The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 23, 2007

4 Advent – A
Isaiah 7:10-17
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25

Two days before Jesus was born, Mary was wondering what would become of her and her baby, and Joseph must have been wondering what would become of all three of them.

St. Matthew says that “the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way: When Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. And Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to have the marriage contract quietly put aside.”

As a just man – that is, as a righteous observer of the Law as the scribes and pharisees were just and righteous observers of the Law – Joseph was therefore an embarrassed man. Mary, the woman he was betrothed to, was pregnant, and not by him.

The angel had told Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, but righteous men – men righteous as the scribes and pharisees were righteous – did not tolerate adultery. So the Law and the conventions of Judea gave Joseph only two options short of capital punishment – either a public divorce from Mary, which would keep Joseph’s name clean but would at best publicly humiliate Mary, or a private divorce in which he would “put her away” quietly.

When we think of the Annunciation, we usually thing of the angel’s announcement to Mary. We imagine it as artists have pictured it for us from Luke’s Gospel, with an angel standing beside a serenely beautiful Virgin, whispering in her ear. But few painters have given us any image of the angel’s announcement to Joseph: Joseph bolting upright in bed, waking up in a cold sweat after the nightmare of being told that his fiancee is pregnant, and not by him, but that he should go ahead and marry her anyway, contrary to what the Law and the righteousness of Judea demanded.

To a just man, to a righteous person, the circumstances were offensive. Righteous people are, after all, those who are offended by unrighteousness. The Law made a difference to Joseph. The customary practices of his people made a difference to him. As an artisan, perhaps a builder of houses and furniture, Joseph was a doer, a man other people depended upon and whose own livelihood depended upon the good will of others. And even though Joseph was a man of modest means, he was descendant of kings, a descendant of David and Solomon and Ahaz, a man of a prominent family, both socially and politically, a man expected to uphold the traditions and the family name.

So caught in a bind, caught between the rock of loving the Law and the hard place of loving Mary, what was Joseph to do? According to the conventional righteousness, there was, under the circumstances, simply no possibility that Joseph could marry Mary. Law and righteousness pointed Joseph to two, and only two, choices short of capital punishment – either a public divorce or a quiet putting Mary aside. Either alternative carried severe penalties for Mary, and the third choice, according to the Law and righteousness, was death by stoning.

But this brings us to another side of Joseph, “to a side that saved him from being simply another righteous and useful man of good religious and social connections, lost in history,” as my friend John McCausland once said. “Because Joseph, in the end, was more than that. Joseph had another side.”

“To begin with,” Father McCausland observes, “Matthew's Gospel throws several wild cards into the genealogy of Jesus. The genealogy begins with Abraham and goes down through King David to Joseph all right. So far, so good. But smack dab in the middle of it all we find three wild cards, three women – Tamar, Ruth, and Bathsheba – three women listed as ancestors of Joseph, each of whom is linked in the Bible with some scandalous sexual irregularity: incestuous rape, marriage to an infidel, and adultery.” And if the Rahab in the genealogy is the Rahab of the Book of Joshua, then we can add prostitution to the list as well.

“Matthew’s genealogy is reminding us that God’s covenant never runs the nice way,” Father McCausland continues, “never runs quite the way we learn it in Sunday School, or the way we want it to. The Holy Spirit delights in surprise, and delights in working in ways that appear scandalous to the practical and righteous of the world. And that, of course, is how the Holy Spirit appeared to good old St. Joseph in the scandal of his pregnant fiancee. ’Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel,’ meaning “God with us,” which is a scandalous thing in itself if you stop to think about it, which we probably should this morning.’”

Imagine it! Almighty God Himself becoming part of a family of scandalous sinners in order to take flesh among us sinners. It’s absurd. But that’s what the Spirit had told Joseph in the dream. And in obeying the Spirit’s prompting and believing that Mary’s child was divinely given, Joseph had set out on a lonely, uncharted path of marrying a pregnant fiancee and claiming and naming as his own her unexpected child.

Have you ever walked that lonely path with Joseph? Have you ever taken a road you thought was right, and hoped was right, but with no clear signs to tell you for sure, and with almost everyone you know telling you not to take it?

We human beings wouldn’t spend so much of our lives in restless uncertainty if only God’s will for us were better illuminated in the particular circumstances we find ourselves in, if only God’s will for us were merely to walk the same path as our parents, if only being righteous meant simply flipping open the Bible, finding an apt verse, and going by the book, if only God would speak to us through crystal-clear messages in neon across the evening sky, rather than in vague dreams that could be from God but might just as easily be from last night’s spicy dinner.

Joseph, stumbling along behind Mary on their way to Bethlehem two days before Jesus was born, all on the strength of a dream no one else had experienced, not at all sure what lay ahead for him, Joseph reminds us of ourselves as we stumble along in lives which we hope will be called righteous. We hope.

What do we hope this year, two days before Christmas?

Hope, Vaclav Havel reminds us, is not the same as wishing that things will come out well. Hope is, rather, a willingness to decide for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope, Havel says, is not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. Maybe this was Joseph’s hope as he walked his way to Bethlehem two days before Jesus was born. Not that he was optimistic that everything would turn out OK, but that it was good and made sense, the right thing to do, if not the righteous thing to do.

Later, long after the angels and shepherds had left the manger, Jesus would tell his disciples that their righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, or they will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Joseph was a just and righteous man, and according to Law his righteousness pointed to divorce, a divorce to be accomplished either publicly or “privily,” as the King James Version has it. But for Mary, such an action, even if accomplished quietly, though righteous in law, would leave her devastated. It would not have erased Mary’s pregnancy. At best she would give birth without a husband in a society in which a woman’s social standing and economic well-being depended almost entirely on her standing in a man’s house, and her child would have no human father in a society in which the father’s name constituted one’s identity. At worst, it would have meant her death, and the death of her child.

And while marriage, under the circumstances, would ease the situation for Mary, it would do so at the cost of Joseph’s own righteousness, at the cost of his standing among the just and good people of Nazareth.

Is it possible that Joseph is the first example of that righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, the first example, in the Gospels at least, of a righteousness that was excessive in that it was blended with mercy?

Isn’t it interesting that in a Gospel, Matthew’s Gospel, that is so strict against divorce, that divorce should first be mentioned as an act of righteousness?

We usually speak of righteousness as grim determination to act with impeccable behavior, righteousness as stiff-backed goodness. “Let the chips fall where they may, I must do what is right.” But here in Joseph is righteousness as a willingness to bear the guilt of another, as a willingness to suffer ridicule for one you love.

Sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t it? Sounds a lot like the One whom Joseph’s decision will help to bring into the world and nurture as a child.

The old righteousness was defined as keeping one’s nose clean, as obeying the law and staying out of trouble and out of jail. The righteousness Jesus was later to speak of was righteousness as willingness to go sit beside the troubled and the prisoner. The old righteousness was defined as keeping oneself undefiled, as keeping clear of sinners and outcasts. Later, Jesus was to sit at table with sinners, welcoming harlots to his parties.

Here is a new way of serving a righteous God. Perhaps Jesus learned it from his fathers, from both of them, from Joseph and from his Father in heaven.

Another thing about Joseph. Another thing about Joseph that makes him the patron saint of the noisy and the nosy in life: Joseph’s righteousness also exceeded that of the scribes and pharisees in that it was so quiet. He didn’t show off his righteousness at Mary’s expense.

The quietly righteous, like Joseph, are not out to shame others, not out to praise themselves by condemning others: ”Lord, I thank you that I’m not like that sinner over there.” How different the righteousness of Joseph from our image of the street-corner prophet who is forever denouncing and publicly pointing to everyone else's sin, the self-righteous prophet.

Joseph never pronounces or denounces. In none of the Gospels do we ever hear him say a single word. “He never left a song for us to sing, or even an eloquent saying to place on a Christmas card,” as someone once put it. From his decision to heed the angel and marry Mary to his decision to obey and take the family to Egypt, Joseph’s witness is more in what he chooses, in what he does and what he does not do, than in what he says.

Through Joseph, Matthew introduces us to an example of a new righteousness, a willingness to do what is good quietly, regardless of circumstance, no matter the embarrassment, no matter the personal cost. As such, Joseph provokes a crisis in what it means to be righteous. Sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it? From the moment Jesus was conceived, he too had a way of causing Torah-loving, righteous people to rethink what righteousness is.

“The scandal of the Cross doesn’t begin at the Cross, ”Beverly Gaventa says. “It begins even before Jesus is born. Even the fetus turning in Mary’s womb two days before Jesus was born provokes Joseph to struggle with the meaning of righteousness. Would he welcome this unknown visitor in Mary’s womb, or not?”

In the very first chapter of his Gospel, Matthew’s picture of righteous’-Joseph-who-does-not-himself-keep-the-Law has already set up the problem the scribes and the pharisees, and you and I, have to deal with later, long after the unexpected child and unknown visitor has become a man: What is the righteousness that God loves? How is our righteousness to exceed that of the scribes and pharisees?

The first miracle of the New Testament was not something Jesus did, or something St. Peter or St. Paul did, but something the hidden God did through an ordinary young woman and an ordinary young man in the quietest, most extraordinary, scandalous kind of way. Even before the unknown visitor in Mary’s womb was born, all values were turned upside down. Everything had to be reconsidered. Joseph’s righteousness lay not only in wanting to do the right thing, but also in not wanting to harm Mary.

And so, this morning, two days before Christmas, just as it was two days before Jesus was born, for every righteous person like Simeon or Anna or Zechariah or Elizabeth, for whom the baby Jesus was an answer to their prayers, a dream come true, there have to be about as many righteous people like Joseph, for whom the child’s coming is a nightmare, a tongue-tying embarrassment, a befuddling shock which requires a quiet rethinking of everything upon which life has heretofore been based.

This morning, two days before Christmas, just as it was two days before Jesus was born, for every righteous person like Simeon or Anna or Zechariah or Elizabeth, for whom the baby Jesus was an answer to their prayers, a dream come true, there have to be about as many righteous people like Joseph, for whom the child’s coming is a challenge – a challenge to us to allow God to work his righteousness through us and despite us, rather than for us to attempt to make righteousness an act of our own.

Twenty centuries after Jesus was born, two days before Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 2007, everywhere Joseph’s story is told, even here this morning, Joseph’s foster child presents people with this same choice, this same dilemma, this same challenge, a challenge to you and me.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.