O come, O come Emmanuel. Amen.
Are
you ready? Today is the final Sunday of Advent; and Christmas, both the
religious festival and the secular holiday, awaits. So, are you ready? This Advent,
I’ve been preaching about preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ, both as
an infant born in Bethlehem and as our king and judge at the last.
We
began Advent by dwelling with the question “How do we prepare?” One way to
prepare is by deepening our relationship with God through prayer and having the
mercy and love of God suffuse our relationships with those around us. On Advent
II, the question was “What are we preparing for?” and we saw that John the
Baptist proclaimed that “the Kingdom of Heaven has come near,” meaning that
what we prepare for is something that is with us as much as it is ahead of us.
Last Sunday, the question posed by John the Baptist was “Is Jesus the one who
is to come, or are we to await for another?” We considered the challenges to
being prepared – our lack of patience, our need for reassurance, overcoming our
assumptions of what the Messiah will do, and in an age of “fake news,” trusting
the Good News of God in Christ. Today, being on the precipice of Christmas, we
start to put that preparation into action.
In
Scripture, there are three accounts of Jesus’ birth. In John, we hear about the
Word becoming flesh – it’s a cosmic sort of nativity story. In Luke, we find
the version of the nativity that we’re accustomed to: the census, the “no room
in the inn,” the manger, the angel, the shepherds. And today, we have Matthew’s
birth narrative; and that was all of it. Mark and Paul are both silent on
Jesus’ birth. So you can see that the Bible has some wild variation in
describing what Jesus’ birth was all about. Each of these writers is not as
much telling us what happened, but rather what those events mean. Said another
way, these stories are about conveying theology more than they are about
recording history.
And
so you can see what these three gospellers might be trying to say through the
way they speak of Jesus’ birth. For John, Jesus is clearly God Incarnate. For
Luke, he is born in poverty and without fanfare, signaling that he is a Messiah
for the lowly and the forgotten. For Matthew, the emphasis is on the fact that
Jesus shows that God is faithful to promises.
There
are a few clues in the text that signal that, for Matthew, the nativity story
is about God’s abiding and saving presence with us in Jesus. For one, the
Messiah would be a part of the lineage of David. It’s what our Jesse Tree that
the children have been helping us to decorate shows. Jesus didn’t show up out
of nowhere, but rather he’s part of the family tree of Abraham and Sarah, of
Moses, of David.
But,
you see, there’s a small problem, a roughly 7-pound problem in the form of a
baby in Mary’s womb. To better understand what is going on in this text, we
need to know a bit about how marriage worked in that place and time. Marriage
was really a two-step process. First, there was the “betrothal” phase. At this
point, the couple really was married, at least in the sense that we think of today
when we say that someone is married. At some point after the public ceremony of
being betrothed, the couple would have the wedding feast. Being betrothed meant
being legally bound to each other, but until the wedding feast, the couple did
not live together, nor did they consummate the marriage. In that culture, the
betrothal really was the bigger event; the wedding carried less significance.
And so you can see the problem. Mary and Joseph are essentially married, but in
a phase of their relationship prior to physical intimacy, and yet, Mary is
pregnant. Joseph knows that this isn’t the result of anything that he’s been a
part of, and so he assumes what any of us would.
The
problem is that, as Mathew notes by referring to him as “Joseph, son of David,” if Joseph walks away from this child, then so does the notion that this
child, who is to be the Messiah, is a descendant of throne of David,
meaning that he really can’t be the Messiah. It really was a lose-lose
situation. If Joseph remains with Mary, well he has to lie and explain why they
had relations before the wedding, not to mention the sense of betrayal that
he’d have to live with. If Joseph dismisses Mary, he loses someone whom he
seems to deeply care for, and Mary would, of course, be in a very difficult
situation. And yet, in a dream, an angel tells Joseph that it’s not what he
thought. God shows up in that situation that seemed to be hopeless.
Matthew
sees this as a clear example of God remaining faithful to God’s promises and
past relationships. Matthew quotes Isaiah, saying “She shall conceive and bear
a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” Emmanuel is a Hebrew name that means
“God with us.” Just as God was faithful in Isaiah’s time, God was faithful in
this predicament with Mary and Joseph. Now, the Bible is silent on the family’s
reaction to this news. Did Mary and Joseph ever have a formal wedding banquet?
Did their parents understand what was happening? How much shame did Mary and
Joseph have to endure? We tend to think of the Christmas story as a sweet,
joyful, and peaceful story of a baby being born under a shining star and with
angels singing heavenly songs. Maybe that’s what you see on the front of a
Hallmark card with the nativity on it, but that’s not what the Bible presents.
The
birth of the Messiah was a scandal, what we might today call a “hot mess.” And
yet, God was right there in that mess with Mary and Joseph. That might be the
most important part of the story – that God is with us. As I’ve quoted William
Sloane Coffin before, “What God gives us is minimum protection, with maximum
support.” Does God always protect us from illness, from disaster, from
brokenness? No. But God is always, always with us, and if we can recognize and
welcome God more fully into our situations, then we can find the redemption of
his presence. Just as God was with Mary and Joseph in their tough situation,
God is with us in ours. God is with us, in our hospitals, in Hospice houses, on
battlefields and boardrooms, in classrooms and congregations, when you get a
promotion and when you get laid off. That is the miracle, that just as God was
with Abraham, and Moses, and Mary, that God is also with us.
We
see this even more fully when we consider the verses that preceded today’s
Gospel verses. I won’t read them to you, but it’s Jesus’ genealogy. For
Matthew, the link between Jesus and his family tree is indissoluble. When we
read through this long list of names, we might not immediately recognize more
scandal, but Matthew’s original audience would have. Included in this genealogy
are a few women of note.
The
first is Tamar. She was married to Judah’s oldest son, Er, who was killed by
God for his wickedness. As was customary in that culture, she then married the
next oldest son in the family, Onan, who also did what was wicked in God’s eyes
and was struck down. So Judah, the father, thought that the problem was Tamar,
not his sons. Judah would not allow her to marry his third son. This meant that
Tamar was stuck in limbo – unable to marry. After Judah’s wife died, Tamar came
to Judah as a prostitute. She becomes pregnant and has twins, one of whom
becomes the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of King
David. Tamar is a bold woman who insisted that she would not be trampled upon.
God was with her, and she became a part of Jesus’ lineage.
Then
there is Rahab, a prostitute and non-Jew who recognized the power of the God of
Israel and betrayed her own people by acting with Jewish spies who planned to
attack her city. For her faithfulness and trust in God, she was spared in the
attack. God was with her, and she became the great-great-grandmother of King
David.
The next woman is Ruth, a
foreigner. Ruth, even worse than not being Jewish, was a Moabite. In
Deuteronomy, it clearly states “No Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of
the Lord. Even to the tenth
generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” But Ruth’s faithfulness makes her
the great-grandmother of King David. God was with Ruth.
Later
in the genealogy, Matthew notes that “David was the father of Solomon by the
wife of Uriah.” You’ll recall that the wife of Uriah was Bathsheba, another
foreigner. Remember, David lusted after Bathsheba, ordered Uriah to be
assassinated, and then took Bathsheba to be his wife. That is a broken and
despicable situation, and yet, God was with Bathsheba, and that brokenness is a
part of Jesus’ lineage. The final woman in Jesus’ lineage is Mary, who we’ve
already discussed.
You
cannot get the birth of Jesus without including some real scandals, some women
who refused to “know their place,” some situations that seemed unredeemable.
And yet, it is coming out of that family tree that Matthew claims that God is
with us. Again, the Christmas story isn’t some Hallmark Christmas special, it’s
really a story where there ought to be a warning that “viewer discretion is
advised.” Embedded into the claim that Jesus is God with us is a trust that
there is no scandal so big that God can't redeem, a trust that there is no
brokenness so severe that salvation can’t come from it, a trust that there is no mistake
or embarrassment so great that holiness cannot be the end result.
Can
you imagine what it might have felt like to be in Mary or Joseph’s shoes?
Imagine, for a moment, Mary. She knows that something has gone wrong, very
wrong. I imagine that I’d be overcome with fear. I imagine that I’d be tired
from crying myself to sleep for nights on end as I try to figure out how to
tell Joseph. Think of those situations that you’ve found yourself in – when you
weren’t sure how you’d pay your heat bill, when you weren’t sure if your loved
one would make it until Christmas, when you weren’t sure if your child would be
able to endure the bullying, when you thought that what you did could never be
forgiven. In the darkest places of our lives, God is with us.
Jesus
is a Messiah for all of our lives, but particularly for those places where we
feel most alone. God showed up not in a palace or with trumpets blaring, but in
an unexpected place – a young teenage girl who was pregnant sooner than she
should have been. And just look at the rest of Jesus’ story in Matthew. God
continues to show up in places we would have never expected. Jesus says
“blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the
persecuted.” He tells us that he is with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger,
the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. He says that he is to be found in a meal,
saying “Take, eat; this is my body” and “Drink this, all of you; for this is my
blood of the covenant.” God shows up on a Cross, bloodied and beaten between
two criminals. And then one Sunday morning, he again wasn’t found where people
thought he might be – lying in a tomb, but instead was found alive. And the
last thing that Matthew writes in his telling of the Gospel is Jesus saying
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
In
Jesus, we see that God is with us in the most unexpected and broken of places.
And it is precisely because God is always with us, calling us further into
mercy, grace, and love that we can act. Because God was with Tamar, Rahab,
Ruth, Bathsheba, Mary and Joseph and because they trusted that, they were able
to act in faith when the time came for them to do so. What the birth narrative
of Jesus makes clear is that God is always with, God is always ahead of us, God
is always for us. You’ll recall that last Sunday, I spoke about the importance
of the political nature of our faith – noting that faith in the Living God can
never be hid under a bushel or kept out of any aspect of our lives or world,
including the political realm. But that’s only half the story. The other half
is what while God is absolutely involved with the institutions of this world,
God is also intimately involved with our personal lives. Both are crucial.
Faith is not public or private, it is necessarily both.
And
this exactly what this story about Jesus’ birth shows us – God was with each of
those individuals in very real and saving ways; and God is also actively
working to bring salvation through the systems of our communal life. And this
is the purpose of our preparation for Christ’s coming – when we get to that
intersection of God’s presence with us and God’s calling us, we can act without
fear or doubt because we trust and know that God is with us. If God is with us,
then what can be against us? Jesus shows us that God is with us in places so
unholy that we’d never expect to find God, in situations that are utterly
broken, in times where the darkness seems to overshadow the light. God is with
us, thanks be to God.
