Christmas is Waiting to be Born

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What a glorious mess!

While I was in college one advent season I can remember a sermon by Victor Price, he’s the pastor at 2nd church in dorchester, where he asked the question, are you pregnant? Is the love of God, love incarnate, love divine, conceived through power of the Holy Spirit, growing in you?

Today is the last Sunday of advent, we wait with eager anticipation for the most holy night of the year. We wait one more week for Christmas to be born.

As we wait there are final preparations to make to pull off the “perfect Christmas”. There might be last minute Christmas cards to send showing the hallmark perfect nativity scene, with Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus. However, that first Christmas was anything but perfect. It was in fact a glorious mess. It is in this mess that Christmas is waiting to be born.

On this, the last Sunday of Advent, we begin to transition from longing and waiting to looking for the nativity story. We expect shepherds in fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. We expect innkeepers with stables full of soft, sweet-smelling hay. We expect a pregnant Mary on the brink of delivering her child. And we have come to anticipate it all wrapped in wonder, beauty, and nostalgic simplicity. Most of our nativity scenes are clean and crisp: angelic faces, resting animals, a clean stable. Even “Away in a Manger” claims the baby Jesus did not cry! Our familiarity with this story often sanitizes it, removing the messy humanity of it, like the fluids at birth, the swollen feet that come with third-trimester pregnancy, and the general noise and messiness.

We also tend to sanitize the family dynamics Jesus was born into. Matthew 1, however, is not a narrative of shepherds in the field or sweet-smelling hay. It’s not a sanitized narrative at all. In fact, it plunges us right into the messy family dynamics Jesus was born into. A betrothed and supposed virgin ends up pregnant, and the man she is engaged to finds out. This is a mess in a culture and religion that allows for the stoning of adulteresses. This is a difficult place for a man who is filled with love and compassion but also righteousness and dedication to his faith. In this mess, on this last Sunday of Advent, we reflect on love.

Maybe, despite our nostalgic feelings toward the shepherds and angels of Luke 2, this is the perfect passage for us to talk about the love of God so great that he not only entered the world in a stable but also entered into the humanness of messy family dynamics.

The messyness of Mary and Joseph reminds us that God with us, Immanuel is waiting to be born in whatever mess we find ourselves in this Christmas. It is in our glorious mess that Christmas is waiting to be born.

The Mess of Mary and Joseph

In our sermon text today we find Mary and Joseph in what we know to be the picture perfect, family Christmas card photo worthy moment. That’s not the scene Matthew paints for us today. It is in fact a glorious hot mess we find them in. The world God enters is a collective hot mess. In this hot mess Christmas is waiting to be born.

Matthew’s gospel ties Jesus to the royal line of David.

-This lineage mentions four women by name, which is not typical, and a fifth is alluded to: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah’s wife (whom we know as Bathsheba), and Mary. Of these women, the first was involved in an incest scandal, the second was a prostitute, the third was a Moabite (which the Jewish people considered about as bad as being a prostitute), the fourth was trapped in a messy scheme of rape and adultery by King David, and the fifth turned up pregnant before marriage. Jesus family tree is messy.

-Joseph and Mary are both named in the lineage. Naming Mary as his mother emphasizes the virgin birth. Naming Joseph as his father connects Jesus to the royal line of David, which is important because it indicates that Jesus fulfills the prophecy of Jeremiah 23:5 that the Jewish messiah would be a descendant of David

-For Joseph to be named as Jesus’s father is incredibly important. Adoption in ancient Jewish culture worked differently than it does now. If a man claimed a child as his, he was considered in everyone’s eyes to be that child’s father, regardless of biological parentage. In legal and relational terms as well as matters related to inheritance, claiming a child ended all question and debate.

2) Jesus is born into a mess.

a) Engagements in the first century were not like engagements today. A betrothal was a contract between families. It was not “let’s plan to get married” but rather “our marriage has begun.” Money or goods were exchanged in the betrothal stage.

b) Engagements (betrothals) were difficult to call off. Since it was a contract, and part of the whole marriage endeavor, ending one required a divorce. Breaking a contract often left the woman destitute and dependent on her family of origin.

c) While betrothed, even though the wife did not live with her husband until the marriage was complete, they were expected to live with the fidelity of a married couple. Often this was the period of time that the husband would build a house for the new family and set things up to prepare for the wife to move in after the marriage ceremony and celebration.

d) Unfaithfulness in a betrothal was not a reason to call off the engagement but was grounds to call for stoning. Women who were caught in adultery were ushered outside of town to be stoned to death so their dead bodies wouldn’t make the town unclean.

e) Mary would have been viewed by her entire community as unfaithful. They would have had no reason not to think so. They had no frame of reference to believe in or understand the Holy Spirit’s involvement. Even other women who became miraculously pregnant (Sarah, Hannah, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth) still had husbands and became pregnant by those husbands.

f) We aren’t sure how Joseph found out about Mary’s pregnancy. She might have told him, or he might have heard rumors and confronted her about it. However he found out, we can be confident that his initial feelings were that she had committed adultery with another man. We can imagine the devastation this would have caused him in the midst of preparing their new home.

g) The righteousness of Joseph is important in this story. The fact that Joseph decided to divorce Mary is not what matters. In his culture and religion, he had every right to divorce her for bringing shame to his family! What matters is that he decided to divorce her quietly. He could have called for her stoning, humiliating her in front of the entire community. Divorcing her quietly was a compassionate choice.

3) God Enters the mess

Oh what a glorious mess we have here. Joseph through a dream is told that Mary truly is a virgin and the child she carries was conceived through the Holy Spirit. After the shame and betrayal he must have felt upon hearing of Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph takes his compassion and love for Mary a step further and is obedient to what the angel tells him. Joseph enters the mess with Mary and walks with her through it.

c) The incarnation is about God entering humanity. Jesus enters the world, born of ordinary human beings with ordinary human struggles. This was not a pristine family without issues, even though we often paint them that way. We tend to want to focus on their faithfulness and ignore their humanity. Even though they were faithful, their path was not easy, and their life was not free of burden and mess.

i) So Joseph knew the truth about Mary thanks to the angel. But did the angel appear to all the neighbors and other families in the community as well, to tell them they could stop gossiping about Mary? Probably not!

ii) When Joseph decided to marry her anyway, for all we know, people assumed he was indicating that he had broken the marriage contract by sleeping with her before the marriage was fulfilled.

The incarnation is not just about Jesus being born in a stable instead of a palace. It’s also about proximity and experience, and God entering the messiness of human relationships. Jesus took on humanity in all its fullness from Day 1, including family dynamics and gossipy community members!

d) The love of God does not run from our humanity or our messes but enters and embraces them. We can have confidence that, if God willingly entered a complicated family dynamic in the incarnation, then our situations aren’t too much for God. There is no distance that God wouldn’t travel to illustrate the love of God for humanity.

Christmas is Waiting to be born.

The Advent narrative—the story of hope and anticipation—is ultimately bathed in the love of God. We trust God because God loves us. The story of Christmas—the story of the incarnation—is one that doesn’t run from conflict, pain, or humanness but embraces all the mess of humanity out of love.

We are loved. No matter the mess we are in, whether it be of our own making or someone else’s. Maybe it’s even a mess that has been created because we are seeking to be faithful to God, and the people around us just don’t see the full picture. God is present with us in the midst of all of it! So on this final Sunday of Advent, we look ahead in the knowledge that we are loved. We have hope in the face of uncertainty because we are loved by God. No matter where we are, no matter what lies ahead, this is the heart of the message: “For God so loved the world, that he sent his Son” into our messes, that we might know and be known by him.

In the messyness of our lives Christmas is waiting to be born. I’ll ask you the same question I was asked, are you pregnant? Is the love of God growing in you through the work of the Holy Spirit?