Dec. 22 Is. 7, Matt. 118-25
Joseph gets center stage this morning.When I was little I would arrange the manger scene, and sometimes I put him at the edge of the scene as a protector of the little family, but I suspect that I was also reflecting a sense that he was always a bit of an outsider in the Christmas story as we tell it.
I have always been struck by Joseph receiving the words of the reality of jesus in a dream. the message is beyond this world’s reality. Like his genesis namesake he lives with dreams, he is name, may he increase seems to deal with greater perception that most of us.I am so struck that he is regard as a good man but that he was unable to face a relationship with Mary when her pregnancy is discovered. After his vision, he sees past doing the conventional thing and doing the right thing, but I do want to honor his ability to do just that, to take on the weight of a huge task so readily.
In his day to be engaged was to be involved in a marriage legally for a year before living as a family. If he had died within that year, Mary would have been considered a widow. In my Catholic upbringing we saw pictures of Joseph as very old to protect the doctrine of Mary being every virgin. It is just as possible that the was what we would consider a fresh teenager. I notice that a new version of Romeo and Juliet has been released. For a moment consider that Mary and Joseph were as young as they, as young as the kids portrayed on Glee.I picked up a copy of the Nativity Story DVD for susie, as I like their idea that the young couple gets to know each other on the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
We affirm a virgin birth as applied in Matthew to try to get at the enormity of the Christmas Incarnation. How on earth, or maybe better, in heaven, can the fullness of God, the fullness of divinity reside within a human being? For that matter, how could a young woman of marriageable age, the hebrew for the word translated as virgin in some bibles, be able to raise such a child?I like the apocalyptic way our nativity window portrays christmas where we see Bethlehem and its starry sky, but the giant manger is a link from heaven and earth, but above it lies the Star of David. To make this miracle approachable we have made this such a sweet holiday, in part, because we cannot truly fathom the depths of what we celebrate so easily. Matthew picks up the same phrase as I do from the ancient words of isaiah. I am less interested in the virgin birth but more in its meaning, and the life held within Mary. We take the hebrew phrase Emmanuel and apply it directly to jesus. In this season, let’s slow it down a bit. God with us us in our our joys and sorrows, in all of our mortal limitations across the board gets encapsulated in that one life. No one can truly be alone at Christmas, for we have Emmanuel, God with us.(See Hall)This does not mean the silly way we insist that Jesus have certain ethnic features as if that is realistic, but it means that jesus is god with us where we are in our lives. At this time of year that means a Christmas presence much more than Christmas presents.That presence pervades us, envelops us, even whn, like Joseph we work so hard and feel unnoticed and underappreciated.
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