God is With Us
December 22, 2013
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Matthew 1.18-25
Elizabeth Mangham Lott
Fourth Sunday of Advent at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church
By week four of Advent, we now most strongly feel the disconnect between the way the church calendar invites us to slowly, thoughtfully prepare ourselves for a Christmas celebration and the way our culture launches us into the revelry of a holiday season.
Have a holly, jolly Christmas. It's the best time of the year
I don't know if we'll have snow, but have a cup of cheer
O Come, O Come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here until the son of God appear
We've come at this from the obvious angles over the past three weeks: the holly jolly culture is fast while advent invites us to be slow; the holly jolly culture rushes us to do more, buy more, say yes to everything while advent invites us to resist that false urgency; and the holly jolly culture stretches us thin in every direction while advent beckons us into a cocoon of waiting as we are transformed into new beings.
But now, just days away from the beginning of Christmastide, we are pushed to the limits of our patience with this introspection and waiting. “We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.”[1]We've had just about enough of these Advent hymns and are ready for our celebration in here to match the celebration out there.
Well...we are getting close.
Today we read Matthew's rendering of how Jesus was conceived and born. Luke is where we turn for the more popular birth narrative, the one with Elizabeth and Mary delighting in unexpected pregnancies together, angels and shepherds in a field at night, a decree, a visit to Bethlehem, no room in the inn, and a manger.
Matthew has a different narrative angle, and he begins his gospel with a look at Jesus' lineage through Joseph; a genealogy of venerated names, hard to pronounce or recall names, and those of the least likely people whom God used for great purposes. Three groups of fourteen generations each; every name a story of God at work in the world, slowly and assuredly revealing Godself to humanity despite humanity’s bumbling blindness and stubborn determination to live apart from God's Way. God has been at this work for a long time. It's through unexpected people and improbable ways that God acts most boldly.
Enter Mary, already pregnant, and Joseph, a righteous man. We aren't privy to how Mary received her news or when Joseph found out she was with child. Matthew goes straight to the point: Joseph had a plan and was ready to quietly end their betrothal. He knew there were dire consequences if Mary's pregnancy drew attention, so he decided to release her from their relationship without fanfare. Because he was a good man. And this seemed the most sensible, kind way to respond to Mary's shocking news. Joseph is a righteous man, and he struggles between what the Law might require of Mary and what he senses to be right.
Having decided what he would do, Joseph goes to sleep. Then he begins to dream.
I am not always a good sleeper and often wake up mid-paragraph with thoughts speeding through my head. Most of the time I can go back to sleep and ignore that mental activity, but at least once a week, I go with it. Some of my best writing and most focused thinking happens in the middle of the night when the house is quiet and still. I have tried keeping a pad of paper at my bedside and jotting down that late night inspiration, but most likely I will forget the paragraphs that passed through my head if I roll over and close my eyes.
I have written a fair amount over the past ten years, and looming deadlines typically spark my midnight imagination. If 3:00 in the afternoon is my sleepiest hour of the day, its late night twin is sometimes my most productive. As ridiculous as it feels, I am still learning to give into those rapidly forming thoughts and get up to write them down lest I lose them to the next round of sleep.
But there are other times when my late night waking is anxious and dark. Maybe it's only the checklist that I am rarely likely to face at 3 a.m.: did I pay that bill? Did I respond to that email? Did I lock the doors? Did I return the book? Or it is the time when my deepest fears about myself and about my family go tiptoeing through my brain. What if they get hurt? What if I fail them? What if? What if? What if?
Other than the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, the midnight of Christmas stories is most often exciting and Santa related—waiting up for Santa, hearing Santa, or delightfully resting until he comes as visions of sugarplums dance in our heads.
Yet it's a different kind of midnight dreaming and waking that we find in Matthew's story of Joseph and across all of scripture. Matthew has already reminded us that Jesus arrives on the scene after forty-two generations, and Matthew wants the legacy of those ancestors to sit in our memories as we look toward Jesus. Many of Jesus' ancestors are known for their own midnight dreams, visions, and encounters with heavenly beings. God speaks through a messenger to Joseph just as God has spoken to Joseph's ancestors for generations.
When the angel comes to Joseph and confirms that Mary is with child through the Holy Spirit, this news is not good. This is middle of the night fear thinking. What's the worst that could happen? She could become pregnant by someone else and the town will stone her. What's the best that could happen? We'll call off the marriage and quietly separate before anyone is wise to what is going on. At least then she'll be alive and safe.
God hears the fear thinking and sends a messenger. This child is of God and will be fittingly named, “God is with us.” Emmanuel. As always, the angel reminds the midnight waker: Donotbeafraid.
It was about this time one year ago when my son and I went to see The Rise of the Guardians, and one of the more frightening images of the movie is the Antagonist's plot to destroy all good dreams with nightmares. He knows he can plunge the world into darkness by taking away the joy that comes through good, deep sleep. Huge nightmare horses are sent out through the night sky to destroy the light of good dreams with the pitch black of worst fears. As his horses succeed, more and more children begin trudging through their days after fitful, terrifying nights. They are grumpy, hopeless, and trying to stay awake lest the nightmares return.
Scenes like this are effectively haunting because you and I don't want to name our fears aloud. Oh sure, we'll name the strange fears or the silly fears—spiders, snakes, public speaking, heights, the stairs that lead to the Tower of St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church.
But the big fears, the ones of our imperfections and flaws, the ones of our powerlessness and lack of control, the ones that wake us at night and make sleep illusive, typically go unspoken.
I’ve been part of a conversation with friends over the past few weeks about their increasing anxiety throughout December. As mothers, as wives, as women, as sisters, as human beings who are pulled toward perfectionism by their culture, they feel this immense pressure to be perfect, to do it all, to make Christmas bigger and larger than life. No detail can be omitted; no teacher/neighbor/postal carrier gift can be neglected. The rush to Wednesday morning is leaving them in puddles of panic, but they feel they cannot let a detail drop. The underlying fear is that the world, somehow, may fall off its axis if we become less than perfect. Or maybe there's even a layer beneath that fear is that the world, somehow, may discover that we are simply fragile, imperfect, very tired human beings who could use a good night's sleep.
This is the final week of advent. Do not be afraid. God is with us.
We know that naming in scripture is significant and not the whimsical or casual process of modern times. Names in scripture serve the literary purpose of assigning meaning to a person or the person's Biblical story. “The name "Emmanuel" (God with us) is more than a nice name for a sweet baby. You might say that it frames the whole Gospel of Matthew, that it tells the story of what God is about, and for the early Jewish Christians it was especially clear that this gift of Jesus was meant to fulfill the longing of their ancestors for all people, not just their own, to recognize God as their Lord, too...
In Jesus, they could encounter God and experience God's saving grace, God's tender mercies, God's healing love. But we know that in Jesus we hear about God's expectations, too, even though we know they are beyond our capacity. Those beautiful Beatitudes are hard to live up to, as are many of the teachings of Jesus. When we are afraid or feel we can never measure up to the demands of the [Way of Christ], we might ponder with Joseph the meaning of the name of Jesus, 'he will save,' and remember that it's God who is acting here, not...we ourselves. In our own efforts to be righteous, there's One who helps us when we fall short, One who is always with us. In fact, that's why 'Emmanuel' frames the entire Gospel of Matthew: it begins with a baby who is "God with us," and ends with that child, grown, promising that he will always be with us: "In many ways the whole purpose of Matthew's Gospel is to show how Jesus is 'Emmanuel', God with us, and at the end of the story,” David Bartlett writes, “Jesus will promise to be Emmanuel for the rest of human history as well."[2]
Joseph is one in a long line of Biblical characters who wake in the night to an unexpected word from an unexpected heavenly visitor. God works through Joseph's fear with the promise that God will be with him. Through Joseph's choice, God will somehow be with all of us.
As followers of Jesus today, we step into this tradition of trusting in God to be with us even when we are most terrified. When we don't know what comes next, which way to go, what the best move may be, we need a messenger to remind us: Do not be afraid. God is with us.
“[T]his story is teaching us something about that presence of God with us...Matthew's spare story-telling isn't concerned with providing us with a pretty nativity scene for our Christmas decorations: he has more pressing issues, like establishing who this Jesus is, and just what is going on here with this remarkable turn of events...[W]hile the story tells us what Joseph did in response to events around him...the main character in action here is God, so 'it is fitting to give God some verbs here,' for in this story it's God whose Spirit has covered Mary in the first place; it's God who speaks to Joseph, calms his fears and gives him instructions, and, in the end, "comes to the aid of...'all people according to their needs'" [3]
Maybe this sounds like a new list of unattainable expectations, and God knows we don't need new things to be worried about accomplishing. Part of what happens to us in studying the life of Jesus over a lifetime is that we are offered a way of living that allows us to let go of some of that other stuff—the hurrying, the showing off, the pretending, the polishing, the bragging. We do all of those things alone as a way of presenting ourselves as individuals to the rest of the world. Let's be honest, we do it right here in this room as a way of presenting ourselves to each other. I want you to think well of me, and you want me to think well of you. So the temptation is to only give our shiny best selves when we show up.
But New Testament professor, Arland Hultgren, urges us to consider the implication for our congregation if we take seriously Matthew's gospel account of Jesus' birth and life. He writes, “Jesus gathered about himself a community of witness in his earthly ministry, and he continues to do so in the era after his resurrection and Pentecost. The people around Jesus, both ancient and modern, are to be a sign in the world that “God is with us,” Emmanuel! Many congregations are named Emmanuel for good reason. Every congregation, no matter what its name, is appropriately called by that name -- at least in spirit and mission -- even if not on its sign out front, in the weekly bulletin, or on its website.”[4]
In Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, we are invited to let go of all of our fear and live this truth out as a flawed, imperfect, beautiful, fragile, broken community of faith. All of our tossed about lives and our late night terrors come together in the light of this place and the light of this community, and we are not afraid. God is with us.
Amen.
1 | God Is With Us
[1]
[2]David Bartlett; source forgotten
[3]Kathryn Matthews Huey, and Mary Hinkle Shore, New Proclamation Year A2007-2008
[4]Arland J. Hultgren,