Advent 4 A
The Lord be with you. (And also with you). The Lord IS with you. (And also with you.) Emmanuel. God is with us. I never really thought about how every time we say, ‘The Lord be with you’, we are talking about Emmanuel. The angel quotes Isaiah when he tells Joseph to name his son Emmanuel. He also tells him to name his son Jesus. Maybe his middle name was Emmanuel. Did you ever wonder if Jesus had a middle name!
The Lord be with you. In this miraculous story, the Lord was with Mary, ahem, really ‘with’ her so that she could bring God into our world in the form of a tiny baby. This teenage, unwed girl finds herself pregnant by an angel. I’ve been thinking about the reality of these two real people in the first century dealing with a very unexpected pregnancy.
Now I grew up in a small town, and I lived in fear of shaming my parents. I knew that if I did anything bad, they would know about it, along with the whole town. I remember women counting the months from a wedding to the birth of a child and shaking their heads. Surely the same thing was true in Nazareth.
Joseph faced such a difficult decision. He must have been filled with anguish to think that his young wife-to-be had been unfaithful to him. In that time, an engagement was a binding, legal agreement and breaking it effectively required a divorce. This was the choice that deeply troubled Joseph was going to make, at least saving Mary from public disgrace. But think about it, Mary would still go on to be unwed and pregnant in her small town. Would this result in the townspeople stoning her?
Thank God the angel appeared to Joseph in a dream. Throughout the bible angels only appear when things get really serious and they almost always start by saying “Do not be afraid”. Well, this is serious. God is coming down to earth. Kind of a big deal. The angel gives Joseph clear instruction on how to deal with his dilemma, and to his credit, Joseph listens.
This is the Christmas story, as told by Matthew. The gospel of Mark pretty much skips the whole thing and John’s gospel gets highly esoteric. The Christmas story we know and read every year is the beautiful, well-loved tale from Luke, with the manger and shepherds and donkeys. (Well, there are no donkeys, I just threw them in.)
Matthew starts his story with a lengthy genealogy listed in the first 17 lines. Starting with Abraham, Matthew lists everyone until we get to David (that’s the important part) then continues down the line to Joseph. All this to prove, without doubt, that Jesus is in the direct succession of the line of David, thus the birth of Jesus fulfills the prophecy we read in our reading from Isaiah today.
Does anyone else pause and wonder about the fact that we believe GOD, not Joseph, to be the father of Jesus? How does the patrilineal line of David deal with that? The cultural understanding, in that time, was that a child who was formally adopted became part of a family genealogy. Joseph named and accepted Jesus as his son and thus he was in the line of David.
In this story, God works through regular people with real challenges. He didn’t choose a beautiful princess to bear Jesus but rather an unwed peasant girl. He didn’t choose a famous, important man to raise Jesus but rather a man with doubts and questions who needed help from an angel to fulfill God’s plan.
This pregnancy must have been a trying time for Mary and Joseph as they tried to deal with each other, their neighbors and God. God was with Mary and Joseph in their fear and worry and joy. God was with them just as God is with us in our fear and worry and joy. God is with us as we are, not as we should be or as we are trying to be but as we are now, in this moment.
Christmas can be the most joyous time of the year. Let’s acknowledge that it can also be incredibly stressful and way too busy. It can be a time of deeply missing loved ones who have passed on. It can be a time full of disappointing memories or loneliness. The birth of Jesus doesn’t mean that there is no more loss or grief or fear, just that these things do not have the last word.
Maybe the promise of this particular gospel is seeing how God came to be with Mary and Joseph, to bless them and make them holy at the birth of Christ, just as God comes to us through Christ to bless us, accept us, use us and love us as we are right now.
Here is the miracle of Christmas: Emmanuel. God with us. God comes down from heaven to be with us. The Lord is really with us. And so, as Gabriel said so long ago to Joseph, let me now say the same to you, “Do not fear. For God is with you. Now… and always.” Merry Christmas!