A Place for Joseph

Sermon Matthew 1:18-25 December 11, 2016 Advent 3A

A Place for Joseph

Often life gets in the way of our perfect dreams.

We hope for order.

We seek peace.

We yearn for love.

We desire joy.

We want a place to call our own.

We want a place that offers us opportunity.

We want a place that provides us space for our perfect dreams to come true.

More often than not our place is found in the unexpected.

Our dreams are met through imperfection.

When we think about Joseph,

the one engaged to Mary,

we wonder what place he had in the story of Jesus our Savior.

Where does he fit into the narrative of Emmanuel, God with us?

We struggle to answer the question of who he is.

When we talk to our children about him as we put the nativity pieces together, we stumble over our words, “He’s, umm, he’s uhh, well, he’s Jesus’ earthly dad.” “He is the one who raised Jesus and taught him all he needed growing up.”

But, there is more to Joseph than this.

There is much more to tell about him as we listen to the words from the gospel of Matthew. Joseph is probably the one in the nativity who is given the least attention. He is the one who we rarely talk about as we go through Advent and Christmas.

And he is the one who does not have much place in our conversations about faith and life and salvation.

Joseph, we read, is a righteous man from the house of David.

He knows his family story and his family name and has lived his life accordingly. He is an upstanding citizen known in the community and is a fine carpenter. He is engaged to a beautiful young woman named Mary. He is a man of faith. He has been raised in the faith, gone to school to learn the Word of God, publicly professed his adherence to the Law of God and has lived a righteous life.

His life has followed the ‘proper order’ and it appears he has a future where his perfect dreams will come true.

And yet, as we learn from scripture the life of Joseph and his perfect dreams, becomes anything less than perfect. There is a huge cloud of trouble that descends on this sweet couple.

Thanks to the artists of old we have a painted picture of perfection in our minds of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Yet, the birth of Jesus was anything but idyllic.

As a matter of fact, Jesus was born into a family that was subject to scandal, gossip and disgrace.

This couple found themselves torn and in turmoil.

Joseph was caught in a crisis!

The relationship of Joseph and Mary was at stake.

His fiancé was with child and he was not the father!

All honor, faith, and righteousness disappeared in the announcement of this impending birth.

Every dream Joseph had was immediately dashed.

Joseph was caught in the midst of a very messy family drama (and we all know what that’s like) and there appeared to be only one way to handle this mess.

Being a righteous and honorable man Joseph realized he only had two choices according to his faith. -He could break the engagement, dismiss Mary and send her away in quiet disgrace.  -Or he could also implement the Law and have her publicly accused of wrong doing and have her stoned to death.

Either way, his choices were honorable, and righteously just. It was crucial for the sake of the family and the a descendant of David to follow the rules, to maintain his place in his family and society.

We still live like that today. (And that’s a good thing) We still want to maintain honor and dignity and follow the rules. We want to live lives of integrity and maintain our places in society and our families.

Yet, we know that life is messy.

Families are anything but perfect.

There is always drama, turmoil and crises.

I find it reassuring that our Savior was born in real life, flesh and blood circumstances. Jesus was born into real and honest family relationship crises.

Can you imagine what the parents of Mary and Joseph were saying?

What I appreciate most about our Father God is that he loved us so much that becoming one of us meant becoming part of the mess! God came into the midst of real life drama, suffering, scandal, gossip, and relationship struggle.

Joseph makes a choice of his place in this salvation story of God by hearing the word of the angel and doing the unthinkable.

Before Jesus turned the tables and the world upside down,

Joseph turns the tables of what doing right is all about.

His actions were the beginning of an upside down world of grace!

Caught in the tension of the Law and the command from God, Joseph moves from doing what is right to doing the right thing.

Sometimes grace is counter to justice.

Sometimes grace is contrary to righteous rules.

Sometimes grace is converse to accepted traditions.

Sometimes grace is clashing the proper order.

And all the time grace breaks through the messy,

the crises,

the tension,

the expectations,

the perfections,

and dumps out love,

pours out compassion, interrupts the norm, offers the unexpected, gathers the lost, unites the lonely, brings together the broken, and lifts up the outcast.

Joseph makes the intentional choice of love to be a husband and a father despite all the oppositions around him. Without this most unusual offering of Joseph, the holy family might not have been as we know it today. Perhaps the words we hear from Jesus about love and grace were first heard while he sat on the knee of his earthly father Joseph.

As we look at our nativities we can look at the place for Joseph as one of great love and grace. May we be as willing in our place to hear the words of the angels and allow God to enter into our messes. May we be willing to be the ones who offer grace all the time. Amen.

Live Like a Shepherd

Sermon Luke 2:8-20 December 4, 2016 Advent 2A

Live Like a Shepherd

The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word shepherd (esp in church) is an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. We recall the parable of the lost sheep, the words of Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd, or the phrases, sheep without a shepherd are like those gone astray from God. We are familiar with shepherd language because the Bible is filled with it.

And for good reason.

Sheep were the most important domesticated animal in Palestine. Sheep were used for more than sacrificial purposes. They provided wool, food, milk, fat, skins and horns all important to the textile industry and the food market. Not only were sheep important to the people of Palestine they were important through the then known world. It only makes sense then that the Bible is filled with sheep and shepherd images. If the Bible were to be written today, can you imagine the images the authors would use to be relevant to a vast majority of people? I think it would be using technology instead of sheep, or perhaps, dogs, cats, and other home domesticated animals…who knows.

Yet, as we learn the context of the times and the people, the language of the Bible is as relevant today as it ever has been.

But, today we turn our focus away from the images for a moment and look to the manger scenes;

the crèche where we find all those characters

gathered around the infant king.

We’ve learned about the angels and the power of their presence and the presence of God through them.

What can we learn from these shepherds kneeling at the manger?

Literally shepherds were hard working men, boys, women and girls. They worked in the plains and in the hill country both day and night. They were responsible for small and large flocks of sheep. Sheep are rather docile creatures. They are subject to the elements around them and are quite inadequate of self-defense. They easily wander away and get lost. The shepherd was responsible for maintaining food and water and to move the sheep from one grazing area to another.

One might assume that the work of a shepherd was rather boring.

But it required a great deal of endurance as well as diligence.

It also required an ability to live with simple means.

There were no fast food restaurants close by so they had to rely on their own ability to pack a lunch.

They had to be willing to sleep on hard ground and to travel distances away from home. Two of the tools at the disposal of a shepherd were a staff and a rod. A staff was used to herd the flock and keep them together. A rod was used to ward off enemies. They also carried a sling (as we know from the shepherd king David).

While studying a little bit about shepherds I became aware of the value of looking at their way of life as an example of how we could live our lives today.

1.       1. Live with courageous awareness. A shepherd must live alert. It is impossible to do the job without being fully aware of the surroundings in which a shepherd works and lives. Not only does a shepherd need to be aware of dangers, despair, and disasters, but a shepherd must know the sounds and sights of his/her flock. A shepherd needs to have the patience to listen and know the voices of the flock, to learn of new places and safe places to gather the flock. A shepherd must have enough fear and awe to respond appropriately to the signs around him/her. If we have our noses in an iphone we’ll never know the sounds or sights of those around us and we’ll be completely unaware of danger or wonder if it happens right in front of us.

Courageous awareness gives us the ability to hear sounds and to discern whether they are sounds that bring joy or terror or both. Courageous awareness keeps us from running away but allows us to face what is before us and make an informed decision on how to respond.

Think of people who hunt or fish or paint or sculpt. They cannot do what they do well if they are not willing to sit still, observe, listen, be a little scared, and have the ability to be in awe.

2.     2.  To live like a shepherd is to live with faithful curiosity. “let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place that the Lord has made known to us. So they went in haste.”

Imagine having enough courage to hear the angels and then the discernment to go and check out everything they had been told?

The shepherds had just enough faith to realize they had heard the words of God through the angels. They had just enough curiosity to run and see and witness what they had been told.

If we are not curious about all that is before we will never leave our safe space to go and discover the wonders of God.

If it had not been for the faithful curiosity of the likes of Madam Curie or George Washington Carver we would not have received the healing powers of medicine and the ability of the peanut to create dyes, plastics and gasoline.

We can and we must be people of faith to be encouraged to live with the curiosity to discover the wonders around us.

We must be willing to run to seek out what is new,

have the enthusiasm to rejoice in what is different

and to always desire to be open to God sending us beyond our safe places.

3.     3.  Finally, to live like a shepherd live with Holy Boldness. “The shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” These are the words used often by my predecessor (Robert Close). A Holy Boldness is what these shepherds had.

They unabashedly proclaimed God as they returned to their flocks.

They didn’t stay at the feet of Jesus and live their lives on their knees.

They went back to work with a new perspective.

They returned to their lives with a boldness to speak out.

They went back to their sheep and could share the power of God present with them as Emmanuel.

They had the audacity to speak the truth of what they saw without any hesitation and without any worries of what people would think of them.

Perhaps, this is the message of living like a shepherd that means so much to me.

These fellas didn’t decide they had to go and become something else.

They didn’t change their jobs after their encounter with Jesus.

What they did was to receive the power of God to continue in their own backyard the message of God and God’s love with a holy boldness.

Let us go from this day of kneeling at the manger and live like a shepherd with courageous awareness, faithful curiosity and holy boldness. Amen.