An Adult Christmas: Advent #3
Dec 10, 2005 Matt 1:18-25; 2:13-14, 19-23
Intro:
I wonder if we can reclaim Christmas. Of course we need to reclaim Christmas from the crass secularism and commercialism that substitutes “happy holidays” for “merry Christmas”, and that makes gathering around the manger in worship of God become human far less important than gathering around the tree in worship of material stuff.
We need that one, but that is not the reclamation of which I speak this morning. I wonder if we can reclaim Christmas from the children. Can we have an adult Christmas?
Please do not mis-hear me. I love children, as most of you know very well. I love to make them feel involved, included, and worthwhile. I love to laugh and play with them, I love to see their eyes light up as their childlike hearts are moved with joy and excitement, and I love to be there to comfort and encourage when their childlike hearts are upset. And I love the joy of children at Christmas: in our home we have a wooden Advent calendar, and every day the three of us gather around and take turns opening the door and discovering the treasures inside. I love how Thomas’ eyes light up every morning when it is time, I love how he jumps up and down with excitement, and joy as we do that together. Next Sunday morning our children will present their Christmas drama, and we will smile and take great joy in seeing them onstage. I would never take those things away.
But I wonder if, in the midst of those things, we could have an adult Christmas.
Fleming Rutledge on an Adult Christmas:
This thought has been rumbling around my head since reading a brief article by a woman named Fleming Rutledge, a deeply respected priest from New York. Let me share just a little bit:
“Grown-up people seem to become addled at this season as they try to recapture their lost childhoods. One of our leading mail-order companies put this verse on its Christmas shipping boxes a couple of years ago: "May you find among the gifts / Spread beneath your tree / The most welcome gift of all / The child you used to be." A typical greeting card says, "Backward, turn backward, 0 Time, in your flight / Make me a child again, just for tonight!"
Harmless, you say. But in a culture like ours, where parents have very little time to spend with their children, and where an obsessive pursuit of youth has caused an 800 percent increase in cosmetic surgical procedures in ten years, a focus on becoming childlike at Christmas seems guaranteed to skew the message of the incarnation…
In these stress-filled times, virtually all of us, as we get older, will seek relief by visiting, in our imaginations, a childhood Christmas of impossible perfection. These longings are powerful and can easily deceive us into grasping for a new toy, new car, new house, new spouse to fill up the empty spaces where unconventional love belongs. Our longings are powerful, our needs bottomless, our cravings insatiable, our follies numberless. For those who cannot or will not look deeply into the human condition, sentiment and nostalgia can masquerade as strategies for coping quite successfully for a while -- but because it is all based on illusion and unreality, it cannot be a lasting foundation for generations to come.” (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=700)
An Adult Obedience:
Instead of retreating into nostalgia, let’s “look deeply into the human condition”. Last Sunday we did so by considering weakness: how God became weak and helpless as an infant, and how weakness of that sort is Christlikeness. This morning I’d like to pick up on that theme and look at what we do with our weakness, and what Scripture has to say to us. Put simply, in our weakness we need to obey. Specifically, let’s look at Joseph. His story begins in Matt 1.
“18This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. 19Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
20But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[c] because he will save his people from their sins."
22All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"[d]—which means, "God with us."
24When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.”
What if you were Joseph:
In this familiar story, I wonder if you could put yourself in Joseph’s shoes for just a moment. Your wife-to-be, from a reputable family, is “found to be with child.” Now, in all the history of humanity there is only one known way for this to happen, and you know it wasn’t you. Obviously, Mary has had sex with some other guy and gotten pregnant. In your mind, there are only two options – make a big scene about it, expose Mary to the humiliation she deserves, divorce her publically, and regain your honor and respect in the eye of the community. Or, divorce her quietly, move on with your life, and leave Mary to the consequences of her immorality. We know that Joseph decided to do the second.
Dream #1
The story is familiar – after Joseph makes this decision (which was, no doubt, a very difficult decision in a difficult situation), then the angel appears to him in a dream. It is interesting timing – God allowed Joseph to wrestle with the situation, lets him feel the struggle, and then appears and fills him in on the story. “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Joseph was in a position of strength. He was completely justified in his decision to divorce Mary, he was innocent and under no obligation to continue the relationship. Prudence, good sense, personal dignity, honor, even righteousness dictated that divorcing Mary quietly was the most Godly thing to do. And then the angel comes in a dream and makes this announcement and command, and leaves Joseph in an even more difficult situation. Taking Mary as his wife means, in the eyes of everyone around him, that he is admitting that he is the father. So he will forever live with the stigma that he fathered this child outside of marriage, while he knows that it is not his child. He was known as a righteous man, but not after this.
Verse 24 is very simple: “When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.” Joseph obeyed God. Mindful of everything that meant for him personally, and all he would give up, he still obeyed.
That, my friends, is an adult faith. Joseph traded his position of strength and embraced weakness, shame, ridicule, loss of stature and respect in the community, and he embraced a fiance carrying a child that was not his. In the midst of an incredibly difficult situation he chose to obey.
Dream #2:
We see that again in the next chapter. The Magi have come, and then we read this: “13When (the magi) had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."”
Once again, Joseph has a dream. Our best guess is that the Magi appeared sometime after Jesus was born, so it is likely that Mary and Joseph and Jesus have settled down a little in Bethlehem. Joseph has probably found a little bit of work, they have settled into some type of a life, and then he has this second dream. “get up, right now, and run”. Verse 14 tells us the result: “14So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt”.
Here is another adult faith response: Joseph obeyed, immediately. They left the country, went to a new culture, a new people, and they started all over again for the second time in less than two years.
Dream #3:
But it didn’t end there. Joseph escapes with his family to Egypt, and then we get to verse 19: “19After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead."”
We don’t know the exact time frame, but Mary and Joseph have settled in Egypt, made some kind of a life for themselves, and once again Joseph lays down one night and has a dream. This is dream #3. If I was Joseph, I might be afraid to go to sleep, because every time one of these God-dreams happens my life gets completely upended…
This one, though, is good news. They get to go home – back to Israel, back to their culture and people, back to the land they knew and the places they were familiar with and the families and friends they had left behind, in the middle of the night, without even so much as an explanation, back after dream #2.
And once again, Joseph immediately obeyed: “21So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.”
Dream #4:
When Joseph and his family arrive back in Israel, though, they discover that the danger is not over. Herod’s son has become king, and so Jesus is still a threat. Joseph is afraid to go to Judea, and so once again God speaks to him in a familiar way. “22But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.”
The Pattern:
A pattern is beginning to emerge: God speaks, Joseph obeys. We do not read of any arguments with God, we do not read of any questions, we do not read of any whining attempts to wiggle out from underneath the burdens that obeying the voice of God will create. Instead we see a man accept humiliation, flee in the middle of the night, return home, and then get redirected en route to a safe place. God said, Joseph obeyed.
In return, what did Joseph get? He got to be a major part of God’s plan to redeem all of humanity. He got to teach the Messiah, he got to hold him and watch him learn and discover all the wonders of this world, he got to provide for his needs, he got to take him out into his workshop and pass along the skills of the carpenter to his son, all the while knowing that God’s plan was to save humanity through this child. Because he obeyed God.
An Adult Christmas:
When you and I choose to obey God, we also get to be a part of God’s plan of redemption. We get to see God work, forgive, heal, restore. Whatever the cost to us of obedience, that reward outshines it all. I want to invite you into that kind of selfless obedience this Christmas season, so that you too might know the joy of an adult obedience that comes out of our weakness and that then draws us into participation alongside the God of the Universe in the greatest plan of all – the plan of salvation.
To make it really applicable, let me ask the pointed question: in your life, where has God been calling you to obey? Perhaps it is in an area of sin, where you have stopped fighting and instead have allowed that part of your life to stay alive. Perhaps it is in an area of guidance, where God has told you to reconcile a broken relationship or has provided the answer to your question and you’ve been humming and hawing. Or perhaps it is in an area where God has just called you to trust Him, leave the situation with Him, and to have faith. This Christmas, I invite you into an adult obedience, like Joseph, with the same promise: as you obey, you will know the joy of participating with the God of the Universe in His incredible plan of salvation.
The children can have the gentle stable, warm hay, the “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” The children can show us afresh what joy looks like, we can see the good anticipation and excitement, and we can delight in the faith of a child. But let us also embrace an adult Christmas, which in maturity recognizes the deep truth: God has invaded human existance, shunning power and glory so that He might become a servant and become obedient, even unto death. That child in the manger, in all the helplessness of infancy, is also the God of the Universe, and is there so that He might live and grow to be a man who would willingly die on the cross so that you and I might be forgiven, so that we might truly live. And so that we might live in obedience, to whatever God says, whenever He says it, without struggle or argument or hesitation. So that we might, like Joseph, simply hear and then obey.
Conclusion:
As part of my desire for a deeper, more “adult” Christmas this year I’ve been reading some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas writings. Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor in Nazi Germany, and was killed in a concentration camp just days before the camp was liberated by Allied forces. Here is one of the things he says: “All who at the manger finally lay down all power and honor, all prestige, all vanity, all arrogance and self-will, all who take their place among the lowly and let God alone be high; all who see the glory of God in the lowliness of the child in the manger: these are the ones who will truly celebrate Christmas.”
