Joseph’s kinda important too!
Matthew 1:18-25; Romans 1:1-7; Psalm 80:1-7,17-19; Isaiah 7:10-16
I spent a lot of time this week puzzling over why the people that put together the lectionary, the three-year cycle of Bible readings that we use, decided to pick Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus for the 4th Sunday in Advent. It actually hurts my head a little bit, because it’s still Advent. Christmas Eve, when we’ll read Luke’s more detailed account of Jesus’ birth, is still five days away. Yet here we are, reading about Jesus being born in a highly undramatic way.
I had actually planned to go a completely different direction today, looking mostly at either the text from Isaiah or Romans, until the other night just before I went to sleep, I had a random thought: Why not talk about Joseph? I thought back: Well, that’d be kind of fun. And so here we are.
Joseph tends to be the silent participant in the Christmas story. We don’t know very much about him, except that he more than likely passed away sometime after Jesus’ twelfth birthday, as he isn’t mentioned at all after that even though Jesus’ mother is. We also know that he was a nice guy. Now you might be thinking, “Pastor, how in the world do we know Joseph was a nice guy?” Well remember the story of the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel? The penalty for that was death.
Keep that in mind for a minute as we go through the Gospel for today. Mary was betrothed to Joseph. This is a lot more involved than an engagement like we have today; a betrothal was a legal state — I guess in some ways you can think of it like being under contract to buy a house. Joseph had committed legally to marry Mary, and even though the wedding hadn’t happened yet, they were still referred to as husband and wife. Anyways, as it happened, Mary found out she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Ok, think about this for a minute. Joseph and Mary aren’t legally married, and thus oughtn’t be doing married-people things. In fact, it says that Joseph and Mary weren’t doing married-people things. So Joseph, knowing that if this got out Mary would be in a world of trouble, was looking to just quietly call things off so Mary wouldn’t get into as much trouble.
Well, one night, a messenger from God came to Joseph and said, “Hi there, Joseph Davidson, don’t stress out about this whole Mary thing, she didn’t cheat on you — the child is from God. When he’s born, yes the baby is a “he”, name him Jesus, because he’s going to save everyone from sin.” Joseph, upon waking up, decided to cancel his plans for divorce and, well, we all know what happened after that. A son was born, just as the angel said, and Joseph named him Jesus.
Joseph showed a huge amount of faith in this lesson. First he trusted God that Mary wasn’t an adulteress. Later, he trusted God after the arrival of the Magi and fled to Egypt for a while, before returning and settling in Nazareth, also at God’s leading. Yet we never talk about him. We talk about Mary’s servant heart. We talk about the shepherds. Sometimes I even think we talk about the innkeeper more than Joseph. But Joseph knew that God could be trusted.
And that really is what our life as Christians is all about — trusting God. It’s about trusting God more than how we think the world should work. It’s about trusting God more than our bank accounts, or our families, or the government, or even ourselves. We seek out God’s will through prayer and reading His Word, because we know that whatever He has in mind for us is better than anything we can imagine.
We’ll have the opportunity during our next hymn to show just one aspect of our trust in God. It often feels like the hardest area to trust God in is our finances, and giving back to God is just one of many outward signs of the trust we have in our hearts. If you brought your pledge card with you today, bring it forward and drop it in this bowl. During the prayers we’ll pray over them, and dedicate our pledges to God for His use. May the be just another example of our trust of God for our lives.