December 22, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Our anticipation has been growing Sunday after Sunday as we lit one Advent candle after another. Today we move at last to the celebration of the final Sunday of Advent and in a few days to the Nativity. And mixed with our eager anticipation is more than a touch of nostalgia for Christmases past. We dearly love the traditions of Christmas. Few of us look for innovation in our Christmas carols. We like to sing the old, familiar songs of our childhood memories. When we were away in Myanmar, what I missed the most was celebrating the Sundays of Advent with you. Now I can.
Perhaps it’s good for us to be reminded of Joseph in the Christmas story because the God with us, Emmanuel sometimes is a disruptive God with us. Here is a Savior who doesn’t mind intruding into our settled lives of ordinary people and asking them to do some extraordinary things. While we may want to keep things calm and orderly, God comes in Jesus and disrupts our lives like he did Joseph’s.
Embarrassment
For a long time, we wanted God to come and save us. Down through the ages we claimed that our soul’s desire was for deliverance. But when God finally, decisively shows up as a baby born to a befuddled father and an unwed mother, it was an embarrassment. It was a disruption of their best-set plans.
This is how Matthew prepares us for the advent of Christ the Savior—as an embarrassment. Luke has the charming story of the angel’s announcement to Mary, and Mary’s moving song in response to the annunciation.
Not Matthew. With Matthew the nativity is presented as “the birth of Jesus took place in this way.” Here is a man horribly confused by a fiancé who is pregnant, but not by him.
Joseph is said to be a “righteous man,” which surely means that throughout his life Joseph had played by the rules. He is righteous, law-abiding, and careful. Now in one horrible, unexpected, unwanted event—his beloved fiancé pregnant, not by him—his world is totally disrupted.
Joseph being an honorable man intended to divorce Mary so as not to embarrass her. Betrothal in the first century culture was only a bedroom away from marriage. Mary’s unfaithfulness would have been Joseph’s shame in the face of the community. Rather than subjecting Mary to public embarrassment and her own shame, Joseph decides quietly to divorce her. This would have been done with two or three witnesses. In doing it in this manner, Joseph perhaps saved Mary’s life from stoning (Deut. 22:23-24). Joseph decided and remained firm in his resolve since he was a righteous, law-abiding man and a compassionate one.
Then enters God. An angel appears to Joseph one night in his torment. And the angel has the nerve to say to Joseph, “Don’t be afraid.” Now if you were in this situation, a dream message for you to not be afraid would be no more than a stressful nightmare.
Don’t be afraid? One can imagine all the reasonable things Joseph might fear—public censure for a failed engagement, condemnation for not playing by the rules. He is in a horribly embarrassing situation. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid.” The angel tells Joseph to not be afraid to keep Mary as his wife because the child is here by the work of the Holy Spirit.
What is that supposed to mean? Later we are told that Joseph is a carpenter. He is probably not an expert in discerning obscure passages of scripture, like the one that the angel quotes to him from Isaiah 7:14, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
I am sure that there are people here this morning who are able to identify with Mary—you know the joy, the great joy, of having a child born into your world, a great blessing of new life, the way Luke begins his Gospel. There are others especially new believers who know firsthand the joy of “the Word became flesh and lived among us,” the way John begins his gospel—the Word, the incarnate Word here with us.
But I suspect that in this congregation there may even be more of us who are able to identify closely with Joseph—a person whose world is rocked irretrievably by God. Joseph is a man embarrassed by the disruption of God.
There is something about a living God being present, here, God with us, Emmanuel, which seems to be inherently disruptive. I think Joseph would back me up in saying that.
Disruptions
When anyone asks me what I might want for Christmas, I often would say, “Peace on earth and goodwill among all.” I know that’s not the answer they were hoping for. But it’s the wish that I really want.
In our world that is constantly being disrupted by school shootings, terrorists’ bombs, drone missiles, and civil conflicts in many countries, we yearn for “peace on earth.” We want to sing “Silent Night” and sleep in heavenly peace. We sing, “My Peace I give unto you, the peace that the world can’t understand but is a peace that only Christ can give.” And frankly, we dearly love the traditions of Christmas that reminds us of familiar songs of our childhood memories that appear to be peaceful. I have KOIT, the official San Francisco all Christmas station on in my car at this time of the year!
There’s a billboard that reads, “Are You Looking for More Peace in Life?” The billboard then gives a website of a nearby church. I do believe that Jesus brings peace and peacefulness to life despite what Jesus said about not giving “peace” as the world thinks of that term. But embarrassed Joseph reminds us that sometimes God’s disruptions among us are anything but peaceful.
The angel tells Joseph that this odd, embarrassing event that has taken place in the life of his fiancé is from God, the work of the Holy Spirit. I doubt that made Joseph feel any better about his situation. He didn’t ask to be brought into the Nativity and neither did his fiancé. Joseph wasn’t searching for more adventure in his life. He had no need to be taking a heroic, courageous stand.
Perhaps he had previously thought of the Holy Spirit as a calming presence in a disordered life, like most of us like to do. Was it a shock for him to learn that the Holy Spirit is a disruptive, demanding presence?
Last Sunday, we baptized and welcomed 7 persons into the Body of Christ, the church. They changed from their normal clothes into white robes. They invited friends and neighbors who have never been to FCBC before to come to church to witness their baptisms and to the right hand for Christian fellowship. The children lined up to see what their parents and adults were doing. They got completely immersed under the water. These persons’ ordinary lives were physically and dramatically disrupted!
Jesus, our Savior intrudes into our settled lives of ordinary people and asks us to do some extraordinary things. Joseph reminds us that to have a living God among us, Emmanuel, God will be disruptive.
A university chaplain was lamenting over the reality that there were only a few students attending worship. One of the students attempted to comfort the chaplain, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. This is a selective university. You have some smart students here.”
“And your point is what?” the chaplain asked.
“My point is that most of these students are smart enough to realize that if they came to church and put their lives at risk of being commandeered by Christ, their lives would only become more unmanageable and difficult. So they stay safely home.”
These smart students know that Jesus will disrupt their lives forever. Are you ready to have your life disrupted by Jesus today?
Christmas Disruptions Today
Do you know what happened in the first two hundred years after Christ’s ministry on earth? The church defeated the Roman Empire without firing a shot because of the disruptive, active and near presence of God in Jesus Christ.
Rome worshiped struggle, power and force. But the church early on drew no distinction between the rich and the poor, for the way it worked among the victims of the plague, for the openhanded generosity it showed toward the needs of others, even those who weren’t Christians. By the year 200, it has been fairly well documented that the Christians of Rome were feeding as many as 20,000 of that city’s inhabitants, most of whom were not Christians. Why did they do this?
They did not do this out of some humanitarian drive to do good. They did it as those who knew the story of how God works because God disrupted their lives. They themselves, whatever their social class or material position, had been lifted up. Lifted up by God who stoops low. Thus, Mary’s song became exemplified in the lives of early Christians. Thus, Joseph’s startled dream in the middle of the night was shown to be true in the disrupted lives of the earliest church: the high speaking down to the low, and the low speaking up to the high.
On this Christmas Sunday, if you find yourself in a situation of barrenness, a situation in which you are brought low, then look up, your salvation is at hand. We have this God who loves to make fruitful the barren and loves to lift up the lowly.
On the other hand, if you find yourself well-fixed, up high, sitting pretty, then perhaps if you would like to be where God is, you will need to come down low. Perhaps you will need to give until it hurts, you will need to go into the places where there is great human need. For that is where our great God is stooping.
To be a Christian is to know the story about who God is, about God’s chosen ways of working, about where God is and what God is doing in your lives today. And then, if we want to worship this God, we must align our lives in accord with God’s story. And this story begins with Christmas disruptions.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, as we stand upon the threshold of your Nativity, give us the sense of adventure that enables us to receive you as you are in all your exciting, disruptive glory. Lead us away from our sinful tendency to want our lives to be more manageable and less disrupted than you intend for our lives to be. Instill in us a joyful willingness to receive you as you come to us, as you are. Amen.