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 be