Year C

Matthew 1:18-25

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Hungry to Love Jesus

We have come to the fourth week in Advent ready or not for Christmas. This coming week is our last chance to prepare our hearts for the baby Jesus’ birth. If you are like me, there are still gifts to be wrapped, cookies to be made and plated, lists being made so I don’t forget to do what needs to be done at home, and here at the church. Even when I try to start early, which I did this year, I still feel wound up and wondering if I will be ready for Christmas Eve services and ready to leave Christmas morning to go spend time with my family. Yet, even if everything is not finished by Christmas Eve, I will be ready for Christmas.

I have spent these days of Advent, in prayer and meditation, in reading scripture and my heart is hungry for the Messiah to be born. I am ready in my heart for Christmas and for the love child to come much like I was ready and overjoyed at the births of my grandchildren. Yet, I know and you know that this is not just any child being born into our lives soon. This is a child named Jesus and we will know we are ready for Christmas when our hearts are hungry to love and realize that something wonderful is happening that we didn’t have to plan for or work for. We don’t even have to wrap him up. This special child comes to us free and today we learn how magnificent it is that Jesus comes freely to save us. He comes just for you and me. God felt our hunger to be loved and met it with love.

The prophet Isaiah today really sets the stage for Christmas. He brings us round to the great sign of God’s promise: a young woman will give birth to a son whose name will be Immanuel, “God with us.” Christmas finds deep meaning in this text from Isaiah today a prophecy given to King Ahaz during the time of war. Isaiah comes to reassure King Ahaz that Jerusalem will not be captured by their enemies. Ahaz is offered a sign from God if he but ask for it, but Ahaz is not at all eager to hear God’s sign and refuses with the excuse that he does not want to tempt God. This rejection of God’s offer shows his fear and lack of trust.       

Even so, Isaiah declares that God himself will give a sign anyway in a child of promise born of a virgin; a sign of hope, promised by God to the church and to the world. If only Ahaz had listened to what God was trying to tell him! He might have found the promise of the Messiah. Instead, he resisted it. What about us? Have we been so caught up in the weariness and stress of the season that we have been unable to see the signs of God’s promise in our lives? On this final Sunday of Advent there is still time to trust that Immanuel who was promised, who came, will come again in our hearts and lives to reveal the Messiah; the one who comes to shake everything up.

Isaiah knew and prophesized that God reveals himself in the sign of the opposite, concealing his glory in the common, the ordinary, his strength in weakness, his power in that which is most likely taken for granted. In eyes that have been opened by our Lord, the sign is Mary: a young woman who in the most extraordinarily ordinary way carries a child. No ordinary child. His name will be Jesus and the name of this child gives him and everything a way: Emmanuel, God with us in the flesh to go into the depths of our lives. Matthew today tells us about how the birth of this Jesus happened and on Christmas, we will hear Luke’s version of the birth of the Christ child through the eyes of Mary. Today we hear the story through the eyes of Joseph, whom Mary is engaged to marry.

Of all the people in the Christmas story, Joseph has the fewest lines but the part he played is one of the most important. He is a righteous man, we are told but God is about to show him an ever-deeper righteousness. God will guide Joseph, the son of David to a righteousness that lives by faith. He is a man who loves and cares for Mary who he is engaged to be married to, and who is now faced with a situation that could lead to Mary’s punishment. He fears that she has been unfaithful. In those days, an engagement was equivalent to marriage; infidelity counted as adultery. The marriage was completed when the groom took his betrothed to his own home. But before that happens, the bride remains in her father’s house with no intimate relations permitted.

Since Joseph did not know the cause of her pregnancy and is a righteous man he must divorce his unfaithful wife; the law did not allow him to “forgive and forget.” Yet, he does not want to humiliate Mary with a public divorce so he plans to divorce her quietly. But before he can carry out his plan God intervenes, sending an angel to Joseph in a dream in which the angel explains to him that Mary’s pregnancy is of divine origin. Somehow Joseph has to trust this strange news: that this child is from the Holy Spirit; that he already has a name, Jesus; and that he will save people from their sins.

The God of all creation was telling Joseph that he was coming down to this earth to save his people. Amazing! What faith and trust in God it took for Joseph to do what the angel commanded him. He took Mary as his wife and he named the child Jesus. The name Jesus was a popular boy’s name at the time, being in Hebrew the same as Joshua. The name means “Yahweh, which was God’s personal name from Isaiah’s day-saves.” Yahweh saves; and the good news then and still is today, that this child, who is to be soon born, would be exactly what this world most needed. One who would take care of our deepest need for forgiveness and bring us into a loving relationship with God in the flesh.

Yet, Jesus would not be what most of the people of his day were looking for. Their Messiah would come to throw off the Roman oppressors and set them free. And he is probably not what many people today are looking for. Many want someone who will free them from sickness, financial problems and the problems that come from a broken world. Definitely understandable and it’s not that these things are not important and that God doesn’t hear and responds but these things have never been God’s top priority and so it’s no wonder that people are turning away from God. God’s top priority is for us to trust with a faith like Isaiah, Joseph, and Mary that transforms our lives into God’s people; a people who make a difference in this world.

As Paul reminds us today, “we are called to belong to Jesus Christ.” We are called to be saints; to be set apart for the gospel. He frames for us today a life lived in light of the coming of Christ. This is the call of the Advent season to renew our commitment and devotion to Christ and his purposes for us in and for the world. We are called to the way of righteousness with Joseph as our example; striving to fulfill the ways of God. We are to be signs from God, as Isaiah reminds us, allowing hope to be born. The sign God gives, despite our resistance, is to redeem this world. The promise of a Messiah is grounded in God’s intention to restore us and to transform our world.

Ready or not, God is coming. Jesus is coming so we can ask him to come into our lives. We can tell him that we want to know him. To know his love that shows us how to live and sends us out to do his will to tell others about this promise of a child born of a virgin to save us, not just now from our difficult times but forever. Emmanuel “God is with us.” This is the God, and this is the Jesus, whose boundless love for the world is just what we need now. May he find a home in our hungry, ready to love hearts.