Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 2:18-25

One of our guilty pleasures in these darker December days has been watching the Netflix series with Meghan Markle the Prince Harry, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, their tell-all documentary about leaving “the firm,” the royal family. I’m not sure I should be proud of my interest in another family’s drama. It’s been the #1 show on Netflix, so I’m not alone.

I couldn’t help but be struck by the expectations that this family has for one another; their disappointments about how things worked out. In one segment, as Harry talks about the possible irreconcilable differences with his brother and the different ways they are treated, we see archival pictures of the two of them playing together as children. It’s a heartbreaking juxtaposition of what we want that family to be, and what it turned out to be.

These weeks in December bring many of us face to face with our families, many of us with this same juxtaposition between what we hoped for and what we got.  The good news is that there is strong biblical witness to this common experience.

It must have been no less heartbreaking for Joseph to discover that his wife was pregnant.  It’s a giant understatement that this was probably not what he expected.  He knew, when he found out that the child wasn’t his, that the contract was broken.  The marriage had probably been arranged.  People didn’t marry for love in the first century world. They likely hardly knew one another.  While everyone knew it was possible that love could grow between husband and wife over time, it was certainly not accepted that a man would raise another’s child.  In that deeply patriarchal culture, your son was your image. Yet, at the same time, Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man, good enough to handle it in a way that lessened the shame on Mary.

Even more important: like his namesake in Genesis, this Joseph was a dreamer.  I learned in dream workshop last year that our dreams are one of the ways that we’re trying to work out our problems.  In fantastical ways, we imagine scenarios that give us tools to face our fears or dream up, literally, creative solutions.  Joseph trusted this deep inner voice that spoke in angelic tones, giving him the idea that this child as a gift of the Holy Spirit–Jesus, a name that means “this one saves, heals, reconnects us to love.  This child growing in Mary would be different.

In the 2012 book “Far From the Tree,”[1] Andrew Solomon recounts his loving parents’ struggle to understand his own difference. He interviews other parents from families with children who are deaf, schizophrenic, or prodigies; children who were conceived in rape; who commit crimes; who have Downs Syndrome autism; who are transgender. His work is no sugarcoated fantasy. Some families are broken by the experience. But others adapt to their children’s needs, as Solomon writes, “grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.”

Reflecting on this Lutheran Pastor Katie Hines-Shaw says, “It would help these parents–all of us, really–to have an angel’s explanation at the start. To reassure us that though a child might not be like us, or what we expected, they are from God. Every child is from God, but only Joseph receives this explicit divine promise.”[2]

But the angel doesn’t tell Joseph everything.  That this child will grow up to reject the traditional ways families are constructed, telling people that those “who follow the ways of God” are my family, my mother, and my siblings.  Joseph and Mary don’t know that the most powerful will set out to silence him, to trivialize and mock what he says about God’s mercy and justice.  And, of course, they will torture and execute him for challenging the very structures of community and self.

They don’t know what this child from God will grow into.  Which, of course, none of us do when we’re called to love a child, or a spouse, or a friend, or even an enemy.  We don’t know ahead of time what will be asked of us, or how they will change, or what they will become, or even what we will become.  We’re simply asked to trust that this cast of characters, with which we live, are from God.  And we’re called again and again to adapt to new and changing situations.

Angels never say, “Everything is going to be okay.”  They just say, “Don’t be afraid.

That angel still speaks in our dreams, or, at least, from the pages of ancient gospel story.  “This child–insert name of anyone in your life, or at your office or your school or across the world or on the other side of some crucial divide–is from God.  As you go, don’t be afraid.  And even more so, these unpredictable relationships that you have bear potential to make you whole.

It seems like a joke, really.  How can we not be afraid, especially given what we know about human nature and what’s going on the world?

Because God is doing the same thing that we are. Adapting and changing to meet the moment, holding it all in mercy and grace.  This is the gospel of the incarnation, God becoming flesh, the infinite divine energy of the universe taking shape in a person.  God meets us exactly where we are.  God bends to be present with us, in the real suffering we face every day, in the very deep political divides, in the destruction of the planet, in the aches and pains of aging bodies, in the crises of unwed teenagers.

At the very edge of Christmas, before they explode into the sky over Bethlehem, the angelic voice still speaks from deep within our unconscious, in our hopes, in the darkness of winter nights.  Call it a dream, a star, a Holy Spirit, the Christ, a whisper almost, “Welcome, child.  You are part of the royal family, a chosen people, a holy nation, God’s very own.”

And, once again, the promise is born, a dream for the heartbroken, a nightmare for the tyrant.  Emmanuel.  God with us.

[1] Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree:  Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Scribner; Reprint edition (October 1, 2013).

[2] Much of my thinking in this sermon can be traced to this wonderful article: “Good People and New Names” (Matthew 1:18–25) Every child is from God. Joseph gets an explicit divine promise by Katie Hines-Shah, December 16, 2016 https://preview.tinyurl.com/vgouye2.