Joseph

Matthew 1:18-25

Joseph is the main character in Matthew’s telling of the birth of Jesus.

In Luke, it’s Mary; but in Matthew, it’s Joseph.

Here Joseph lives up to the name later given to him by the church, nutritor Domini – the guardian of the Lord.

Joseph has been a very popular figure for obvious reasons.  And has been called the patron saint of families, fathers and orphans, pregnant woman, married couples, carpenters, teachers, lawyers, laborers and working people, and most recently the patron saint of a happy death, and of fighting communism.

Much has been made of Joseph over the two millennia,

Much has been made of him though not nearly as much as has been made of Mary.

Year after year we get a very mythologized picture of Joseph

We get this through Christmas decorations, through television, through the internet.  Sometimes we need to peal away some of these accretions to see what we might see of the real Joseph.

When I opened up the Bible to read the text for this week and saw Joseph sitting there on the page, to be honest I began to feel a little bored. 

And I think it’s because the Joseph that lives in my imagination is so divorced from reality – he’s the wooden Joseph of the manger scenes, the cartoon Joseph of the children’s television shows, the stuffed Joseph – is there a stuffed Joseph? I’m sure there is.

The Joseph of our million consumer-driven sometimes good and often times awful “art”

How do we delete that Joseph in order to see him again for the first time, to borrow a phrase that Marcus Borg uses in his books.

We need to see Joseph again for the first time.

One thing we immediately notice is that Joseph is a lot like his namesake.

You might remember that the first time we see the name Joseph in our Bibles is when Jacob’s son, the one with the “a coat of many colours,” gets betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery in Egypt and ends up by his being there, able to work his way up in Pharaoh’s court and assist the nation in enduring a famine.

Remember that Joseph?

He was privileged among his brothers, he had a future before him and the support of his father.

But something really awful happened to him and then another thing.

His bright future was fundamentally altered by other people’s doing. 

But we have that Joseph’s story not because of what wrong was done to him, but because of what good came to him as a result of his willingness to choose love over hate.  When his betraying brothers come to him in their distress, Joseph does not dismiss them, ignore them, betray them.  He forgives them and says the words that have become iconic in our understanding of providence:

“Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. “

As you read the stories of Joseph in Matthew’s gospel, you see that a similar thing is going on.

As I said, when I first opened to text to think about Joseph I began to get a little bored.

But I started to think about this first century Nazarene Carpenter.

It’s said that the population of Nazareth in that time was around 400.

I’m not sure how you imagine the town that Jesus grew up in, but it seems like it was about the size, population-wise, of Langdon.

And here’s this carpenter, a tekton, which could mean someone who works with wood, but it could also be a stone-mason, or some other kind of craftsman. 

And we read that he is a righteous man.  That he does good.  I imagine he has kept the laws that he was brought up to keep, followed the ways that his parents gave him, and was happy to live a hardworking, and healthy life in community, right before God and right before his neighbors.

Joseph was one of those guys you say to your friends.  He’s a good man.  There’s nothing bad I can say about him.

And Joseph was looking forward to entering the next chapter of his life.  He was betrothed to a devout and beautiful young woman named Mary.

And then.  Like that moment in so many Coen brothers movies, things start to spiral out of control.

Mary and Joseph were betrothed.  Which in that culture essentially meant you were married legally but that you were not yet living together.  There were two steps to the marriage process.  So Mary was living with her parents and Joseph living in his own home.  Mary and Joseph were in that crazy inbetween time.

And then Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant with someone else’s child.

And he begins to imagine how he’s going to deal with this news.  Joseph is a good man.  Good men do not allow their reputations to be tarnished by someone else’s shame.

We might call Joseph a sexist, a chauvinist for wanting to abandon Mary.  And I don’t think we need to feel like we have to keep Joseph from any blame.

But we have to also understand that in that culture in that time it was plain and simple what you did under such circumstances.  You gave a certificate of divorce and began different wedding plans with a different betrothed.

You could do this publically and prove your own innocence and thereby receive back the dowry that you paid.

Or you could forfeit the dowry and save your partner’s reputation and give the divorce privately.

Although in a town of 400 people, I’m not sure how private this would be. 

It would soon get around that for some reason Joseph didn’t want to go public.

So Joseph is spending a sleepless night, tossing and turning wondering how his life got so complicated and why him and why couldn’t things just have gone as planned.

And he probably had that adrenaline rush that made him realize that no matter how “comfortable” he got in one position, his mind would keep him awake.

Have you ever had that feeling?  I did last night.  And I began to wonder if an angel was about to visit me.

Well, an angel did visit Joseph according to our text. 

In a dream – sounds like another Joseph I know.

And tells him not to divorce Mary, to take her as his wife, and to name the child, Jesus.

This last part was really significant.  For Joseph to name the child was for Joseph to claim the child as his own and to raise him.

I imagine that this also meant living with the suspicion of his neighbors. 

Joseph claims that he wasn’t the father, but look at him, he’s raising the child, he named the child. 

The dream, the wild and crazy dream, borne of tossing and turning, of stress, of anxiety, of adrenaline, of poor circadian rhythms,

Produced a peace, a resolve, in Joseph.

And our text cuts to the chase.  When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife.

Many people trip over this text in Matthew and many others, because we live in a skeptical culture which hears about angels and prophecy fulfillment and virgin births and dismisses them outright as fiction and fantasy.

That begs the question as to whether fiction and fantasy can be true in some more powerful way than history, but we don’t need to go there right now.

The point of Matthew’s gospel is not to convince us to believe dogma about virgin birth.

The point of Matthew’s gospel is to make disciples of all nations,

To draw our hearts to the God who wants to show us a new way in Jesus.

The God who created all of this and is still creating everyday.

We get so caught up in trying to disprove miracles of the Bible we lose sight of the fact that existence itself is a miracle.

But I don’t want to go into debates about biological anomalies as if the Bible were trying to communicate some new science.

Let the fundamentalist atheists and the fundamentalist religionists fight those battles.

I’m with Marcus Borg when he writes, “believe whatever you want about whether they happened the way they are told -- now let's talk about what these stories mean.”

And this is what I see in our Joseph story.

God is present with us.  Immanuel.  Even in those humiliating scandals.  Those disappointments.  Those awful sleepless nights when you wonder how things will go and you can’t imagine it turning out any way but bad.

Providence is not the American dream that if you get a good job, house, spouse, and act prudently you will live a wonderful and prosperous life.

Providence takes place in the midst of distress and calamity, of scandal and disgrace.

Providence is linked to human persons who show extraordinary love in times when it would be much safer to abandon, to escape.

Providence happens when people like Joseph put away their desire for good religious reputations or good societal image.  And trust God and act in love for the most vulnerable in their midst.

Providence is borne of love, a love that makes community, a community that together, like many carpenters, builds a common home.

Providence is God with us, God with us as love in us and for us.

And that love inspires us to become, like Joseph,

guardians and foster parents and educators.

It inspires us to move beyond the tossing and turning anxiety whereby we feel stuck.  A victim of circumstance.

To become agents of history. Our history and the history of tikkun olam.  The healing of the world.

And that transformation from object of history to subject and agent of history is a liberation central to God’s plan for you and me.

Not so boring.  Amen.