Year A
Matthew 1:18-25
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Ordinary In The Extraordinary
We tend to associate the word “ordinary” with things that are routine, normal or even mundane. Most of what we do every day can be labeled ordinary or routine. Things like, getting up each morning, getting dressed, and for most eating breakfast. Many of us then get into our cars, go to work, spend the required hours on our jobs and then return home, flip on the TV, eat dinner, relax and at some point we get into bed for the night and then wake up in the morning and start all over again. Weekends, and vacations allow for the non-routine changes that help make life more interesting. On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, just one week before Christmas, we hear about events in the readings today that are far from ordinary because with God nothing is routine or ordinary.
In Lewis Carrol’s children’s classic, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, the White Queen advises Alice to practice believing six impossible things before breakfast each day. Good advice, I mean how else can we break away from the ordinary, and believe the story that we hear today in the gospel. The story about a God who leaves heaven for earth, trades power and might for diapers, wow! Nothing ordinary about that for sure! The Hebrew people knew from their heritage that a Messiah would be sent by God. This redeemer would be a king; they hoped he would be like the great King David. This King would be different and special and arrive in a very extraordinary and miraculous way. The preparations for the first Christmas we read about today was anything but conventional. It was miraculous!
In this miraculous story is Joseph’s story of how the angel of the Lord came to him and he found out Mary was with child. Not just any child but the Messiah. Joseph was a builder by trade. He was a kind man and a righteous man Matthew tells us. He certainly knew the tradition of the Hebrews and the hopes of the nation of Israel. The angel whispered in his ear, giving him several impossible things to believe before breakfast. He was asked to make a major leap of faith and he believed what the angel told him in a dream and he took Mary home to be his wife. He like Mary accepted God’s will and call in his life. Our tradition has never quite known what to do with Joseph. He disappears early in the gospels and is never heard from again.
We learned recently in the Advent Study that the protestant tradition believes that Joseph was only 15 or 16 years old when he took Mary to be his wife. Yet, much of religious art depicts Joseph as an old man who sits next to the young Mary and her child. This understanding originates from the Roman Catholic tradition. Joseph is seen as an extra, lingering just beyond the edge of the golden sphere that envelops them in the drama starring Mary and the babe child. But not in Matthew’s gospel, the angel whispers in Joseph’s ear, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
The greeting from the angel to Joseph, son of David, means this is the man that the Messiah, Jesus, son of David, must be born to. According to the prophets, the messiah would come from the house of David and Matthew in his gospel goes to great lengths to convince us that what the prophets foresaw has come to pass, it has happened. So everything hangs on Joseph’s response and when he awakes, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and Mary will have a home and a family and her child will be born the son of David. The child becomes Joseph’s son the moment he believed because what is at stake is not biological but legal. The Jewish law reads, ‘If someone says, ‘this is my son, he is so attested’ and that is what Joseph did. He chose to set aside his doubts and was willing to do as the Lord commanded. According to Matthew, Joseph’s profound trust and belief is as critical to this story as Mary’s womb. Mary to give Jesus life and Joseph to give him a name: Jesus, son of David.
Joseph, an ordinary humble man, was presented with circumstances beyond his control, and much like Joseph’s life we are presented sometimes with circumstances out of our control. Joseph could have walked away and we can be tempted to walk away, to divorce ourselves from it all. Or like Joseph, we can listen for the angel’s whisper in our ears: “Do not fear. God is here. It may not always be the life we had planned, it certainly was not for Joseph and Mary many times during their life yet God was with them. There was also the routine for them and like the routine, the ordinary in our lives, God can be born there too, if we will believe and permit it. We have the opportunity to encounter God every day in the events of our life. As God worked in Joseph and Mary’s life, we don’t want to miss the opportunity for God to work in our lives, for God to call us to step out in faith, to do God’s will and work in the world.
Each and every encounter with God through events, nature and people has the possibility to be extraordinary. How we hear and receive God is up to us. We can choose to not see God’s presence in the ordinary. Yet, if we look for the possibilities, the extraordinary then we realize that Jesus, the one for whom we are waiting, born in humble conditions, in what appears at first glance to be an ordinary manner was anything but ordinary. Our gospel today reminds us that the preparations for the first Christmas were extraordinary because this babe in the manger Jesus came with a message of love which never fails and can transform the world.
Unexpected things in the ordinary can often be wonderful signs that God is at work. Amid all our less than perfect Christmases and lives, God can and does something new. Somehow Joseph had to trust this strange new: that this child was from the Holy Spirit; that he already had a name, Jesus; and that he would save his people from their sins. At this point in the story, he is totally unaware of the journey ahead. The journey that will take the one he will call Jesus from Bethlehem, to the temple as a boy, to Jerusalem to the cross, and to the empty tomb. To show us the awesome love of God.
God opens a door for each of us, or gives us a vision, and we are asked to believe in the extraordinary, to trust and to follow. When we open our hearts and our minds to Jesus unexpected things can happen in our lives. Mary and Joseph found that out. As the poet David Whyte notes, for most of us “the call will not come so grandly, so biblically, but intimately, in the face of the one you know you have to love.” Unexpected in the ordinary is what God calls us to. Mary and Joseph did not know where God was taking them. They just knew something wonderful had been promised and they were to follow. Like them, we will not always know where the journey will take us or the path that God has set before us yet we are asked to walk the journey. So let us walk these dwindling days of Advent to the place where God is born where love speaks in the ordinary and extraordinary.