IN DEFENSE OF JOSEPH

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

December 23, 2007

Scripture:  Isaiah 7: 10-16 and Matthew 1: 1-25

 

Take a minute and hum quietly to yourself a Christmas Carol that gives a featured role to Joseph.  “Away in a manger….” “O Little Town of Bethlehem.…” “Silent Night, Holy Night….” I don’t think you’ll be successful.  A quick study by Eric Riley and me found only one such Carol that gives even a hint of prominence to Joseph.  Joseph is both present and yet almost invisible in the Christmas story every year.  Even though we talk about Mary and Joseph, it’s Mary’s song we sing, Mary’s role that is pre-eminent.

 

This helps explain why today’s lesson from Matthew is such a surprise.  Here’s how it begins:

 

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,

the son of David, the son of Abraham.

 

Matthew then unfolds a strange and wondrous list of relatives that ties Jesus back to Abraham and David over the course of more than a millennium.  What’s so startling is that the genealogy is of Joseph’s side of the family tree.  It is through Joseph’s ancestors that three great claims are being made about Jesus:  that Jesus comes from a line of kings going back to David, that his ancestry is rooted even deeper in Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, and that—hold your breath—that Jesus is the long awaited  Messiah, the Holy One of God.

 

The genealogy is loosely constructed and consists of three groups of 14 ancestors.  There are gaps in the family tree—three kings between Joram and Uzziah are missing—and for reasons known completely only to Matthew, he adds in two harlots, Tamar and Rahab, who weren’t even Jewish.  Matthew has something up his sleeve.  He lays claim to the ultimate Jewishness of Jesus’ ancestry while at the same time connecting his lineage with Gentiles of less than sterling repute.  It must be that Matthew’s Jewish Messiah is also to be the savior of sinners like you and me—and this claim is built into Jesus’ genealogy.

 

Let’s now turn to what Matthew has to tell us about the birth of Jesus the Messiah.  It’s already clear that Joseph is the central character in Matthew’s account.  We usually don’t notice this at Christmas time because we blend Matthew’s story in with Luke’s—and for Luke, the lowly maiden Mary is absolutely the central character in the drama.

 

Joseph and Mary were engaged.  In first century Palestine the custom of engagement often went on for years.  For example, a girl as young as 10 or 11 might be spoken for in what we would call an arranged marriage.  Prior to being married, the man and woman (we would say girl) lived in their respective homes.  But what’s important to note is that in the eyes of their neighbors, their relationship was as sacrosanct as marriage itself.

In ancient Hebrew law this is made unmistakably clear.  We read in Deuteronomy 22:23-24, for example, these chilling words:

 

If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be

married, and a man meets her in the town, and lies with her,

you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and

stone them to death, the young woman because she did not

cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his

neighbor’s wife.

 

Not his neighbor’s fiancée, but his wife.  To be engaged was just like being married.

 

With this context in mind, let’s read on.  Mary is pregnant.  Gulp!  Joseph and Mary had

not lived together.  Joseph has every reason to believe that the child in Mary’s womb is not his.  By law, he had every right to go ballistic.  Instead, being a righteous man and unwilling to humiliate Mary, he made plans to dismiss her quietly and move on with his life.

 

We might see Joseph as a weak reed blowing in the wind, a sunshine fiancé walking away from a mess.  In his defense, we should note clearly that Matthew saw him as one who dared to live as the prophets demanded and as Jesus was to do:  showing mercy and not vengeance.  Joseph foreshadows the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew so carefully records.  “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

 

Next comes a passage that is close to home for every single one of us.  The Joseph we are coming to know in this passage had to have been tormented by the drama unfolding in his life.  Here he is, a carpenter bent on marriage and raising a family.  He has a young fiancée who is soon to move in with him as his wife.  And now she’s pregnant.  His dreams are turning to ashes.  He must have tossed and turned through many a sleepless night.  Like us, he laid out his plans—such good ones—and now he can only ask, “What am I to do?”

 

Martin Copenhaver, a preacher in New England, makes this very wise observation about Joseph’s dilemma and ours as well:

 

When your dreams are dashed, when you struggle with fear

and grief, they seem only to tighten their grip on you, when

your mind spins in the same awful and familiar circles all

day long, it can be exhausting.  But sometimes there is a

blessing in that, because sometimes it is only when we are

weakened enough and tired enough that we are able to

listen.  So it is in sleep, when Joseph can do no more righteous

things and ponder no more his own thoughts, that he can

finally hear what God has to say to him.  That is, when his

own waking dreams are destroyed, Joseph is invited to hear

God’s dreams for him and for all humankind.[i]

 

Just as Joseph was about to divorce his bride-to-be and slip away, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.  “Don’t let your fears overwhelm you, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Sprit.”  Martin Copenhaver embellishes the angel’s words:  “Do not fear.  God is here.  It may not be the life you planned, but God can be born here, too, if you will permit it.”

 

Joseph comes through.  Somehow his dreams enable him to imagine an improbable future in which the child to be born of Mary will be like none before or since.  “You are to name him Jesus,” says the angel.  It’s an ordinary name with an extraordinary meaning.  It is based on the Hebrew Joshua or Yeshua.  In Greek it is transliterated Iesous.  The literal root meaning of the word is “salvation.”  Jesus will “save his people from their sins.”

 

Lest there be any doubt that this child is one to be reckoned with, Joseph’s dream includes words from the ancient prophecy of Isaiah about a virgin bearing a son named Emmanuel.  The Hebrew word emmanu means “with us.”  The El is a name for God.  Jesus will embody God.  When we meet him, we will meet God.  Emmanu-El—God with us.

 

Joseph must have awakened as we sometimes do asking,  “What am I to make of this world of dreams from which I have just come?”  But he soon made his fate-filled choice.  He took Mary as his wife, and when she gave birth to a son, Joseph named him Jesus.  It was customary in those days for the mother to name the baby.  But Joseph, the central character in Matthew’s nativity, names his and Mary’s son Jesus.

 

Matthew wants us to know and believe that God is at work, that God is acting through the birth of Jesus to bring Good News into a weary world.  And Joseph is his willing accomplice, one whose actions mirror God’s very own mercy and righteousness.

 

God will be born here if you will permit it.  Matthew is playing his trump card at the very  beginning of his Gospel.  Matthew portrays a consistent theological conviction that while we are saved by pure grace, our human response matters greatly.  In the Sermon on the Mount Matthew quotes Jesus’ emphatic pronouncement of this reality:  “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”  God will be born here if you will permit it.  It’s no wonder Matthew has a particular fondness for Joseph.  God’s way in the world requires a partnership with humans, with the likes of you and me.  If there is to be peace, God requires peace makers.  If there is to be mercy, merciful humans must do their lot.

 

Martin Copenhaver’s refrain, “If you will permit it,” really hits Matthew’s nail on the head.   “It is a fragile mystery that is entrusted to each of us, the mystery that God’s birth requires human partners—a Mary, a Joseph, a you, a me—willing to believe the impossible, that God can be at work even in the midst of our own shattered dreams.  Human lives being what they are, we are all invited to accept the whole sticky mess and rock it in our arms.  There are times, and surely this is one, when the whole world seems like one shattered dream.  And it will take the faith of Joseph to believe what the angels endeavor to tells us in our dreams, that God is still with us…”[ii]

 

Tomorrow evening at our 6:30 family service I will be inviting the young people to come stand around the communion table.  On it there will be a crèche shipped here from Bethlehem last summer.  The children will cradle the figures in their hands, feel the smoothness of the olive wood, and sense once again the beauty of it all.  Then, when we place the figures in the manger scene, this year Joseph will be front and center.  After all, he’s the one who gave Jesus the name that rings true across the vast expanse of time and space—Jesus, Emmanuel—God with us.

 

In closing, I’d like to read from a poem by Ann Weems from her book, Kneeling in Bethlehem, entitled “Getting to the Front of the Stable.”  Cindy Sproat read it at our staff meeting this week, and it is a most fitting way to conclude our reflections about Joseph.

 

Who put Joseph in the back of the stable?

Who dressed him in brown, put a staff in his hand,

   and told him to stand in the back of the crèche,

   background for the magnificent light of the Madonna?

 

Is this a man to be stuck for centuries

   in the back of the stable?

Actually, he probably picked the Child up in his arms

   and walked him in the night,

   patting him lovingly

   until he closed his eyes.

 

This Christmas, let us give thanks to God

   for this man of incredible faith

   into whose care God placed

      the Christ Child.

 

As a gesture of gratitude,

      let’s put Joseph in the front of the stable

   where he can guard and greet

      and cast an occasional glance

        at this Child

          who brought us life[iii]

 

Matthew has made his point.  While it may be hard to reconcile the place of Joseph’s family with that of Mary’s—and the whole matter of the virgin birth—for Matthew only one thing mattered:  the invisible God came into view and brought us life in the person of Jesus.  That’s the enduring miracle.  That’s what matters most.

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

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