Advent 4 Confronting the shame

ISAIAH 7: 10-17 MATTHEW 1: 18-24

And so we are all getting ready with hope for the coming Christmas celebration. It is as we so often sing “the season to be merry.” But wait! Our Gospel reading is hardly the stuff of sweet dreams. For within what is revealed there is a nightmare situation to be faced by Joseph.

Now we know very little of Joseph. He doesn’t even get a speaking part in the Gospels. In fact he does not attract very many mentions at all and the last mention of him is some 12 years on. After that he fades into obscurity and possibly an early death - at least by our standards.

But of course being in the background does not take from the significance of a person. I know that from experience. I have only ever seen one picture of my maternal grandfather who died back in the 1930s. I have seen nothing that he wrote and the only story that I know of him is of his fear as a young man that the boat on which he was travelling to begin his life in Chile might sink as a result of cards being played on board for money. Well it didn’t sink thank goodness. After all if it had I wouldn’t be here. For many years later after his wife had died, he returned to Cornwall and married my grandmother beginning a new family that would amount to five children to add to the six children he had had in Chile. In all the years that I knew my grandmother, I never once heard her refer to my grandfather by name. He was always “your mother’s father.” A figure shrouded in a mist I often thought. Yet he and the Chile connection are highly important to our identities.

And so it is with Joseph. We know little of him but we can not but feel for him in the nightmare that he faces. And the heart of that nightmare is that Mary to whom he was engaged was pregnant!

Now I wonder if today we fully appreciate the shock that this would have entailed. In the first place given that we are told that Joseph had not had sexual intercourse with Mary, there is the big question;

“Who’s responsible?”

After all, Joseph can be forgiven for a less than charitable feeling towards his fiance. If you watched the Liverpool Nativity on BBC 3 last Sunday, you will have seen a reminder of the pain of a man whose woman is pregnant and he sure knows that he isn’t responsible. It is the sort of pain that makes you want to hit something or someone, the sort of pain that makes you want to let out a scream. After all this is the stiff of betrayal. And stories of virgin conceptions - well they are too far fetched and after all to hear such a story is like having a knife twisted deeper and deeper into the wound!

But it’s not just about love crashing down. It’s also about the fabric of society. Remember this was an age in which a woman’s virginity was worth a high price monetarily. No family wanted the inheritance to be endangered by children born of women from outside the extended family. And more than that, Joseph would like any man of that day, have seen in what had happened, another man cheating him of what was rightfully his.

Do you get it? The situation confronting Joseph was total and absolute disaster! So what is he to do? If he goes through with marrying Mary and bringing up a child that is not his, he faces a life of humiliation. If people assume that he is the father, well they will both face a degree of moral censure. If people assume that the father is another man, then Joseph will look a bit of a fool who is easily walked over. In short there is no happy solution for them together - at least for Joseph. A taint of scandal and his own suspicions are about as far away from love’s young dream as it is possible to get.

But there is no ease in splitting. Matthew suggests that Joseph is tempted to quietly cease the betrothal. After all he is convinced that Mary has committed adultery and adultery required divorce as a matter of requirement rather than as an option. This could be done with a legal minimum of two witnesses to bring the contract to an end. And quietly may seem to be the kind option. It would on the face of it avoid a fuss although in a culture rooted in the practice of shame, a culture in which single parents did not fare well, it would leave Mary and her child facing an uncertain future on the margins of society with ostracisation being their constant companion.

And yet it could have been worse than this. That this option bad as it was, was considered by Joseph is a sign of his decency and love for Mary. For certainly he had it within his power to publicly disgrace and humiliate her. And believe you me, the fundamentalists of his day would have argued that this is precisely what he ought to do. After all it was the Biblical option. Why? Well listen to these words from the Book of Deuteronomy;

“If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them both to death - the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from you.”

And at this we can thank God for the pagan Romans for they had control over capital punishment and did not implement this law. But look at that law and know that many in Nazareth would have said a loud Amen to it and know that Joseph had the power to make Mary’s life quite literally unbearable.

Anyhow whilst he was in turmoil about all of this, Joseph has a dream. And in it, an angel vindicates what Mary has told him and tells him that the baby is of the Holy Spirit. Joseph is to stick with Mary and to make her his wife. And guess what? He’s not even going to be allowed to choose the baby’s name. Even that is taken away from him. For he is to call the baby Jesus which means “The Lord saves.”

Now all we know is that Joseph is obedient to this message. I cannot help but wonder if he has those dark nights of the soul when he would have questioned the authenticity of the dream. Certainly along with Mary he was troubled when Jesus stayed behind at Jerusalem at the age of twelve and we know that Mary had her concerns in later years. But despite the anxieties, the fact is that Joseph at great cost to his reputation among his contemporaries, obeyed the message of the dream. And in so doing, he is an example to all of us who would seek to follow a God of love and who will not let ancient Scriptures be used as a block on the ways of God that are all loving and all merciful. In the context of his times, Joseph takes the path of not allowing religion to get in the way of the love and mercy that is of God.

And of course Joseph’s nightmare creates the opening for God’s hope and love to be revealed. Of crucial importance is the link with Isaiah’s seventh chapter. Whilst Isaiah’s young woman was precisely that in Hebrew, the Greek translation followed by Matthew, uses a word that means a virgin, the more important (in my view) connection is that the child will be “Immanuel” meaning “ God with us.”

But is God being with us to be welcomed? Is this presence to be dreaded? After all we know that religious people have at times given us a pretty dark view of God. So we cannot but ask if God is for us? Or is God full of rage at us due to our failures.? It’s a question that we all ask from our varying vantage points.

Recently I have been revisiting William Shakespeare’s King Lear which I studied during A Levels. The stigma over circumstances of birth which hangs around the Christmas story and which was exploited by early opponents of Christianity was still very much alive. And in the play, Edmund the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester, bears the scars fearing that his half brother Edgar is preferred. At one point the cries out;

“Now gods stand up for bastards.”

At Christmas we do indeed meet the God made flesh who will stand up for all those who are marginalized be they lepers, sinners or even tax collectors. But it is more than that. At Christmas, by the very circumstances of his scandal tainted birth, Jesus becomes as one with those who are marginalized. He who arrives the subject of gossip and of the tut tutting of the religious and their leaders. And it is with the marginalized that he is ever to be found be it his scandal hit parents, the outsider shepherds and the foreign religiously unsound magi of the birth stories. Later we will see him with women, foreigners and those who are often termed sinners, talking and even partying. For his presence is not to bring good news to institutions that oppress but instead it is to be good news to those who know only too well what rejection is. Rejection will ultimately be his lot and yet in his rejection he brings a hope to the world that despair can never overcome, a light to the world that darkness can never put out. In him, we are able to discover the reality of being the beloved of God. Oh sure, there are the times when he will challenge and confront us but he will absolutely never stop loving us.

Joseph knew his share about the nightmares that life can throw up. Those nightmares are all to real. But we celebrate on Tuesday because he responded to his nightmare in a way that enabled the birth of the one in whom we invest a million dreams. For the One who has come, offers to all the worth that destroys the shame culture that we see casting a dark shadow above his birth. He is the Divine gift of love and even today he is being born into a multitude of lives. And even today he shares in the joys and sorrows of our lives. But most of all he is with those whose needs and pains are greatest for after all it was they who were his companions in his Nativity. And still, he tells us not just to speak for those who are the poor, the marginalized and the victimised but to see his presence in them for there is where he choses to belong.


Buckland Brewer Methodist Church Sunday December 23rd 2007