Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I think most of us feel it, to a
greater or lesser degree, that feeling that Christmas, with all of its
expectations, responsibilities, get-togethers, family tension, and drama is
almost here. For me, and I admit this may be more of a pastor’s thing, there’s
a certain sadness and melancholy at how Christmas has been so secularized and
commercialized that it has lost its core message. I’ve said on more than one
occasion, I love the Nativity of Jesus, but I have grown to dislike much of the
celebration of Christmas. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the exchanging of gifts
and watching the surprise on the faces of family and friends when I give them
this year’s bag of assorted sawdust and scraps from the shop. But the simple
message of Jesus’ birth can very easily be overwhelmed by everything else going
on so that we forget the Gift is Jesus.
So, if you are almost to the end of your
proverbial Advent rope and you are ready for Christmas, just to be done with
all of the hectic goings on that surround it, then today is for you. For the
next twelve minutes or so, I want you to put the part of your brain in neutral
that is trying to keep track of everything that has to be done this week.
Mentally set aside the shopping lists, the calendars, the events, and simply
listen. So, let’s do this: everyone take a deep breath, shrug your shoulders
just a bit, roll your head and neck, take another deep breath and allow the
Spirit to work in an uncluttered mind and space. “Accomplish Your purposes
among us, O God. Tune our hearts to the voice of Your Spirit. Amen.” [1]
There are many wonderous things
that happen throughout the Scriptures when it comes to the fulfillment of God’s
plan of salvation, so many that it is almost impossible to name them all. Some
are obvious, some are subtle; some have only an immediate importance, others
are further magnified through the generations; some are easily understood, some
can only be grasped by faith. I submit
that one of the greatest wonders of all is in this sentence:
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ
took place in this way.”
We cannot go to God, so God comes
to us in the most extraordinary, yet also the most ordinary way. Extraordinary,
that Jesus, the Son of God, becomes flesh for us. Extraordinary that Jesus was conceived
by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Extraordinarily, spiritually
possible; ordinarily physically impossible. Ordinary, that His was an otherwise
normal, human birth similar to what takes place daily in hospitals and homes
all across the world. Even the scandal of Joseph’s initial plan to divorce Mary
after finding out she was pregnant with a child that wasn’t his, even this is
ordinary, sadly. But, again, the extraordinary happens – an angel, a messenger,
sent from God to Joseph explaining to him what was happening. An extraordinary
proclamation to a man of extraordinary faith: he would be, in modern terms, a stepfather
to God’s Son whom he would name Jesus. All of this was to fulfill an extraordinary
prophesy spoken by Isaiah that the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
calling His name Immanuel.
Now when Isaiah said these words
to King Ahaz while he was inspecting the aqueduct in Jerusalem, he probably
didn’t have a pregnant virgin in mind. Isaiah was giving a sign to the
nervous king not to worry about his two enemies, the king of Syria and the king
of Israel, because in nine short months, the time it takes for a young woman to
conceive and bear a child, Ahaz would know “Immanuel” - God is with us.
But Isaiah said it in such a way that it left room for something more.
And Matthew, under the guidance
of the Holy Spirit, looking back 750 years after Isaiah, saw something
more. A virgin actually did conceive and bear a Son who is “God with us”
in a way that God had never been “with us” before. The child of a
pregnant virgin, conceived by the Spirit of God is Y’shua - Yahweh in the flesh
come to save His people. And He saves us by being Immanuel - God with us
in our life and in our death. He is our Savior from cradle to grave,
literally from womb to tomb. He is the Christ, the Messiah, the Annointed
One, who is our Savior.
Jesus entered our history the same way we do, conceived in a
mother, nine months in the womb, and then born. And so He embraces in his
own humanity all of humanity. Jesus is the entire human race in one
Spirit-conceived, Virgin-born man who is God. He is the second Adam, the
new head of humanity, who came to save not only the sons of Abraham but all the
sons and daughters of Adam, the entire human race. Yet, He embodies our
humanity all the way through, from conception to death with nothing left
out. You might say that when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, the
whole human race was re-conceived in Him, restored to what God intended when He
first made Adam and Eve in His image.
Here in the human flesh of Jesus is sinless humanity, without the
inherited disease of Adam’s death. Here is our humanity in its full
dignity intact, the image and likeness of God restored to us. Jesus is
God with us, God in our flesh dwelling among us, who takes up our sin into His
own sinlessness, who takes up our death into His death so that we might live in
Him and be perfected in Him.
There is one other sentence that grabs my attention, the last one
we read. “And Joseph called His name Jesus.” With all of the extraordinariness
swirling ‘round him, Joseph believed the Word. He trusted what the angel
said. He got up from his nap, forgot about the divorce plans, and took
his pregnant virgin fiancé into his home to be his wife. And he did it
with nothing more than the Word of God through an angel in a dream.
I think about Joseph every year about this time just before
Christmas.
As a father, I think about this quiet, godly man. We don’t
hear a single word from Joseph recorded in the Scriptures. His actions
speak louder than his words. I think about how those nine months of
Mary’s pregnancy must have been, and how Joseph must have stared at his wife’s
belly every night, how he reached out his hand to feel the kick of little feet
and wondered in silence, “Can it really be true? Can a virgin conceive and
bear a Son?” How many nights did he spend awake wrestling, wondering,
doubting? And yet he did what the angel told him to do.
As a pastor, I think about Joseph when I stick my hand in
baptismal water, and pour it on a baby’s head.
I think about Joseph, when I stand at the altar holding out bread that
barely looks like bread, and wine that makes a sommelier sneer, and hear the
words, “This is my body,” “this is my blood.”
I think about Joseph, every time I speak the words of absolution,
knowing full well you’re going to do the same stuff all over again, and you’re
not nearly as sorry as the liturgy makes you say that you are, and you’re only
telling half the truth about your sin anyway.
As a human, I think about Joseph every time I look at my own life
with all my shortcomings and failings, my doubts, my sins, wondering, “How can
I be justified?”
And then I remember Joseph, quietly taking God at His Word without
so much as a shred of visible evidence, and doing what he was given to do all
because God said it was so. And I realize that this isn’t about what I
see or feel or even think. It’s about trust in God’s Word, that with God
nothing is impossible, that by the Word a virgin girl conceives a son.
Baptismal water really is birth and life. Bread and wine really are the
body and blood of Jesus. Sinners are forgiven, and the dead rise to life
in Jesus - all because God says so.
And the greatest truth about us turns out not to be about us at
all. It’s about that Jewish kid named Y’shua with the Virgin mother who happens
to be “God with us” come to save His people from their sins by dying and
rising, and who isn’t ashamed to call anyone, including even us, “His people.”
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
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