"The Lord Saves."

Matthew 1:18-25

December 18, 2016

I.

In Matthew’s gospel, we see from the very first how God is challenging our normal, standard understanding of God.  His book opens with a genealogy, where he pointedly mentions 4 women with all the men.  Each of these women was suspect and tainted.  Each was a victim in a different way.  They are Tamar, who posed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, Ruth, who was a foreigner, Bathsheba, who was probably a rape victim, and Mary, who gets pregnant before her wedding.  Yet not only are they all particularly blessed by God in carrying an important part of the story of God’s people, Matthew shows how their witness and their lives are fulfilled in serving to bring into the world the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ.  

It’s almost like, along with the list of men, which includes no less than all the kings of Judah beginning with David, we find this quiet, subtle, understated, alternative but essential voice of these women.  As if to say, “Yeah, but not even these kings could bring the Messiah into the world on their own.  Even the kings needed women; and God chose these particular women, each of whom has what society would consider moral “issues;” and now God is choosing another particular woman with similar issues for the greatest task of all.     

In the prologue to John’s gospel we hear about how the Word is born into the world “not by the will of man.”  The text is not being generic here; it means not by the will or action of a male human.  Not only is bringing God into our lives not a project that can be accomplished by people in their sinful, alienated, ego—centric state, it is especially not something that can be done by any man.  God doesn’t force “his” way into the world.  

In a society run and dominated by and for men, this is a revolutionary assertion.  In a society where women were barely more than property, and often considered mere objects for pleasure, domestic labor, and child-bearing, the idea that a woman, not a man, would be necessary for God’s emergence, is a radical and subversive one.  

Indeed, the only role in this story for a man is what we see in Joseph.  His job is to get out of the way, set his privilege and his rights aside, adopt and protect what is in effect someone else’s child, giving him someone else’s name, and take on himself his wife’s likely social ostracization.  Joseph has to empty himself of all male ego, all male jealousy, all male pride, all male reason, and all male privilege.  He has to follow, of all things, his dreams.

Instead of dealing with this situation “like a man,” with decisiveness and strength, he has to let himself be used.  He has to go along with a plan he had nothing to do with, gains nothing from, and costs him his whole life.  He has to go along with a plan that is even contrary to Scripture, as it was usually interpreted. 

So we see the necessary conditions for God’s arrival among us and even within us.  We have to, as we say today, get over ourselves.  We have to let go of whatever resentments, desires, memories, moral standards, expectations, and sentimentalities we may harbor.  We have to let go of our own strength, rationality, and reputation.  We have to get ourselves out of the way.   We have to empty ourselves so that God may self-empty in and through us.

When Matthew relates that “Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit,” it is therefore first of all to insist that this happens outside the normal, standard, male-dominated regime of society.  Mary’s offspring will not owe his life to an earthly father.  He is not subject to the system.  

II.

Secondly, Mary’s pregnancy does not mean that some alien thing, this Holy Spirit, invades her from the outside.  The followers of Jesus have always understood the Holy Spirit to be everywhere and to fill all things.  The Spirit is the breath of God by which God creates the universe.  In Genesis, God creates by speaking, which means that God’s Voice, God’s Word and Spirit, God’s Wisdom, is embedded and encoded in everything that is.  All matter, all energy, all life, everything resonates with God’s frequency.  It all belongs to God and declares God’s glory, as the Psalms teach us.  The universe and everything in it is literally God-shaped.  

Mary’s pregnancy is a realization of something already inside of her.  The point is not about gynecology, which is what we like to reduce it to.  That would make this story ridiculous, which is fine with many people today.  If it’s ridiculous we can forget about it or ignore it.  We can self-righteously roll our eyes and decide not to say that part of the creed.  We can decide that that is an unbelievable myth that we modern people have grown out of and don’t need any more.  As if this was written to be taken literally, and since we are way too smart to take it literally, we have no choice but to reject it because of course we know better.

But what if it is not written to be taken literally in that sense?  What if it’s not about how to physically conceive a child, any more than the story of the feeding of the 5000 is about how to make bread?  What if the real meaning of this story concerns spirituality and human life?  What if it is about how we encounter and experience God?  What if it is about the meaning and purpose of human life?

This is one of those stories where, if you take it literally, you completely miss the point, which is much higher and deeper than the superficial literal reading.  Then we get into arguments about taking it literally… and lose the real meaning of the story altogether.    

This story basically tells us an essential spiritual truth, that we do not have to wait for God to come to us from out there.  We do not have to look elsewhere for God.  We do not have to seek God outside of ourselves.  We do not have to wait until we are given something from beyond us that we do not already have.  God does not invade the world or us.  

The Holy Spirit is already in Mary, as is the case for all of us, and everything.  She only has to be open to her true self, to who she really is.  She only has to be open to the destiny God has already placed within her and within everything.  True spirituality involves letting go of whatever in us is keeping us from knowing and participating in our true Self.  

  

III.

Joseph is instructed in a dream to bear responsibility for and give protection to this process as it unfolds in Mary.  His first job is to protect her from the law and its self-righteous enforcers.  He has to protect her from the humiliation and public disgrace she could expect from the upright religious people.  He has to protect her from the authorities who would presume to protect society.

And in embracing her, he himself has to share in her disgrace.  That is the character of his protection, to take on himself the humiliation and hostility resulting from this unusual and scandalous circumstance.  He is to give up his fear and replace it with a love that stands with her.  God could have waited until they were safely married to do all this.  But that would rob Joseph of the opportunity to lose his own illusions and fears, jealousies and control.  The new life is never cost-free, easy, convenient, and comfortable. 

He is told to name the child Jesus because “he will save his people from their sins.”  “Jesus” means “the Lord saves” in Hebrew.  The word “save” means heal, restore, deliver, and make whole or complete.    

Sins are the specific manifestations of sin, which is the discontinuity between who we think we are and who we really are.  Because we are living in a world we have concocted out of our ego-centric, self-serving, fear, our lives are disordered and destructive, out of synch with God’s reality.  We’re off the mark.  We are living a lie.  Jesus will save people from this condition and its consequences by revealing and demonstrating the truth.  He will show us what it is like to be in synch with God’s reality.  He will himself be the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  It will be by following him that people come into harmony with God.  In following him people literally get real. 

This happens, he will show, by humility.  In Jesus, God self-empties, becoming flesh to dwell among us, and even taking on our own death, on a cursed Roman cross, no less.  He shows that to realize God’s life we have to give up our twisted excuse for life.  We do not have to receive anything new so much as lose what we are holding on to which gets in the way of God’s Presence already with and within us.   

For God saves us from within us and among us.  This is what Joseph’s dreams are telling him.  Do not fear.  But now salvation is arising in this child who will be born to Mary.  God is going to be with-us, as Isaiah prophesied, conceived within a woman and emerging among us as one of us.   

Once we stop putting so much time and energy into maintaining our false selves, God’s life begins to emerge.  God seeps up into human life through the broken places and the broken people; God identifies with them.  God’s activity is characterized by self-emptying.  God pours life out in love.  Here is God’s m.o.  God finds the empty places and fills them.  God finds the cracks and shines through them.      

IV.

What we see here is not the powerful, violent, retributive, strong, male, explosive, penetrating picture we usually have of God.  Matthew is asking us to look at how God not only chooses the weak, the gentle, the generous, the abused, and the unlikely, but now in his gospel we will see how God blesses and  becomes these qualities in Jesus, redeeming them, transfiguring them, and showing them to be the Way to life and salvation.

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