Connie Frierson
Matthew 1: 18-25
I have a friend who used to claim to have lived an accidental life. He makes a whole series of jokes about how everything in his life has been accidental. He went to the college that sent him an acceptance letter. But he really didn’t know anything about the college; in fact he was shocked to find that it was a boys only school when he showed up the first day on campus. He met his wife when he accidentally bumped into her at a party and spilled his drink on her. He went to law school to avoid the draft, so he thinks of this as an accidental profession. He claims none of his kids were planned. Yet here is a man with a happy 35-year marriage, healthy grown kids, a prosperous career and years of community service. In hindsight, my friend of the accidental life has had a good life and knows he was blessed, that God was moving in the circumstances and accidents of his life.
As Christians we believe that God works in and through all of life the good and the bad. We believe in more than serendipitous life. We believe in a life of God’s providence.
Graham started a sermon series last week on the witnesses to Jesus Birth. This week we have Mary and Joseph as witnesses to us. Mary and Joseph have had a particular gift from God given to them, a gift that is remarkable even before the miracle of Jesus birth. Mary and Joseph knew that their lives were not accidental or incidental. They knew that God was at work in their lives and how they responded to God made all the difference in the world. Even right down to today and our world.
So who were Mary and Joseph? What was it about them that was faithful, significant and important? Well at first glance not much. My, my, God uses dubious material. At first glance it almost appears random. Mary was one of thousands, no millions of teenage girls in the wide, wide world. If we looked at the 8th grade class at Seneca Valley Middle School would we be any more surprised to see one of those teens as the mother of God? Mary was even more improbable. She was young, poor, powerless and insignificant to anyone except perhaps her parents and Joseph. She had no powerful relatives, no entourage, no four star education. This was no princess.
Nor was Joseph a prince. He was the workingman with a humble but respectable job. He was a good man, Matthew calls him righteous, but of no more importance in the world than millions of other good men. He was from nowhere and had nothing except for a skill set, some homemade furniture and the family background of a long ago King. A small member of King David’s line, a dynasty that had been trounced several empires before the Romans.
So what is God telling us with this Mary and Joseph? If we look with the eyes of the world, we don’t know beans about how God works. God looks at the world and turns what we think we know upside down. God uses common people, poor people, young people, working people to bring in a new world. If you think your life is insignificant, it is not to God. Think you are too young, or too old, or too whatever not to bring Christ into the world, think again. This is a magical aspect of God; God evidently does use sow’s ears to make silk purses.
We are always trying to gild the common story. We make Mary and Joseph saints in retrospect. I respect veneration of Mary and Joseph, but while they lived this story it wasn’t gilded it was messy. The circumstances this couple found themselves in were terribly messy and not just messy but also dangerous and potentially tragic. One of our cultural blind spots is that we don’t understand what a dangerous situation this was for a pregnant teen, how devastating for her fiancé, how lives hung in the balance on the response of Mary, and the response of Joseph.
Betrothal in the first century was a legally binding contract that required a divorce to break it. A betrothed woman whose husband died was considered to be a widow. A man whose betrothed wife became pregnant could be stoned for jumping the gun. The woman could be stoned; any man outside the contract could be stoned. A pregnancy outside of marriage like this was a crime. Hebrew society did not wink and nod at breaking these rules of behavior. Reputations and how you lived or died rested on this. Both Mary and Joseph had lots to lose in the eyes of their communities. Deuteronomy 22 was a clear line in the sand. You don’t fool around with a married woman and a betrothed girl was just as married as some matron with five kids.
This story has a wealth of broken dreams in it. We tend to move on quickly to choirs and angels and gifts. But the gift of God’s son came into the world first with the devastation of best-laid plans. The two people most involved, Joseph and Mary had their young plans, their dreams of how life was to be, broken apart. For Mary, girlish dreams of the wedding and gifts and the whole town turning out to be happy with you, the age-old customs of this high water mark of life, were dashed. Now Mary gets to be suspect. Her reputation is lost. Her very life or at the least quality of life is in danger. Joseph had similar dreams of the respect of being a married man, dreams of a honeymoon, dreams of fathering his own child. Yet now all the eyes of their community would look askance. A reputation has been clouded. What each of these people wanted to happen, planned to happen have been irrevocably changed. Each has to put their lost dreams behind them and share God’s dream for their life.
Isn’t that like our lives too? Each of us has lost dreams, the parts of life that did not go as planned, the parts of life that look accidental or even catastrophic. But angels are urging us on to a new work of God in our life, perhaps a bigger dream. From the ashes of the small dreams of Mary and Joseph came the savior of the world. In the same way God is waiting to let your dreams be taken over by something bigger, stupendous, and eternal.
How well matched these two are. Each in their own way has said yes to God in radical ways. Mary’s response to the angel is so simple: “Here I am the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word.” Mary’s response of the Magnificat is beyond passive acceptance. It is bold and courageous. “My soul magnifies the Lord… all generation will call me blessed.” How simple. How profound. Joseph’s response shows the character of the man even before an angel in a dream changes his plans. Joseph had already chosen a compassionate yet just response to Mary’s scandalous pregnancy. He was going to put her away quietly so that Mary would avoid public disgrace. However, Joseph is completely obedient and completely flexible. Joseph changes his plans on a dime to follow God. These two are evenly matched. These two ordinary insignificant people are really quite extraordinary in their response to God. How open they were. Here God take my body to create a new way to break into the world. Here God take my reputation, my plans, my life and create something new. Mary and Joseph didn’t say yes to God at the edges of their life. They said yes to a divine invasion, a complete take over. Mary and Joseph were radical.
We get this all wrong. We turn the nativity into a sentimental story. We think of Jesus Mary and Joseph, and point to old paintings and say is there anything more traditional than that? Yet Jesus and Mary and Joseph were breaking all the modes, all the models on how God acts and how people respond. Mary and Joseph were iconoclasts. An icon is an image or a symbol of the way things are or the way things are meant to be. An Iconoclast means someone who breaks the image, the mold. Mary and Joseph break all those stock images. God doesn’t speak through powerless working people. Yes God does. God doesn’t speak though an unusual pregnancy, Yes God does. God doesn’t work outside of our cultural rules. Yes God does. Our problem is we pick out the world’s icons. But God is trying to shine through holy icons, to reveal new and timeless truth. This is a love story, yes of Mary and Joseph for each other, but more powerfully of Mary and Joseph for God and more powerfully still of God for us, God with us.
Joseph and Mary are our witnesses today. As a lawyer a lifetime ago, I was used to examining witnesses. One of the fallacies of witnesses is that they are objective observers, like a scientific test of testimony. But every lawyer knows that every witness has a story, a view point a place that they start. When we look at Mary and Joseph we need to know that they aren’t just witnesses to the story. They are part of the story. In the same way you are not just witnesses to the story of Mary and Joseph and God breaking into the world. This Christmas you need to know that you are part of that story, as much as Mary and Joseph. Christ comes into the world when we allow this holy invasion. When you hear this story do you say yes or no to God? Do you view you life as accidental or does God work on and through your life? Do you let God rearrange your dreams, your life? Can you see God creating a new mode of Grace? Christ is waiting to be born in our lives.
AMEN.
