Writers describe the season of Advent with the words
expectation, hope, and patience. Today,
we can add miraculous. There are lots of
miracles happening in Matthew’s birth narrative. First is the miracle that a young woman
conceived a child in a way we simply are unable to understand. The most important miracle, though, is that
she didn’t end up the way that most young women in her situation ended up. The responsibility for that miracle was
completely in Joseph’s court. Yes, I
know, he had a dream. But even before
the dream, Joseph planned to treat Mary very differently than most. Other women in this delicate position would
most likely have been put to death, or at least maimed, by stoning. You see, adultery in that age was not a
violation of a person’s morality, it was a form of robbery. Joseph would have been well within his rights
to have had Mary punished, but he didn’t.
It was a miracle.
Joseph planned to ‘dismiss her quietly’. Joseph had compassion despite his
disappointment and anger. He put Mary’s
needs before the community mores and before his own embarrassment. And, that was pre-dream!
The angel’s message to Joseph was much more than a request
for him to go ahead with his plans to make Mary his wife. Joseph was the subject of another
annunciation. God needed Joseph’s “yes”
as much as God needed Mary’s “yes” to set out the plan of salvation.
Poor Joseph. His “yes”
gets lost in the midst of all of our nativity scenes and images of Mary great
with child. All the attention is on the
pregnant one. It’s still the same in our
day, too. Not too many people throw baby
showers for the dads. Even though the
prevailing politically correct reference is that WE are pregnant, WE all know
who’s taking the brunt of this new life in her womb. The dude isn’t working through morning
sickness, the swollen ankles, the elevated blood pressure, the exhaustion and eventually
labor and delivery. (Now you know why my son Kevin is an only child.)
Thankfully, once every three years, we are asked to consider
Joseph and how much his “yes” mattered.
Without him, Mary would have had no guardian – something that was a matter
of life and death at that time. Thanks
to Joseph, Jesus had brothers and sisters – a family who eventually would join
the apostles in sharing the good news of God’s coming kingdom.
Without Joseph, Jesus would have had no one to teach him a
trade or insist on his learning the faith. The Incarnate Word needed a place to
grow up. Thanks to Joseph, Jesus had an
earthly mansion – a home – in which to become fully human.
God didn’t ask for a “yes” that Joseph and Mary could just
forget later, their “yes” took a great deal of courage. It required a leap of faith. I know that we sometimes use that term
lightly. It was even used for the title
of a movie starring Steve Martin a while back.
This isn’t fair to the commitment that Soren Kierkegaard had in mind
when he coined it. For him, a leap of
faith was not convenient nor did it guarantee the person making the leap would
benefit from doing so. A true leap of faith is a permanent choice made with
total commitment, knowing that the success may not be the payoff.
According to Kierkegaard, the moment of leap-taking is the
pinnacle of a person’s freedom. It is a
fall you cannot reverse. There are many
ways of looking at this leap – from one perspective it is outrageously foolish,
from another it is courageous. Most of
the time, it’s both!
When I think about Joseph saying “yes” to God by taking Mary
to his side and treating Jesus as his own son, it occurs to me that there are
many men – and women – out there who have done the same thing. Stepparents, adoptive parents, even some
godparents and grandparents: they are
our modern day Josephs. Everyday there
are people in our midst who have said “yes” to God and a child of God in order
that love might build a family.
I also believe that our responsibility to God’s children
doesn’t end when they grow up and move on to new adventures. First of all, we never stop being parents, no
matter what anyone says. Just ask my
mother. But, we also have little ones
who don’t belong directly to us who need us too. There are kids who need to be read to, kids
who just want a hug, and kids who need a warm meal.
There are godchildren and grandchildren to play with and tell
the Christmas story to so that another generation knows the love of Jesus. To them, we are Joseph, the grown-up who
adopts them out of love and because God’s dream for all of us is to be one
family. On their behalf, let’s take a
leap of faith and say “yes” when they need us because too many others are
quietly dismissing them.
Amen.
