Scripture: Isaiah
7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 Romans
1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-25
On this 4th Sunday of Advent, we finally get to
the reason for the season. Three weeks
ago, we had apocalyptic texts connected with the return of Jesus. Two weeks ago, we were out in the desert
listening to the rantings of John the Baptist.
Last week I was away, but you heard Mary sing her song about a God who
looks with favor on the poor and lowly, and brings down the high and
mighty. And this week, we get to hear
Joseph’s side of the story.
And Joseph’s side of the story begins with embarrassment and
shame – his fiancé, Mary, as found to be “with child”. With child.
As in, “Baby on board”. As in, preggers.
It would be embarrassing enough if Mary’s
child was his – but it isn’t, because they hadn’t been together. By all appearances, this was not going to end
well for anyone, mother, father, or baby.
We’re told that Joseph is a righteous man – he’s a decent
person who wants to do the right thing in what appears to be an indecent
situation. In that culture, marriage
wasn’t primarily a matter of emotion, but about carrying on family lines and
providing economic security – and if the spouses came to love one another,
well, that was a bonus - and Joseph would have paid Mary’s family money as part
of the engagement. Were Joseph to divorce her in court publicly and repudiate
the child as “not his”, Joseph perhaps could have recovered his money and his
honor. On the other hand, had Joseph
gone for a public divorce, Mary would have been seen quite literally as damaged
goods – again, in that culture, marriage was primarily about continuing family
lines and providing economic security – and, unfortunately, Mary’s being
pregnant with God only knows whose child was no help with either of those goals. Joseph didn’t want to subject Mary to shame
and poverty by divorcing her publicly, so he resolved to divorce Mary quietly
by giving her a certificate of divorce in front of two witnesses rather than in
court. He’d made up his mind along those
lines when an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream with another option: take Mary as his wife and raise up the son –
who was from the Holy Spirit, as his own, naming him Jesus. “Jesus” is the Greek version of the Jewish
name Joshua, which means “The Lord saves” – and the angel tells Joseph that
Jesus will save the people from their sins.
And Joseph did as the angel instructed.
It was a difficult decision for Joseph. He could have left the whole messy situation
behind, with some degree of damage to Mary’s reputation, but with a chance to
start over for himself. Instead, the
angel of the Lord is asking Joseph to embrace the situation with all its
embarrassment, rather than running from it.
And Joseph said “yes”.
At heart, the Christmas story is about making room, about
making room for Jesus – Mary making room for the child within her and the
scandal the baby would bring, Joseph making for Mary and her baby and the
scandal that they would share. And
throughout the Christmas stories, characters are defined by whether or not they allow room for
Jesus. Famously, when Mary and Joseph
traveled to Bethlehem, there was no room in the inn and so they ended up in the
manger with the animals. The shepherds
and wise men traveled considerable distances, made considerable room in their
schedules to see the Christ child. By
contrast, there was no room in Herod’s plans for a new-born king of the Jews,
and so he tried to have the baby killed.
How about us? Is
there room for Jesus in our lives? The
name of Jesus means “God has saved” – but do we feel the need for a savior…or
are we doing just fine by ourselves, thank you very much? Presumably, if we’re here, we’ve made some
room for Jesus in our lives, or at least are considering the notion. But how much room? Do we turn our whole lives over to Jesus –
give Jesus the run of the house – or do we lock Jesus into a little room called
Sunday morning and keep the rest for our own priorities? And that’s not an easy yes/no question – I’ve
found for myself that once I let Jesus in the front door of my life many years
ago, the rest of my life has been a process of welcoming Jesus into the various
spaces of my life, and it hasn’t come all at once – and occasionally I’ve
decided I wanted a closet or crawl space back for myself. It’s one thing to trust Jesus with my Sunday
mornings. But with my money? With my job? With my family and
friendships? With my free time?
There can be one other problem with making room for Jesus –
he has a habit of inviting his friends.
We’d like to have a private, personal relationship with Jesus – just
Jesus and me – but if Jesus is in our lives, we will find ourselves among the
poor, among those on the margins, among those whom our society rejects.
Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton wrote a meditation on
Luke’s Christmas story of there being no room in the inn. I’d like to share a few lines of it.
“In the time of the
end there is no longer room for the desire to go on living. The time of the end
is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them, because they
wish they did not exist. Why? Because they are part of a proliferation of life
that is not fully alive, it is programmed for death. A life that has not been
chosen, and can hardly be accepted, has no room for hope. Yet it must pretend
to go on hoping. It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And out of this
unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs…and all
the other crimes of mass society….
Into this world, this
demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has
come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of
place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom
there is no room. His place is with
those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as
weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of person, tortured,
exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is mysteriously
present. He is mysteriously present in
those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.”[1]
May we at Emanuel make room in our lives for Jesus, and for
those whom Jesus calls us to serve. May
we be able to pray, in the words of an old hymn, “O come to my heart, Lord
Jesus; there is room in my heart for Thee.”
Indeed, may every heart prepare Him room. Amen.
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