December 23, 2007 - The Spirit Against All Odds - Frank Alton

Matthew 1:18-25



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“The birth of Jesus took place in this way. When Jesus’ mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” From the beginning of the story we’re given this huge clue about what is going on: Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Even before the story tells us what happens, before we know what will change, we know that this fact changes everything.

But Joseph doesn’t know. His initial actions are based on how it looks from the outside, namely that she’s bearing some other guy’s child. Here's his society’s rule about that: both the woman and the mans whose child it is get death by stoning -- assuming you know the identity of the father, and that the woman is seized in an area in which someone could have heard her screams if she cried out. Under those terms, Joseph’s response to news of Mary’s pregnancy is as humane as a first century Jewish man could be. The rule for his part was that he had to divorce her in order to show that his love for God was stronger than his love for Mary – there were simply no other options available to him as a faithful Jew. It was not his prerogative to forgive her and act out that forgiveness by consummating the marriage.

But even before having a dream, Joseph took one further step – he determined to divorce Mary secretly, so as not to cause her public humiliation. Joseph’s righteousness is clearly as much a matter of compassion as it is of strict obedience to the law. (Paul Nancarrow) Matthew sets up at the beginning of his Gospel an understanding that to be righteous means to do God’s will as understood in the new circumstances created by Jesus’ origin. In fact, the genealogy that comes right before this story shows us it’s not new. It’s the way God has always acted. Among the 42 fathers from Abraham to Jesus, Matthew inserts 5 mothers including Mary. All five – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba & Mary - have in common; some seemingly sexual impropriety in connection with them or the conceptions of the sons in the line of David. The story of Jesus' birth follows as the story of Mary’s seemingly improper conception. Mary is found to be with child before she and Joseph are married.

So here’s the deal: we need rules, & we need to stretch rules. Rules make life predictable; to make meaning, we need things to be at least somewhat predictable. Rules are how we know what's what – especially with respect to really important matters. In some ways, you can tell what's really important in a culture by where it most sticks to rules -- things you do because that's how it's done.

For example, weddings are important in our culture. Women who are responsible for many others as heads of organizations, companies, or families often choose on their wedding day to be "given away" by their fathers -- not because they belong to their fathers to be given to another man, but just because "that's how it's done." Men who are already living and sharing household expenses with the woman they love go to incredible lengths to squirrel away enough to buy a diamond ring (& for a woman who doesn't wear jewelry) when they propose marriage because, well, "that's how it's done." (Sarah Dylan’s Blog)

Imagine that amped up about ten thousand times, and you have some idea of how serious Joseph’s culture was about what he needed to do. But Joseph understood righteousness to be as much a matter of compassion as it is of strict obedience to the law. And that was before he had the dream in which the angel told him that the child is of the Holy Spirit. Don’t miss that little detail: Joseph received the information in a dream. We the readers are told it as a fact. Of course we still have the choice to believe it or not. But we have history to help us make our decision. Joseph only had a dream. This was a defining moment for him. If he believed the dream that the child was of the Holy Spirit against all odds, he knew it would change every thing. He hadn’t awakened that day thinking he was facing a defining moment, but he was. He didn’t wake up thinking his life was about to change, but it was. His already stretched idea of righteousness that had made him decide to protect Mary from public humiliation was about to expand further. Going ahead with the marriage would expose both Mary & him to public scandal. To marry under those circumstances meant acting contrary to societal expectations; that certainly would be misunderstood & evaluated as shameful.

Have you ever faced a defining moment? Robert Coles, the child psychologist who wrote many books, including The Moral Life of Children, shares an interview with a fourteen-year-old boy, the first white youth to speak to a black youth in one of Atlanta's desegregated schools half a century ago. "I didn't want any part of them here. They belong with their own, and we belong with our own - that's what we all said. Then those two kids came here, and they had a tough time. They were all by themselves. The school had to get police protection for them. We didn't want them, and they knew it. We told them so, in case they were slow to get the message. I didn't hold back, no more than anyone else. But after a few weeks, I began to see a kid - a guy who knew how to smile when it was rough going, and who walked straight and tall, and was polite. I told my parents, 'It's a real shame that someone like him has to pay for the trouble caused by all those federal judges.'

"Then it happened. I saw a few people cuss at him. Soon they were pushing him in a corner, and it looked like trouble, bad trouble. I went over and broke it up. I said, 'Hey, cut it out.' They all looked at me as if I was crazy. But my buddies stopped, and the kid left. Before he left, though, I spoke to him. I didn't mean to, actually! It just came out of my mouth. I was surprised to hear the words myself: 'I'm sorry.' As soon as he was gone, my friend gave it to me: 'What do you mean, "I'm sorry"!' I didn't know what to say. After a few minutes, we all went to basketball practice. That was the strangest moment of my life."(pp. 27 - 28) Later on he confided to Robert Coles: "Something in me just drew the line, and something in me began to change, I think." (John Purdy, The Human Face of God)

It’s always risky to draw the line. It can go either way. You could be ostracized & have to start your life all over again. You could be tolerated as people allow the memory of what you did begin to fade. Or you could gain people’s respect for standing up for something. Joseph drew the line when he decided to go ahead with the marriage. The angel knew he had to be afraid as he made that decision. The “be not afraid” was dead on:“Fear not Joseph, son of David, You fear disgrace. You fear embarrassment and shame for yourself and for Mary. You fear public scandal. You fear that your reputation will suffer, but it will not happen. For out of this fear comes an opportunity that neither you nor your worthy ancestors could have imagined: you will become the guardian of God. You will be the protector of the Savior of the world. You, Joseph, will become the Stepfather to hope." Rev Craig Shirley quotes Peter Gomes, Harvard University’s Memorial Church.

When did something in you draw a line? Or is something calling you to do that now? What have you feared doing because of what it might bring to you? Is there some conviction you hold privately that you need to go public with in order to be a witness to God’s reign of peace, justice & healing? Is there some truth about yourself that you need to reveal to someone in order to become the one through whom God’s opportunity comes? Is there some act of forgiveness or compassion that you feel deeply called to carry out, but whose implementation could bring embarrassment and shame? Is there some relationship that needs reconciliation in which you could intervene, though you know that things could either get better or worse through your mediation?

The Bible tells us story after story in which the Spirit of God acts against the odds so that we might believe it enough to act in spite of our fears when the odds are not in our favor. But it’s different to be the reader & to be the actor. Joseph received the same information we did. As readers we can sit in our pews, hear the story for the umpteenth time, and applaud his courage. Joseph didn’t have that luxury. He needed to act that very day. How he acted depended in some sense on the degree to which over the years he had allowed his own spirit to be shaped by those same stories of God’s Spirit acting against the odds and against the dominant culture.

The reason we tell good stories over and over again is that they need to wrap themselves around our bones and our tendons; they need to take up residence in the synapses of our brains where the decisions are made about how we will act. That doesn’t usually happen through a single telling. The church tells the same stories every few years because we need to get those stories inside us in order to find what Paul Tillich called “the courage to be.”

But we still need to move from reader & hearer to actor. Joseph didn’t only have whatever Bible stories he had managed to get inside. He had a dream. We all have dreams. Some of them are pretty crazy. We’ve learned that dreams are a mechanism of our psyche that somehow processes our experiences but does not give us literal truth. We don’t usually look to them for life-changing messages. So why did Joseph?

Some spiritual traditions speak of something called discernment – an examination of one's internal reactions to God in prayer. There are different kinds, but one kind occurs when grace is so gently strong that the person praying has an inner assurance that the experience did not come from imagination but from God. Somehow it is impossible to doubt it. Now many of us could convince ourselves that God or an Angel spoke to us this morning. We need to “discern” which experiences are from God and which are not. Are they quiet? Do they lead toward God or away? What is the long-term result?

Joseph's dream may have been a movement of this kind. It contained a quiet certainty of the presence of God. It was like the face of mother to a child, like the voice of a close friend. This is where hearing the stories over and over impacts discernment. Joseph already had a storehouse of trust in God's love. He didn’t experience the storehouse as broken into, shattered or pulled to pieces by the dream. Instead the message fit right into the design of his life. And so he followed.

How does the message of the Christmas story fit into your life? Is God’s birth an impossible tale reserved for children? Or do you find the roots of trust within yourself as Joseph did? What is at stake is not whether or not we believe a 2000 year old tale. What is at stake is whether we will be able to overcome the fears that keep us from acting whenever life calls us to face the little deaths that keep confronting us. If the Spirit is alive in us it means that we are growing; and in almost every case, in order to grow, some part of us has to die – our rules, our reputation, our comfort, our security, our self image, etc. Unless we are willing to risk those parts of ourselves, we cannot grow to embrace more and more of life. Joseph’s experience encourages us to keep listening to the stories, to attend to the Spirit who acts against all odds; & to be open to the surprise of waking up on any given day to discover that we have to draw the line some where, when we had been expecting no such thing.