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Advent series Part 2
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Hi, everyone. Welcome to church today. It's so good to have you join us here. And for those I haven't met before, my name is Scott. I am so excited to be jumping into our Advent series called Enough.
Speaker 2:And I'm excited because, and I know that I've said this before, but Advent is my favorite season in the Christian calendar. And I have been trying to pay attention and figure out why for a few years. I I do know that it has something to do with the anticipation that swirls before Christmas for sure. There's all kinds of meaningful moments and unbridled joy and light wrapping trees and spilling out into darkness everywhere we look. But to be honest, there's something more dissonant that I identify with in this season.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's the way the sun almost feels hollow on these short winter days, offering a tired, mournful kind of light. Or maybe it's all the hurried, distracted holiday preparations. The presence of eggnog and cheap chocolate could also play a role. And for the record, I like both those things, and I know I shouldn't, and that's why there's dissonance. But all kidding aside, what has happened as I've paid attention to Christian seasons is that when Advent comes around, I feel like I wake up to the ways that longing is present in my life.
Speaker 2:Longing for quiet, longing to see those I love, longing for time to slow down and for things to be right and for the year to end well. And, of course, as I say those things, maybe you're thinking, yeah, but twenty twenty has brought a special kind of havoc into the world where all we feel is longing, it seems, which is to say that we probably all come to this season with an acute sense of our gaps and our need and some anxiety that we may not have experienced before. And maybe that's left you feeling some dissonance with the ways that this particular season invites us to wait and prepare for an impending arrival. An arrival, remember, is what the word advent means after all, which is why maybe you feel caught, Caught between your longing for the future and your wariness of what it's bringing. Caught between your hope for this Christmas and your uncertainty about what to do next.
Speaker 2:Caught between your need and your longing to share the joy of this season with others. And all that dissonance? Well, it places us in good company because today we're gonna take a look at the story of Joseph, who I think has something to offer us for these moments when we suspect we don't have enough. Maybe we don't have what it takes to move forward. But before we jump in, let's take a moment to form some stillness in our world.
Speaker 2:Let's pray together now. God, of all our advent longing, our hearts are open to you, and our desires are known today. And we gather together as a community that is spread near and far from one another. And as a community that feels that kind of tension, we ask that you would come and fill all the space in us, that you would come and fill all the space between us, That you would come and fill those places in us that maybe we can't even speak to or name today. And ask too that you would come and be our gentle guide as we turn again to an ancient story and look for new ways back to the hope we find in the infant Christ.
Speaker 2:This we pray now. Amen. Okay. So as I said, we're gonna be looking at Joseph. And to begin, we're gonna start in the early fourteenth century when a young Italian painter named Giotto de Bondone was on his way to becoming a founder of Renaissance art.
Speaker 2:And one of his well known paintings is a depiction of the nativity. And this is a stylized representation of the night that Jesus was born, and it includes most of the characters that we have come to know in the gospel stories. Off to the right, there is a couple of shepherds gazing into the shed or the shelter. Along the top of the painting, we see angels gathered milling around in subdued excitement. And then, of course, Mary and the infant Jesus are featured prominently in the left of the painting.
Speaker 2:And they are gazing into each other's faces in a kind of transfixed moment, the kind of suspended beauty that many of us feel when we are holding an infant. But what struck me about this painting when I first saw it years ago was the image of Joseph here. Tucked into the bottom of the painting off from the luminous connection of a mother and divine child, Joseph's head is propped up with one hand and his face is turned away from the drama around him. And art historians think that Giotto places and pictures Joseph this way as a representation of those who ignore the story and appearance of God in Jesus. And that's fair enough.
Speaker 2:But I find in this image or I I find this image more compelling for far more human reasons. Because in Joseph here, I I see a kind of fatigue, a kind of resignation, a kind of distance from the intensity of Jesus's birth that strangely I identify with. And, yes, this could be because I was present for the birth of my own children. And in those moments, I often felt like a helpless witness to the awe inspiring work of birthing done by my wife. This work that brought life into the world with such beautiful violence and force and tenderness that my story too was forever altered.
Speaker 2:And I I can still recall the numbness, the feeling almost of like being shell shocked, and then the gratitude that I felt that having been present for it. So, yes, maybe I see parts of myself in the vacant and emotionally fried expression that Joseph has in this painting, but I also know the gospel stories. How Joseph is a bit of a bit character. In Luke's gospel, all kinds of drama is unfolding before Jesus's birth. There's angels appearing and characters breaking into song, and Joseph appears only briefly as a dad just packing up the family vehicle into predawn darkness.
Speaker 2:He appears like a husband going into hotels with blinking no vacancy signs trying to find a room for his laboring wife. And we're gonna come back to Luke's perspective here in a second before we're done. But first, we wanna look at Matthew who tells the story a little differently. We read in chapter in chapter one that this is how the story of Jesus the Messiah came about. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 2:Because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. And I wanna pause right there and acknowledge how the story of Jesus pulls into its orbit the experience of women's bodies not being their own. How women's bodies are often subject to control and speculation and derision when they do not or cannot or will not comply with the wishes of men and their morals, that exact harsh and harmful forms of power in the world. See, because Mary has mysteriously become pregnant. And even here, there could be an implied unhealthy fascination with how and why and by whom has this happened.
Speaker 2:Now the work of scholar Lynn Koch is helpful here because in an examination of Jewish and rabbinic law, Koch points out that this state of betrothal that Mary and Joseph were in according to Matthew, it permitted sexual relations. Though we should still ask ourselves why we care so much about this. But maybe that's a different sermon. Kohick's point is that sex isn't the problem here and that there would have been no stigma in this pregnancy because of their marriage agreement. The catch is that Joseph knows he's not the father, and we know this too as the omniscient readers, meaning that we sit with Joseph as he mulls over this information and tries to make sense of it.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting is that the text tries to defend Joseph's image and reputation by telling us that he's a God fearing man that who wants to honor the law, that he's a good guy and he doesn't want Mary to be disgraced and shunned, that he's going to quietly divorce her, which means that he's choosing to defend the way that he's perceived in the community instead of advocating for Mary. Remember, nobody else in the story knows anything's different than it should be, which means that Joseph is leaning towards following the letter of the law here in the story to protect his own religious status, his own conscience. There's actually not something noble in what he's getting ready to do here, which, let me say again, just reveals the idols that we tend to make of male reputations and female moralities. And this is a revelation we don't always expect from the Christmas story. But this story takes a turn because we read that after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary home as your wife because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 2:She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. And when Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and he took Mary home as his wife. And as they so often do in scripture, an angel comes here as a divine emissary of inspiration with direction and clarity for the person that doesn't have the right perspective or have the right information. And in the end, Joseph does the right thing. But along the way, you and I maybe lose our sense of connection and identification with him as a character because I certainly have dreams, but I've never had an angel show up in my darkest moments.
Speaker 2:When I'm tossing and I'm turning and my sleep is an anxiety riddled practice of already living in tomorrow's worry. Those mornings where I find myself weak and paralyzed with not enough information to go on and not enough strength to get up. And those are lonely moments where bereft of any angelic visitation, you and I don't know what to do. And I love what Friedrich Bukner offers as an interpretive lens for these kinds of stories. He suggests that here with our modern minds and our technologically informed imaginations today, we only see what we expect to.
Speaker 2:We don't expect to see angels, so we don't, Buechner says. And before you dismiss this thought as flighty and speculative, just hear him out. Because he invites us to imagine how an angel might spread his glittering wings over us, and we might say, like, it was one of those days that made you feel good just to be alive. Or we might say, I had a hunch that everything was going to turn out alright. Or we might say, I don't know where I ever found the courage, but I did.
Speaker 2:And, of course, what Beakner is offering is an imagination for how divine emissaries might come to us in our intuition, in our encounters with beauty and gratitude, or in the impressions we have that bring clarity in a major decision that we have to make. And I actually see this mystery here in the work and the story of Joseph, where it tells us that he was contemplating and considering his situation, and he goes to bed with all these things on his mind. And during the night, he encounters a divine guest. Or put another way, he comes to a place where he knows what he needs to do. He knows what's right.
Speaker 2:He knows what direction to take without seeing the full scope and the outcome in the conscious world. And I wonder if that isn't the encouragement that you need in this historical moment that has us all wondering how the road ahead is going to be passable, where it can feel as though we used to know where we were going, like we knew where we were what we were doing, like our closest relationships were still meaningful. And yet now, some days it feels like there isn't a way to know what the world's gonna look like. We can feel lost like we'll never be good at anything ever again. Sometimes I think that maybe we feel unsure of how to make our marriages and our friendships and our connections work.
Speaker 2:And at least in part, I think the invitation for us this Advent, in the light of this story, is to pause and to admit that we just don't have the information that we need. And then to take the quiet moments that we do have in isolation, in looking for work, in altered rhythms the world over, and attend to the intuition that might rise quietly from these holy spaces, whether it be new perspective on our skills and our contributions, maybe fresh insight into how we can pivot and change, maybe some renewed passion to love daily and simply and intentionally. Now what's interesting is how this isn't the only time that Joseph has an experience like this in the text. In Matthew two, we read that through another dream, he figures out that he needs to take his family to Egypt. And this intuition that Joseph has spares the infant Jesus from a murderous king.
Speaker 2:And then we read a few years later, again, through a dream with an angel, it has Joseph getting this sense that they need to return back to their homeland. And then in another dream, once they've made that journey, he has the sense that they need to settle in Galilee away from the political and religious establishment. And there, Jesus grows up in the margins and is formed by the margins and is launched in into his ministry for people in the margins, which just goes to show that, in fact, you could argue that Joseph's primary role as a periphery character in the story of Jesus is just to pay attention and try to make good choices and take care along the way. Now with that said, there's one more image of Joseph that I wanna highlight, and it comes to us in Luke's gospel chapter two. And in this part of the story, Jesus is 12 now, and Joseph and Mary take him to Jerusalem for a festival, and the story goes that they lose track of him in all that was happening there.
Speaker 2:And they search and they search for him and finally discover that he's learning and discussing the scriptures with the rabbis in the temple. And I love this picture of the adolescent Jesus with his evolving self awareness and his growing mind and maybe his inappropriate questions. And that's maybe because I have a thoughtful, curious, sensitive 12 year old son who asks great questions about the scripture too. Anyway, Jesus sees his parents. They come to him.
Speaker 2:They find him, and we read that they were astonished. And his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you. And I I don't know why, but when I imagine this scene, all I can think of is Giotto's painting that I mentioned at the beginning. Holy mother and divine son locked in penetrating gaze face to face in this furious conversation, and Joseph just named in the text, off to the side, his head in his hand, suddenly looking off into the distance and looking lost.
Speaker 2:And I I think I see this because I find it so hard to understand how and why a man who received all this divine direction earlier in the story, who had all these angel encounters, a man who's had the right intuition about what's going on before. Here in the face of his adopted son, he sees something beyond the scope of his imagination, and he is astonished. Now, again, he's unsure of what he actually knows, which is to say that for all the intuition that we might have and all the good choices we might make and all the times we think we are the center of our own story, there will come a time when you find yourself wondering if you have what it takes. You'll find yourself wondering if you've miscalculated, if you're strong enough, good enough, and sure enough to move forward. And when you do, what Joseph offers is not the surety of a story that always turns out the way we want.
Speaker 2:Because, I mean, on one hand, we don't know what happens to Joseph after this. Tradition holds that he may have been an older man and died long before Jesus became the man that he would be. No. For all his ambiguity, what Joseph gives us is the picture of how to live life in the face of great uncertainty. Doing our best, yes, but also discovering that the measure of our lives is never in finding that we know enough to do enough to accomplish enough.
Speaker 2:No. There's a deeper truth at work here, I think. And that truth is that God's greater story unfolds in our daily fitful tries to get our story right. So this week, my prayer is that you would live as Lucy Shaw describes, quote, without discarding reason or analysis, seek from the spirit images that will open up reality and pull you into the center of this story that God is still telling, end quote. Finding your intuition alive and guiding you.
Speaker 2:Finding your intention more than enough to make way for Christ's arrival each and every day. Let's pray. Loving God, Emmanuel, come to be with us in this season of the calendar, but then also in this season of our lives now, wherever we find ourselves. In this story, maybe you come to us in the image of Joseph who seems to have found himself maybe always behind the eight ball, always responding to what seems to be happening and maybe not sure of how to move forward. And in this story, we reclaim again the ways in which your spirit gently comes, the ways you move, the ways that you direct, the ways that you speak to us in our intuition and our inclination to do what's right.
Speaker 2:And two, we confess that in this season, have this need to maybe press closer to what's under this story that maybe we know so well, but what's hidden, the thing that we need anew and afresh this troubled year we've been in. And so we ask, loving God, be near to us. Give us strength to trust that your story holds all of our attempts in our own. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.