Scandal

Light Splits the Night • Sermon • Submitted 5 years ago • Presented 5 years ago • 30:11

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From the very beginning, Jesus comes to his people in ways that shatter all expectations. He still comes to his people like that today.

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Matthew 1:18–25 NIV

18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. 20 But 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. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). 24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

Last week we looked at the first seventeen verses of Matthew; it was the genealogy of Jesus’ ancestry. Now Matthew needs to address a very important detail about the ancestry of Jesus—namely, that he is the Son of God. You see, the genealogy of the opening verses satisfies Matthew’s need to connect Jesus to Abraham and to David. The family line makes the case for Matthew’s Jewish audience that Jesus is, in fact, from the kingly lineage of Israel. But for the salvation message of Matthew’s gospel to be true, then he must also show us that Jesus is divine—that he is God in the flesh.

Here again, Matthew pulls on the familiar background of his Jewish audience by making connections back to Old Testament prophesy. He starts with this story a couple engaged to be married. Let me pause here and put a little more background to the customs of Jewish weddings. Mary is already pledged to be married to Joseph when the news of her pregnancy comes. This is more than what we might think of today as an engagement. A pledge of marriage is already legally binding. It meant that, essentially, Mary and Joseph were already considered to be married—the actual wedding had not yet taken place.

So, when Mary is discovered to be pregnant, it’s complicated. There is more going on in Joseph’s mind than simply calling off the wedding. And so, Matthew tells us that he considers all the options available under the law for divorce and decides to proceed with the option that will bring the least amount of public attention to the situation.

This is where the angel steps in. Matthew doesn’t give us any details at all whether Mary tried explaining or pleading her case. In fact, we don’t have a timeline to stitch together all the details. Matthew says nothing about it, but in Luke 1 we see the story of the angel Gabriel coming to visit Mary. Luke tells us that Mary travels to go stay with her cousin Elizabeth for three months following the announcement from Gabriel.

Maybe it is during this time that word somehow gets back to Joseph about Mary’s pregnancy. We simply don’t have any details of any confrontation or communication between Mary and Joseph during this time. And so, perhaps, it appears most likely that Joseph hears the word of Mary’s pregnancy and assumes there has been infidelity. And now the angel comes to Joseph to assure him that the baby Mary is carrying is not the result of any unfaithfulness but comes from God. Can you imagine the bizarre conversation in which Mary and Joseph share the news together about angel visits? Mary says, “Joseph, I know this sounds kind of ridiculous, but an angel from God told me that I am pregnant by the Holy Spirit and will give birth to the Son of God, and we’re supposed to name him Jesus.” Joseph replies, “No way, that’s so crazy; I heard the exact same thing from an angel as well!”

Matthew pushes the story one step further with his audience by making reference to an Old Testament prophesy from Isaiah confirming the promised Messiah would be the result of a virgin birth. Maybe it all sounds crazy to us today. But let’s remember that in the day of Jesus most people in the Roman empire were religious. And in the Roman empire it was generally accepted that the Caesar was a divine being of human origins. None of this would have been crazy nonsense to people living in that time.

But here’s the thing. It certainly was not expected.

After all, the conditions surrounding Jesus’ birth did have all the appearances of being rather scandalous. There was a real risk to Mary’s life here. If Joseph were to choose public divorce, the result for Mary would be execution by stoning. I imagine that thought might have crossed her mind. Why would God choose to come into the world under such sketchy circumstances? I don’t expect God to show up like this. I don’t imagine that anyone expected God to show up like this. Which gets us to a very important question for today.

What do I expect from God?

Let’s face it, we all carry expectations. We have expectations of spouses, expectations from kids, expectations from parents, expectations from bosses, expectations from employees, expectations from teachers, expectations from students, expectations from coaches, expectations from teammates, expectations from the pastor, expectations from my congregation.

I expect that my kids will clear their dishes to the dishwasher after dinner. I expect that they ask to use the car before just grabbing the keys and taking off. I think my kids expect that I will stock the pantry and that they may eat the food that is provided. These are expectations that are built upon consistent patterns. Because something has always gone a certain way, we expect it to continue going a certain way. Now that I am living back in Michigan, I expect to wake up to a cloudy overcast day with no sunshine because that is what I have woken up to almost every day for the last two months. Patterns help shape our expectations. When the pattern is broken, it challenges our expectations.

Sometimes, our expectations are built more upon wishes and desires than patterns. One of my favorite Christmas movies is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Clark Griswold builds up a fantasy of the absolute perfect family Christmas in which everyone gets along in harmony and everything in his world turns out perfect. If you have ever seen the movie, then you know that absolutely everything that can go possibly go wrong happens. Clark Griswold’s perfect family Christmas vacation turns into a nightmare as one thing after another goes off the rails. One-by-one the expectations are shattered. Of course, it’s a movie; so, in the end everything works out—movies tend to be that way. But it tells us something about how we play around with expectations.

Every one of us has a longing and desire to see things world out right, to see justice. Our expectation of movies is that the good guys end up winning and the bad guys end up losing because we have a longing expectation for justice to win. We have a longing expectation for the world to be fair. Or, in other words, when evil occurs, we expect God to do something about it. We expect certain things from God; we all do.

What about us? What do we expect from God? I think Joseph expected to have a normal happy marriage and a simple quiet family. When that seemed like it wasn’t going to happen Joseph looked for a way out. And God stepped in with a message from the angel that helped to rearrange Joseph’s expectations. God sent a message that turned his expectations upside-down.

What about us? When has something happened in your life that came along and turned your expectations upside-down? When has something happened that caused you to react and turn to God and say, “I don’t think it is supposed to go this way; this is not what I expected.” You see, if we live long enough then we all know there are moments that come along when we build expectations for God, and God does not follow through on what I expect him to do. That happens to every single one of us. It happened to Mary and Joseph.

It seems that God is up to something here. His strange and unexpected way of entering into the Christmas story sends a message about our many expectations. It seems God is setting about a course of action in which he is reminding every one of us that he works in ways that shatter all expectations. This is not the way I would expect the king of the universe to arrive on the scene. This is not the sort of family arrangement I would imagine for the Lord of lords. I do not expect Jesus to show up in the middle of scandal. That doesn’t seem like the best possible way for God to work this one out. But maybe—just maybe—God is giving us a lesson about the shortfalls of our own expectations.

What does God expect from me?

What did God expect from Mary and Joseph? In the challenge that came in the shattering of their own expectations is an equally challenging question of what comes next. If I put myself in Joseph’s sandals for just a moment, I think the response would be something like this: “So, God, this is not really what I expected from you; now what exactly do you expect from me? Do you think I am just supposed to go along with this?” I think my response would be much more like Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3. God called Moses to go the Egypt and confront the Pharaoh. And Moses says, I think you got the wrong guy. Moses tries to tell God, go find somebody else. I think if I were Joseph, I would take a pass on this one.

So, what does God expect? We shouldn’t ignore that question. With all this talk about what we expect from God, we should not forget to pause here a moment and consider what it is that God expects from us. What did God expect from Joseph? The answer is actually quite simple. Take Mary as your wife. Keep going Joseph. God is about to turn your world completely upside-down, but your only part is to just keep faithfully going one day to the next.

Really? I suppose for Joseph that would take an extreme amount of trust. And maybe that’s the point. God is going to do what God is going to do. And the announcement of Jesus declares that God is doing things in ways that continually upset our lineup of expectations. And God’s only expectation he places back upon his people is the expectation to faithfully follow where he is leading.

Simple, right? Not at all. As anyone whose world is turned upside-down knows, faithfully trusting God takes a pretty good amount of commitment. It takes work to keep trusting God when it seems he is coloring outside the lines. While God may be in the business of performing supernatural feats, my expected response lacks the superhero fame and recognition that I might like to be recognized. In fact, my expected response is rather ordinary. Even so, it is an expected response of truth and faith that can be far from easy.

Not what I expected

All of this leaves us to confront a God who turns out to be not at all what we expected. A servant king who reigns in humble gentleness. A mighty ruler who stoops down to the lowest marginalized people in the darkest corners of society. Jesus enters the world with an unexpected narrative so that we will not miss the way he brings salvation. He is not violent warrior who crushes all his enemies beneath him. Instead Jesus is the loving savior who sacrifices himself because of his great love, even a loving forgiveness for those who bring him to the cross.

I have to admit, sometimes I would rather have a savior who marches like a warrior into my world and wipes out all my enemies, and wipes out all my problems. Sometimes I would rather have a savior who lets me kick back in my armchair and watch everything in my life go exactly the way I expect it to happen. And yes, Jesus does come into the world to bring salvation. But right from the beginning, he works his redemption into the world in ways that turn everything else upside-down.

For us to be followers of Jesus today means that we trace the steps again this advent season to a manger in Bethlehem where the King of kings and the Lord of lords enters a world that never saw this scandal coming. May God grant us the faith to see the surprise of this completely unexpected gospel. And may God grant us the trust to simply live our day-to-day lives in ways that follow him in eternal gratitude.

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