Amherst Community Church - Weekly Sermons

Witnessing Jesus: Joseph

Hard choices for a righteous man (Click to Download), or read the entire sermon below.

Matthew 1:18-25 November 30, 2008

True story: ’Twas the afternoon before the annual Christmas pageant, and the phone rang in the church office. It was a mother from the congregation, calling to say that her son – who was going to play the Virgin Mary’s fiancé, Joseph, in the pageant – had a terrible cold and was to stay in bed, on doctor’s orders.

The secretary told the director of the play. You can imagine how she took the news. “Well, it’s too late now to get another Joseph,” the director said. “We’ll just have to write him out of the script.”

And that’s what they did. Joseph just disappeared from the story, and the show went on, and do you know what? Hardly anybody even noticed that he was missing.

That’s how it is with Joseph. He’s a bit player in the grand drama of the Nativity story. He’s sort of like the father of the bride at the wedding – nobody pays much attention to him, but he still pretty much has to pay the bills.

Today is the first of three sermons about witnesses to Jesus. The holy birth turned the people around Jesus and his family into witnesses – they saw a miracle happen, and they testify to it in the Gospels. But the Incarnation – the miraculous way in which God took human form – that makes us witnesses as well to the reality of Christ in the world. And so over the next three Sundays of Advent, as we explore some of the witnesses to the holy birth, when we imagine the experience of those persons, some of that experience can be our experience as well. We can learn from these witnesses how to celebrate and affirm the birth of the Christ Child.

And so today we have before us Matthew’s story of Joseph, the ultimate stepfather.

There is so much that we don’t know about this pivotal figure in the Nativity story. We don’t know where he was born or where he died. We don’t know the dates of his birth or death, either. Some church traditions hold that he was a good deal older than Mary at the time of their betrothal, but the scripture doesn’t say. After the birth of the Messiah, Joseph shows up again when Jesus is twelve, but then he disappears forever. Presumably he has died before Jesus begins his ministry at age thirty, but we can’t be sure. The Bible calls him a tekton, an artisan, by trade, probably working with wood but we can’t be sure. And in the Gospel record, Joseph says not one word. As we imagine his life, there’s so little to go on.

But there’s one thing we do know: As Matthew tells the story, Joseph is faced with a terrible dilemma. He’s a law-abiding fellow – that’s what the scripture means when it says he is righteous, that he follows the dictates of the Torah. And so when Mary, the young woman to whom he is to be married, turns out to be pregnant, Joseph finds himself between a rock and a sledgehammer. The Torah is clear on what has to be done in this situation. It’s right there in Deuteronomy, and it’s not pretty – the woman is to be taken out to the gates of the town and stoned to death, and the man who impregnated her, too, if the townspeople can find him. And Joseph is a law-abiding man.

There’s an issue of public humiliation as well. If the dictates of the Torah are followed, the young woman’s family will be shamed in the public eye. But if it becomes known that Joseph has let her off the hook, it’s he who will lose face. What would people think? In fact, Joseph may well have been under some pressure to uphold the laws and traditions, to make an example of Mary, so that other young women would think twice before showing up pregnant. The crime was adultery – if not execution, divorce was the only option.

But Joseph isn’t interested in shaming Mary and her family, so he goes to Plan B – he figures he’ll just divorce her quietly. Certainly she’ll be damaged goods – a single mother with a child, anathema in that society – but she’ll be alive and her family will be spared the humiliation and trauma of a public accusation.

Even before the angel comes to give him Plan C, God’s plan, Joseph shows empathy for this young woman. It couldn’t have been easy; the social pressures were heavy. But that’s the first lesson to take away from our look at Joseph: Yes, he was a man of the law, but his sense of compassion outweighed all the rules. And then when the angel of the Lord comes and explains it all to him – starting off with what angels always say when they visit human beings, “Don’t be afraid” – Joseph pledges himself to a new reality that is bigger than the old law, and that is the presence of God in human form, a holy child, a miracle boy for whom Joseph will be the only earthly father.

Joseph is taking a risk. This was a society of rigid social norms. It was not a time of fluid gender roles. And in families, especially, there was a deeply rooted set of expectations for how fathers were to act and how mothers were to act.

The mother’s role was to manage the home life of the family. She was in charge of the kitchen, of household animals like chickens, and she was in charge of her sons until puberty, when they were considered old enough to be with their father and learn the ways of men.

The father’s role was to represent the family to the outside world. He controlled any land the family owned, their farm animals and tools, and his adult sons. He also controlled the distribution of any inheritance.

But it was not expected that the father would be particularly involved with children in their growing-up years. Fathers wouldn’t spend a lot of time around the house; they wouldn’t give their opinion about how to raise the children, and certainly they wouldn’t be doing any child care. A good father was expected to be rather formal and distant with his children. If his family was like most Mediterranean families of the time, Jesus would have been raised in an almost exclusively female environment.

And so as we try to understand who Joseph was and the nature of his witness to Jesus, we have to start with those cultural assumptions. That sense of formality and distance must have entered into the relationship between Joseph and Jesus. As he grew up and talked about God, Jesus most often used the word Father in describing God. The way he understood and related to God would have been informed by his own relationship with Joseph. It’s a trap that we still fall into if by default we think of God as Father – our relations with God are colored, for better or worse, by the relationship we had with our own fathers when we were growing up.

So for Jesus, raised in that Mediterranean culture, you would expect his conception of God would be a formal, distant one – a God you watched your step around. Yet look at how Jesus addresses God in prayer – as Abba, a term of fondness and familiarity. When Jesus prays, he’s not talking to Father, he’s talking to Daddy. The relationship is that warm and that intimate and that dependent.

And I think we have to give Joseph some credit for that aspect of Jesus’ spiritual development. Jesus’ spiritual attitudes must reflect the warmth and tenderness of Joseph’s care for him. It would have been out of the ordinary, that kind of parenting by a grown man. But Joseph has been led by an angel into a place he never expected to go. He’s entrusted with the care of the Messiah. He has learned to break some rules to get the job done.

And as he grew, Jesus must have heard about the circumstances of his birth. He would have recognized that Joseph swallowed a lot of pride when he stayed with a woman who was pregnant out of wedlock, and with a child not his own. Jesus would have understood that Joseph had to withstand the stares and gossip of the townspeople, to tame his own anger over the shame that had been imposed on him by this pregnancy. And Jesus would have seen that Joseph responded to all that hurt not by lashing out, not by punishing Mary and her family, but with compassion and grace. He cared for his wife and he took care of his family. And as the grown-up Jesus went about his public ministry, and told people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek, there must have been a whisper of Joseph in the back of his mind, Joseph with his human compassion and grace.

Joseph was put to the test, that day in Nazareth when God put an impossible family situation before him and asked him to choose: keep the law or stick with Mary. And notice that God didn’t make it particularly easy for him. God could have sent the angel right at the start, when Mary said those fateful words, “I’m pregnant.” Instead, God lets Joseph toss and turn for a few nights, wrestling with the honorable and right thing to do, before finally sending the angel in a dream to tell him the miracle story in which he was to play a part. For those days and nights, in all the chaos and confusion that had suddenly invaded his nice ordered life, Joseph sweated and God was silent.

And so it’s that time before the angel comes that I think might resonate for us, in our own faith lives. When we come to times of uncertainty and trouble, when it’s hard to see the hand of God at work, can we summon up the faith of Joseph? Can we risk believing in God even when God seems to be silent? Can we act faithfully even when it feels like that is not being rewarded? Can we trust that in the fullness of time God will reveal God’s plan for us and our world?

It would be nice to have a faith that is more like Mary’s – unquestioning, always receptive to God’s leading. Maybe that’s your faith. But maybe your faith is more like Joseph’s. You live in a world of cause and effect. You doubt your beliefs, you believe your doubts. But when hard questions come into your life, you come down on the side of faith. You faith it through, even when you don’t feel like believing. You trust even when you don’t feel like trusting.

When God came into our world as a child – born to an unmarried teenage mother – Joseph responded in faith. He’s no bit player in this drama. And if God chose him, maybe God is choosing us as well, to witness to Jesus, to be the grace and compassion that was born into the world along with the Holy Child.

May it be so. Amen.