the child is not Joseph’s.

            Those are the circumstances by which Joseph finds himself surrounded.  He is acutely aware of his situation.  Somehow I think that moment captured in Rembrandt’s painting is not the first time that Joseph, the righteous carpenter, sat alone in the dark contemplating his reality. 

            The culturally popular thing to do would be for Joseph to publicly shame Mary and openly reject her and their pending nuptials in favor of saving his own reputation.  The cultural expectation- the popular reaction to this circumstance- was to kick Mary to the curb and be done with it.

            Joseph takes a different tack.  He determines to leave her at the altar, so to speak, but to do it without a public spectacle.  As the text puts it, “Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly.”

            The text does not tell us what his motivation was other than not humiliating Mary.  I like to think that Joseph was aware of what would happen when it became widely known in the community that Mary was pregnant before she was married and he did not want to pile on the trouble she would already face.  So he quietly packs his bags, calls a cab and prepares to sneak quietly into the night. 

            It would be as if he was never there.

            Mary would have to face the cultural backlash of her pregnancy but Joseph would not add to her plight.

            Joseph was a righteous man.

            If there is a central point to this text, an axle, around which the rest of the text revolves, it is the next verse- or the first part of it at least.  The English translation reads, “As he was thinking about this…”

            The Greek word translated here as “he was thinking” is enthumathentos.  Like so much of Greek, the English translation does not quite capture the fullness of the meaning.  “Thinking” is accurate, but a more illustrative and accurate way of saying what Joseph is doing might be “he was sitting with this thought.” 

            Some problems need a little sitting if a solution is ever to be found.  Occasionally life presents us with a ready exit from a problem, but more often than not we have to spend some time searching around to find the best way forward.

            The idea of enthumathentos evokes less a picture of intellectual mulling than a picture like the one Rembrandt conceived; sitting in the dark with thoughts mulling- pondering- praying.  It seems, from the text so far, that Joseph has made up his mind about what to do with his relationship with Mary.  However, here we have evidence that rather than pack his bags and storm off in a huff, he decides to sleep on it.  He decides to let the decision steep a while before he walks away.

            It is in the midst of this pondering that Joseph evidently drifts off to sleep and in his slumber he is visited by an angel of the Lord.  The angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph and told him not to be afraid, to marry Mary and to raise Jesus as his own.  Now, on the surface that seems a pretty innocuous encounter.  In truth of course, this was much much more.  Because the child growing in her was not any other child, it is the son of God.  Joseph is called to care for the mother of the son of God and the son of God himself.

            And that is exactly what he does.  He takes Mary as his wife.  He also refrains from sharing their marital bed before Jesus is born.  In addition to taking on the responsibility of raising a child that is not his own, Joseph takes pains to ensure that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the child does not belong to him.

            Before he drifted off that night, while he was in the midst of his pondering of this major life decision to leave the woman he intended to marry, Joseph could not have known what was going to happen.  He was trying to do the most right thing that he could and leave Mary quietly.  Then the angel visits and everything changed.

            Joseph went to bed a righteous man.

            Joseph woke up the step-father of God.

            What happens in between those two realities is one of the great mysteries and miracles of this season.  You see, the birth of Christ is not the only nativity that happens.  There is also this oft ignored and little understood nativity of Joseph. 

            What we witness in these few verses is the rebirth of a man and the birth of a father. 

            Matthew does something very clever in the way he tells this story.  He makes it clear that Joseph’s righteousness does not depend on how he responds to the angel.  Joseph is declared to be righteous before the angel visits.  It is pretty easy to read into the text that this righteous label would have been ripped away if Joseph woke up and ignored the angel’s invitation.  The problem is that is not in the text.  Joseph is righteous not because of what he does after the angel appears but because of who he is before.

            Joseph is a righteous man.

            What changed is that in his sleep- in the midst of his prayer and discernment- Joseph found another way through his reality.   Faced with a seemingly inescapable problem, Joseph spends his time with the decision he feels compelled to make and, as it turns out, it was time well spent.  After the angel visits in the night, his choices were no longer stay and be humiliated or leave and humiliate Mary.  The angel, whispering in Joseph’s ear, shows him another way forward; a way that will graft him into the impossible truth of Messiah; a way he could not find alone.

            In so many ways, Joseph waking from his dream, gives a glimpse into what will be expected of this child he is now called to raise a his own.  It is as though the angel whispers to him;

“There is a place for you in this story.  This child, the one you will name Emmanuel, will need a dad.  He will need someone to comfort him when he is scared at night. Someone to teach him a craft in the world with which he will so long to truly connect.  Joseph, if you do not walk this hard road to Bethlehem, who will teach him how to climb the cruel hill to Calvary?”[i]

            Far from the reluctant groom of a pregnant young bride, Joseph is called to be the one who will greed God into the world and be there while he grows up. 

            Sometimes we forget that the nativity of the Lord is the birth of a baby.  And the lost years between Jesus later childhood and his adult ministry can leave us with the impression that the Christ child went straight from swaddled infant to enigmatic adult, but somewhere in between someone had to change his diapers and comfort him while teething, make him eat his vegetables and teach him the stories of the faith, help him with his homework and teach him to throw the Galilean version of a baseball.  He would need someone who, when the work ahead seemed too much to take, could look back on a dream and remind the child that just when there seems to be no way out, a new way will be made clear; a way defined not by the imposition of the customs of the world, but the intrusion of the grace of God.

Jesus is not the only one who needs an example like Joseph.  We all have moments when we yearn to know that God’s Good News is indeed true.  We all need, from time to time, to hear from a seasoned voice that the hope we find in Christ is not misplaced or mistaken. 

            We all need a Joseph from time to time.

            There is no way of knowing the moment Rembrandt had in mind when he painted that image of the holy family.  I like to think that it captures a moment in time so familiar from the hymn:

O Little Town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie 
Above they deep and dreamless sleep the silent starts go by 
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light 
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

            Sitting in the dark, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, Joseph knew what it is to sit at the junction of hope and fear.   He knew what it was to fall asleep in fear and uncertainty only to be awakened by hope and promise.

            May we each and everyone know the truth that stirred Joseph from his sleep; in the birth of an infant, when the hopes and fears of the world meet, hope emerges to show us the way.

            May the angel of the Lord whisper to each of us in the stillness of our hearts and when we wake from our dreaming may we all know the courage of Joseph; the courage of the hope of a righteous man.

            Amen.

                 

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[i] From an article by Alyce McKenzie on the Patheos website titled The Fear of Betrayal: Advent Reflections on Matthew 1:18-25.