The Rev. Margaret Watson
St. Margaret's Episcopal Church & School
Biblical Reference
Well I heard it on the news this morning so it must be true. This Christmas season is all about children and believing in the magic. You know it made me want to sing those Advent, those melancholy tunes louder and harder and longer. You know like Hymn #69. "What is this crying oh God the prophecy? Dark is the season, dark our hearts and shut to mystery. Who then shall stir in this darkness? Prepare for joy in the winter night, mortal in darkness we lie down blind hearted seeing no light".
Somebody decided I needed to see things differently. And you know, it's helped. The colors, the lights and all of you, I do see them differently. And it occurred to me when I was playing with these glasses, yes a child gave them to me, it occurred to me that that's what this Gospel is about. Calling Joseph to see things differently.
Imagine with me, imagine Joseph, an ordinary man engaged to be married to an ordinary girl, Mary. Their marriage had been arranged years before by their parents and Mary would come to live with Joseph in his parent's home and through the years they would make it their own. Imagine Joseph an ordinary workingman, calluses on his hands, an artisan. He wears a hat to keep the sun off his head, and he is more likely to work in stone on any given day than that exotic species wood so rare here in the desert. Joseph lives and works in an ordinary one-room house, which he shares with his parents. The home has an open fire in the corner with a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. It's a very smoky room, but it's just like every other house in town. As a matter of fact, the family probably shares an oven with everybody else in town, and the oven is down the street, just like the water supply, in the middle of the ordinary dry, dusty desert town. And when Joseph sleeps at the end of a working day it's on a mat just a few feet from his parents, and when he awakes each day the mud and plaster that make up the walls of his home greet him with a luster of oil, soot and shadows. The only true color in this light are the faces around him, his parents and his beautiful bride to be.
So imagine Joseph's ordinary feelings, his brokenness, his lying down blind hearted, shut to mystery when the light of his life, his beautiful bride to be tells him she is pregnant and he knows without a doubt it's not his child. Imagine as he plans to dismiss her quietly, yes he is a righteous man, but nonetheless calling off their engagement.
Would he be the laughing stock of the town, hoodwinked by Mary? All those other women at the well would then laugh at him, knowing he had been rejected by her.
Would another man step into his place? Or there is, of course, the other possibility. Perhaps the town would take the law into their own hands, which meant they could justify giving this cheating bride to be what she deserved. And the town would conspire to stone Mary to death.
After this devastating day of disappointment, it's a wonder that Joseph could sleep at all, much less dream. But there, in the middle of that darkest night a brilliant dream and an angel and a promise of a son with a name. God is with us. Was this an ordinary man in an ordinary house in an ordinary desert town? Yes.
Was this an ordinary dream? In many ways, yes. Because God calls each of us in ordinary ways, not with flashing lights, magic glasses, clouds parting, breathtaking panoramas of thrones and lights and magnificent feasts. No, God calls each of us in ordinary ways through our brokenness, through the dark of night when we are dead asleep. God calls us into a new awakening. Joseph awoke and saw things in a whole new way.
He no longer saw the humiliation of a pregnant bride. He no longer saw the shame, the women in town laughing. He no longer saw the justifiable anger and retribution of the law. He awoke and saw God at work.
He saw a whole new way of making relationships. He saw a whole new way of loving each other, his parents, his bride. Not with the broken way of seeing, not with the old justice, the right way, the correct way, the lawful way, but in a new light.
Joseph saw the promise of the Son. And you and I, Josephs all of us, called in our ordinary lives. Our shame and disappointments, our judgments of each other, our cultivation of gossip, our brokenness. The church angry with itself and angry at the world, our struggles with who might be right, who might be justified, the violence, the famine.
Called by God in that ordinary life through our brokenness and in the darkest of nights to a new way of loving, a new light. This last week of Advent, prepare to awaken to that new light, to that new way of loving. When we can finally put to rest, to sleep our division, our shame, our brokenness and be awakened by God.
To paraphrase another Advent hymn, "Sleepers awake, a voice astounds us, awake Jerusalem, arise, the time has come. Rise up and share the light the bridegroom is in sight, alleluia. Your lamps prepare that you the wedding feast may share.
Indeed may God bless us that we may awake and share the wedding feast and see the whole world in a new light, now and forevermore.