God Is With Us.

Isaiah 7:1-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18- 25.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent.

I.

            Matthew began his gospel with a genealogy in which he pointedly lifted up 4 women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.   All of these women had some reason to be judged, excluded, and shamed, but God chose to work particularly important and pivotal actions through each one.

            Then, in today’s reading, he turns to a 5^th woman, a teenager named Mary.  She is another woman whom God is choosing for special work, but who will also be condemned by many as morally questionable.

            Matthew’s point is that this is not unprecedented; it is in fact normal for God to act this way.  So he writes: “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.” 

            That is a mouthful that we may confidently assume no one swallowed.  Sometimes we have to cut through the sentimental, pious cobwebs and realize that, although we have learned that this is all a beautiful, holy mystery, at the time it was a shameful scandal that would have had no scent of holiness or mystery about it.  There are cultures even today where a young woman’s showing up pregnant outside of marriage warrants an instant death sentence.  And we may be confident that Mary’s culture was far closer to those than to ours.

            Were this to happen in our time and place we wouldn’t be happy about it, but we would figure out a way through and try to do what’s best for the mother and child… which for the mother would surely include intensive therapy if she stuck to that story about the Holy Spirit.  But back then, Mary was risking her life along with permanently shaming her family.

            One of the things we learn from all this is that when God interacts with the world and with people, it is always messy.  God does not usually if ever show up in a way that affirms our stability, order, rules and regulations, or even our morality.  In fact, God tends to enter human life with all the gentleness and subtlety of a charging rhinoceros.  God’s motto seems to be, “If it ain’t broke, break it.”

            In fact, the only time God doesn’t enter life like a tornado blowing everything apart, is when everything is blown apart already.  When the Creator chooses to interact with the humans and their civilization it is usually not very pretty because what passes for civilization is just about the opposite of what God originally had in mind.  Civilization is just the word we give to the chronic human tendency to disobey, reject, mock, and otherwise hate our Creator.

II.

            God’s Presence and activity is always wild, undomesticated, feral, and fundamentally challenging if not comprehensively destructive to all our human systems.  The seminal story of the whole Bible is God messing with Pharaoh, the supreme leader of the most advanced civilization of the time, who was busy building monuments to himself using slave labor.  (Powerful people building monuments to themselves with slave labor is practically the definition of civilization.)  God comes in, not on the side of the powerful, wealthy, educated, attractive, and successful Pharaoh.  Pharaoh had all the other gods telling everyone how great he was.  No.  The true God comes in on the side of the slaves and in freeing them totally wrecks Pharaoh’s cushy gig.

            So here, with the coming of the Messiah, God does not show up in Caesar’s or Herod’s palace to one of the royal daughters, so the Messiah can be raised in comfort, privilege, and splendor, as we might imagine befits the Creator of the Universe.  It is not into one of the well-appointed homes of the successful, respectable, upright, beautiful families that the Messiah arrives.

            But it is to a young, unmarried woman, as a spectacular disruption of her whole formerly ordinary life.  Showing that we have a completely unrealistic understanding of what “befits the Creator of the Universe.”  The Creator of the Universe actively seeks out and flows into places where the creative and active response can only be trust and love.

            Matthew goes on to tell us about the man to whom Mary is engaged.  “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”  He is a man who faces the disorder, chaos, and wildness of God with dignity, grace, and forgiveness.  He could have reacted in anger and violence.  His community would have supported him in this.  He could have moaned on about his offended honor.  He could have had her arrested.  He could have energetically sought to get to the bottom of this.

            But he doesn’t.  He is righteous; more righteous than the letter of the law, apparently.  His righteousness is demonstrated in mercy, in his humility, and in his caring about others.  He does not want “to expose her to public disgrace.”  In other words, he meets God’s disruption with trust and love even before he has the dream that explains it all.  He doesn’t feed violence, anger, fear, vindictiveness, self-righteousness, and retribution into the system.  Instead of making the situation far worse, he rolls with it.

            When God chooses Mary, God also chooses Joseph.  Only a person of decency and patience, only a person of profound humility and openness to God’s disruptive activity would do.  Someone who was insecure with a big ego wouldn’t have cut it.

III.

            But then, just as Joseph has resolved to do the decent thing, as much energy as that would have taken in itself, God sends Joseph a dream requiring even more of him.  His intention is to put this sad incident behind him and move on with his life.  His intention is to separate from the disruption and the chaos of God.  But God says, “Not so fast.  I require more from you than simply not being a jerk.  I want you in this thing for the long haul.”

            Joseph is to marry Mary anyway.  He is to raise this child with her.  He is to weather with her whatever storms may arise.  He is to answer with her and for her when people ask hard questions.  He is to make her lot his own.  This is a great deal to ask.  I mean, it is still someone else’s baby that he is being asked to raise as his own.  That Someone Else may be the Holy Spirit, but it remains a big pill to swallow. 

            In the dream the angel says that if it makes him feel better he gets to decide the child’s name… as long as he decides that the child’s name is Jesus.  In Hebrew the name “Jesus,” or Yeshua, means “the Lord saves.”  The dream-angel says that the child gets this name because “he will save his people from their sins.”

            The angel addresses Joseph as “son of David.”  Part of Joseph’s appeal is his lineage.  He is a descendant of the great King David, as Matthew pointed out in the earlier genealogy.  So there is this necessary connection here to various prophecies that indicate the Messiah will be a descendant of David. 

            But once again the story is messy.  God doesn’t make it easy or clean or neat.  There are apparent loose ends that need to be addressed.  It has problems and ambiguities.  Because Joseph isn’t the biological father of this child.  It will be one other thing that Jesus’ opponents will use against him.  Joseph isn’t his father; therefore Jesus can’t be the Messiah because he is not a biological descendant of David. 

            It turns out that anyone obsessed with the question of who Jesus’ father is or isn’t, anyone needing the historical, biological verification, anyone holding Jesus up to this or that proof-text in Scripture – for that matter, anyone arguing about the gynecological likelihood of a virgin birth – is missing the point.  God deliberately makes this all unproveable.  Because it is not about our proofs of various kinds; it is about the trust and love with which we receive the Messiah into our lives and into our hearts.

            Jesus is a descendant of David by adoption, not by blood.  God is therefore saying that the actual, historical, biological DNA doesn’t matter.  What matters is the trust and love demonstrated by Joseph.  It will become the way all of us become part of the Messiah’s family and are made descendants of Abraham: by adoption.  By faith.  By trust and love.  By sharing a universally applicable story rather than a limited, tenuous, arbitrary blood-line.

IV.

            The angel in Joseph’s dream then interprets for him the passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah, where it says: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
 and they shall name him Emmanuel.”  And the angel translates the Hebrew name Emmanuel as “God is with us.”

            The angel sees this as a prophecy; Isaiah looks ahead to the time of Joseph and Mary.  The child that Mary has conceived with be named Jesus, but he will function as emmanu-el.  That is, he will be not just a sign of God’s protection in a particular historical situation; he will be the living, saving Presence of God with, within, and among the people, for all time.

            Each Sunday during the season of Advent we have been singing the last verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  The words are: “O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray.  Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today….  O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.”  The great medieval Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, once said something to the effect that if Christ is not born in us now, it doesn’t matter whether or not he was born back then.

            We experience that Presence of God in trust and love.  We trust that God is more powerful and creative than whatever disasters and catastrophes we bring upon ourselves.  The Creator is bigger than our messes and stronger than our brokenness.  Not only can God take our broken, dirty, confused, shattered, and lost lives and bring something unique and true and beautiful out of them, that’s the only way this happens.  God only comes to the humble and the powerless, the losers and the lost.  God only comes to those who know they have nowhere else to turn.

            The good news is that it is our very brokenness that opens us to healing.  It is our losses that enable us to receive grace and forgiveness.  It is our powerlessness that creates the space where God can come in and empower us.  The people most able to experience resurrection: the uprising and awakening, the redemption that restores us to our true place in God, are those who know their lives have become unmanageable. 

            The good news that God is with us is the essence of the Christian message.  It means we are not alone.  It means our lives have direction and purpose from the Creator.  It means that nothing can ultimately harm us.  This Word is what we have to tell and express and reflect and share with others.  God is with us!  All of us.

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