When I was a child Christmas at our house was more like National Lampoon’s Griswold family Christmas with all the mishaps of trees, dinners, and chaos than it was the Norman Rockwell-Hallmark picture-perfect Christmas. Over the years, I have taken comfort in knowing that the first Christmas was not produced by a flawless lead-up and elaborate preparations dictated by convention. Certainly, most people in the first century did not expect the incarnation to happen through the life of a young, unmarried girl, named Mary and her groom to be Joseph where mystery and scandal met in the fragility of love and a faithful response on the journey toward wonder and new life.
You see, I think we need to remember that Joseph was simply a village carpenter in Nazareth engaged to a young woman of his village named Mary. Joseph is easily forgotten amidst the drama of God’s mysterious and surprising gift of a child to the young woman Mary and her faithful response to Gabriel’s announcement that she will be Theotokes-God bearer, ”God, let it be with me, your servant, according to your will” not to mention her song of such prophetic wonder that musicians are still seeking ways to put it to ever more thunderous and stirring music today.
So, it is very easy to ignore Joseph with his rough, calloused working man hands, but ignoring Joseph will leave us caught in darkness instead of being illuminated by the light of God’s love shined through the multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of Joseph’s faith.
Yes, Joseph is a village carpenter, but he is one at a time when being a carpenter meant being an artist as well as a skilled craftsman. The artist in Joseph dreamed into being pieces of furniture, houses, cribs, utensils, and other household items long before they took shape in wood. Artists frequently have in their imaginations the thing they wish to create. They see it whole and complete in its design and how the creation will be used. I can attest to this as a writer. I have written a couple of novels, several plays and numerous short stories and each time I have had the story visualized like a movie in my imagination long before I had it written on paper or word processor. Artists, also, see beyond their raw materials to see the possibilities of what those materials might be. As Larry Chottiner said about his father, “He could take wood and fashion a chair or a cabinet or a crib for my daughter’s baby dolls. He knew how to make steel and how to shape a red-hot ingot into a piece of pipe or a structural beam.”
So, too did Joseph know how to take raw materials into his hand and envision what this raw material was going to become before taking tools in hand and bringing his vision of what this material was going to become into reality.
However, Joseph is not only a carpenter. He is not only an artist. He is also a righteous man who is, Matthew tells us, the latest link in a long line of generations who have all struggled to be righteous. All the way from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph of the multi-colored coat, to Ruth, Samuel, King David, Solomon on down to Joseph of Nazareth. To be called righteous is a weighty descriptor because the man or woman who is righteous is obedient to God’s word, not in a legalistic manner that speaks about dreary dutifulness or judging others to see if they measure up, but by the choice to be bound to God in love. A love that is wholehearted and prompts the person to be as faithful to God from their side of the relationship as God is faithful to the person from God’s side of the relationship. This bond of love comes from the dynamic movement of God’s love extending its power among men and women, who experience God’s love as the abiding presence of God making their lives complete.
Out of their experience of being whole, the righteous person makes the bond of love with God visible in their way of living, so that every decision reflects God’s will and their love for God. Anyone who works with this person, who sees this person, who has any sort of relationship with this person, knows that this is a righteous person, and celebrates them as a blessing to his or her community.
However, being obedient to God isn’t easy and doesn’t lend itself to quick fixes or knee jerk reactions. Being obedient to God is a struggle to discern by opening one’s awareness of God’s presence and the path God is inviting you to walk. Joseph’s dilemma about what to do when he discovers that the woman, he is engaged to marry is pregnant causes him to struggle with what path is God’s way. One the one hand he loves God and wants to be obedient to God’s Torah and the community’s standards of behavior for young unmarried women, but that means he would have to drag Mary out into the public square, denounce her, humiliate her, and make her subject to being stoned to death for what many in her community would consider adultery which was the prescribed penalty according to Deuteronomy 22:23-27. On the other hand, Joseph loves Mary deeply. He was planning to make a home, raise a family, and spend the rest of his life with her. He wants to do the right thing, but he doesn’t want to embarrass or hurt Mary. Certainly, he doesn’t want Mary to be stoned to death. So, how does he balance his love for God and being obedient to God’s Torah and the community’s expectations of living as God’s people with his love for Mary?
While he is struggling to discern what to do, he recognizes that wholehearted obedience is also about being compassionate, it is about seeking the well-being of other people in the community and providing for the needs of others in the community by imitating God’s nature. This is what Joseph is doing by being merciful and kind to Mary through his decision to continue with the marriage, even though he is planning at some point to divorce her without scandal, so she might be able to remarry. He doesn’t want to shame her or humiliate her. He is concerned about her future and her life and in a way the life of her child.
Aren’t we all like Joseph at times? We go about our business and do not want to make trouble; we just handle things quietly and without a fuss, knowing that the things we might want to do loudly are best done quietly.
Of course, before Joseph could act, God acts by sending an angelic messenger to Joseph as he slept. This message is delivered in a dream about how God had chosen not only Mary to play a special part in the fulfillment of the word God had spoken through the prophet Isaiah, but God has also chosen Joseph, like his technicolor dream coated namesake, to participate in God’s plan of bringing salvation to the world.
Do not be afraid, the angel told him, meaning do not hesitate, do not worry about taking Mary as your wife, for the child is the one who will save his people. This is a child conceived by the Holy Spirit and God wants you to name this baby Jesus-meaning he saves. For this child is the one who is called Emmanuel and like the sign given to King Ahaz and the Israelites in the time of Isaiah, this child will be the visible, concrete presence of God with God’s people. He will incarnate God’s being, so God’s people will directly experience the power of God’s love to restore and create life. He will incarnate the power of God’s love to overcome all evil in the world, so that God’s joy, hope and peace will flourish on earth as it does in heaven.
Joseph acts with great courage because it takes great courage to be obedient to God despite what the interpreters of the Torah tradition might have said was the right thing to do, the biblically sound thing to do or what social expectations say is the right thing to do. Yet, it also took the vision of an artist whose feet were firmly planted, firmly centered in God with one arm stretched back holding in his hands the tradition and heritage of the past while at the same time his other arm stretched forward to hold in his hands the hope of God’s future promise for all humanity and all creation to be living God’s shalom, which in the present moment dwells unseen within the young woman Joseph loves. Joseph the artist hears the angelic message and can envision the creation of a new heaven and new earth God was bringing and is bringing to reality.
Courage and artistic imagination coalesced in the mind of this simple carpenter from Nazareth empowering him to do what God was calling him to do. As one pastor has written, “He accepted the responsibility God placed upon him. He risked his reputation, his life on a dream. He allowed God to touch the deepest parts of his being.” Then, he did what God called him to do, he named the baby Jesus, and he helped birth salvation into the world, by participating in the birthing of a child.
I often wonder how I would respond if I were in Joseph’s shoes, don’t you? I mean what would happen if God whispered to one of you in the comfort of your sleep about things that had to happen to fulfill what had been spoken by a prophet? Would you have the courage and the imagination to be as obedient to God as Joseph and Mary were?
It is useful to ponder about the ways that the faithful thing to do and the faithful way to live are sometimes at odds with tradition, teaching and social conventions and expectations. Also, that the unexpected things outside of social expectation and conventions can often be wondrous signs that God is at work even as the less than picture-perfect Christmases that are not as perfect as we might want them to be, and the lives that are not as perfect as we want them to be, just might be the very place where God shows up to do something new, beckoning us to trust and follow without being afraid or worried about where the journey will take us, but simply being willing to take the path God sets before us with one hand holding firmly to the traditions of the past while reaching out with the other hand to grasp the brightly lit future of hope, joy and peace God promises us and all creation. May we, too, say let it be with me according to Your Word of life, O God.
Sojourning to Sabbath 