Sermon for Sunday,  December 18, 2005  

EMMANUEL

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Fourth Sunday In Advent

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-25

¹⁸ Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰ But just when he had resolved to do 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 as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." ²² All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ²³ "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." ²⁴ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵ but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Last week we may have seen some things about the Christmas story that were new to us.

We learned that there is no mention in these stories of a stable-only a manger. We heard that Mary’s song is a revolutionary protest song telling us that God is on the side of the least and the last. We heard that when the wise men or astrologers found Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, they had been in a house in Bethlehem, and that we do not know how many wise men there were-only that there were three gifts, and that there might have been a fourth wise man who did not bring a gift because he was behind in his Christmas shopping like some of us!

There are probably some other surprises for you in the only two gospels out of the four that tell us about Jesus’ birth. For instance, in most of our Christmas pageants we find an innkeeper who tells the holy couple that there is no room for them, but in the Bible there is no mention of a an innkeeper-only the news that there was no room. If you like to pursue this kind of trivia, you can take a twenty question test online at a site called Bible-trivia.com and look for the Christmas test. I found the site by Googling the words Bible trivia.

We said last week that the earliest of the four gospels tells us nothing about Jesus’ birth and nothing about a virgin birth. We did not mention that the earliest source in the Bible for any information about Jesus is the apostle Paul who wrote his letters earlier than even the gospel of Mark. And Paul never mentions a virgin birth either. We also need to know that even the two gospels that do talk about a virgin birth also tell us that Jesus, the messiah, was a descendant of David through his father Joseph who was a descendant of David. Now I think it is difficult to hold all those ideas together in one’s mind, and if you want to do some additional reading about this, I point you to the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible in our library and the article on virgin birth. You will learn there that there were other important people in ancient times for whom a virgin birth was claimed and what that claim meant.

Now that we have discombobulated some of our long held ideas about the Christmas story, we are going to look at the story in the gospel of Matthew about the time Jesus was born.

We know very little about Joseph. Time magazine has a five page article this week about Joseph and it offers mostly legend and speculation. Some legends tell us that he was very old. One legend says he was 111 when he died. I don’t think that is likely. He would have had to be in good condition to walk, as they did, to Bethlehem and to have been a builder/carpenter. It is likely that, later on, he and Jesus did most of their building work in a town three miles from Nazareth called Zippori where there was a lot of construction going on in the first century. I picture him as a younger man who was also, later on, the father of other children with Mary because the Bible tells us in several places that Jesus had several brothers and sisters.

In a typical family, Joseph would have been Jesus, main teacher of religion and Jewish law, so the grounding Jesus obviously had in the Hebrew scriptures would have come from his father as well as from hearing the scriptures read in synagogue as he went with his mother and father each Sabbath.

We do not hear much more information about Joseph in the Bible except what we learn in these early verses but I think of Joseph as one of those strong, influential, quiet people who fills their servant leader role very well but who does not look for recognition and who is comfortable being a quiet disciple, a very important leader but doing so quietly. Sometimes they are willing to take a secondary leader role but they are extremely important and should be remembered. There are people like Joseph in your friendship circle and your work environment whose quiet and steady leadership out of the spotlight are just extremely important and this might be a good season to tell them how much you appreciate them.

We learn some other things about Joseph in this story. By Jewish law he could have ended the engagement with Mary when he learned she was pregnant. He even, by law, could have had her stoned. He was an upright man, a just and honorable man the text tells us and so he planned to break the engagement quietly. An angel came to him in a dream and told him some very important things: Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary to be your wife. The child in her has been conceived by the Holy Spirit. You will call him Jesus/Jeshua because he will save people. This is taking place, Matthew says, to fulfill what the prophet Isaiah said about a young woman becoming pregnant and bearing a son who will be called Emmanuel.

These sentences contain profound messages for us in just a few words.

Do not be afraid the angel says to Joseph.  Have you heard those words before in the Christmas story? Last week in our story about Mary we did not read what happened when the angel Gabriel appeared to her. We said she was deeply troubled by his words. But here is some of what the angel told the 15 year old Mary: do not be afraid. Then, later on in the Christmas story, when the scraggly shepherds are out in the field and the angels appear to them, and a heavenly light is shining on them, what are they feeling? Luke tells us, they are terrified. They are scared out of their minds. What is the first thing the angel says to the shepherds? Don’t be afraid. There is no need to fear, because I am bring you good news, joyful news for all people.

Don’t be afraid. Do you know what the most frequent verse is in the whole Bible, the phrase that shows up more than any other phrase in the Bible? This is the phrase: do not be afraid. Do not live your life in fear. You do not need to. The second most frequent verse in the Hebrew Bible-the Old Testament for us-is connected to last week’s sermon topic: take care of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. You are responsible to help the most vulnerable and the weakest among you. That is the second most frequent verse in the Old Testament. It shows up 43 times.

But the most frequent verse in the whole Bible shows up-do you know how many times? 365 times! Tim Hansel in his classic book writes that God is saying to us every day-365 times!-you do not need to be afraid. 

This can be superficial: there are some things that we should be afraid of, that we should have a healthy respect for or fear of. There are reasons people over 50 should have regular medical tests and checkups for colon polyps because we want to head off anything that might develop into cancer. There are reasons we should get out of the way of a hurricane or tornado because the consequences are deadly.

Why should we not be afraid, according to the Christmas story? One reason is because of what Joseph hears in the dream. Do not be afraid because this child means that God is with us. We are not alone. God will walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death. God will surround us with comfort and peace and courage and will give us hope in the face of tragedy. God will do that. God is with us.

The 8 year old girl in Sunday school got this right when she started to recite the 23^rd psalm and said, “The Lord is my shepherd, that’s all I want!!”

Christmas means that God is Emmanuel--God with us. Whatever happens to us, we are not alone and God will sustain us. Two stories about that.

John McCain has a new book out on the subject of character and it contains some real life stories about character and some of the virtues that make up character: honesty, courage, faith, integrity.

He tells his own story about Christmas and about God with us in the most desolate of circumstances. He had been shot down as a pilot during the Viet Nam war. He was seriously injured with a broken arm and a broken leg. He tells about being in prison during Christmas 1971.

Here is the story:

Last, almost all of us had faith in God, even if when we arrived in prison we lacked a close affiliation with an organized religion. But in prison you needed to believe in a God Whose love for you was ever present. And you needed to believe in God to maintain, through all the horrors of war, a sense of moral responsibility to struggle to remain a human being.

Of all my memories of prison, many of which, it may surprise the reader to know, I recall fondly, the one I cherish most is a Christmas service we conducted in 1971. In 1970, our treatment had improved somewhat. We were no longer tortured routinely. But the most welcome change of all occurred when we were relocated to group cells. Twenty or more men were now kept together in large rooms. After years of solitary confinement, forced to remain in secret contact with our fellow prisoners, and subject to discovery and punishment at any moment, suddenly being allowed the company of other prisoners twenty-four hours a day was the most wonderful comfort imaginable. I doubt I have ever been happier than that day I moved into a group cell.

During the Christmas season our captors decided to allow us to conduct services in our cells, and even located a Bible for us to share with prisoners in other cells. I was appointed our cell’s chaplain, and was given the responsibility for copying passages from the Bible before it was given to the men in the next cell. At the time, despite our joy at being allowed to live together in groups, many of us were is pretty bad shape. Some of us had been in prison for many years, and the inadequate diet, mistreatment, and other unhealthy conditions of imprisonment had taken a toll on us. That Christmas many of us were suffering from fevers or from injuries that had never properly healed and, in the cold of a Hanoi winter, could cause us considerable pain. We were a pretty wretched sight that Christmas night: crowded in our cell, with four bare lightbulbs in each corner of the room, some of us lying down because we were too sick or hurt to stand, some of us hobbling to our places on crutches, all of us shivering in the cold air.

Some of the prisoners in our cell had organized a choir. One of them had once served as the conductor of the Air Force Academy choir, and he led them in singing hymns of the season. Their voices sounded to us as rich and beautiful as those any cathedral choir could boast. We gave thanks for the birth of Christ, and for one another’s company, for our families and for our country. I read from the passages I had copied: “And the Angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”

We expected the guards to come into the cell at some point to force us to finish our celebration, and we all occasionally glanced at the bars on the cell’s windows to see of they were watching us. But they left us alone. That Christmas service was as meaningful and encouraging to me as any I attended before or since. That night in gratitude for the birth of my Savior, and the bless.ing He had granted me with the company of men I had come to deeply admire and love, I felt as close to God as I have ever felt. And that faith sustained me as no other could.

Jesus means that God is Emmanuel-God with us.

Because God is with us does not mean that we won’t suffer or experience tragedies or bad accidents. It means that God will see us through whatever life throws at us. We will have trouble. Life will be unfair.

Judy and I saw that again when we heard this week about her 24 year old nephew whose house burned down destroying all his possessions and his business records and, most tragically, his dog who was trapped in the mobile home and could not escape the raging fire. Some very sentimental things went up in smoke including the drafting table his grandfather had given him. Her nephew Colin is a landscape designer who has just gone into his own business in the past year and has already built a reputation because of his good work and his honesty and integrity. He is lucky he was not at home asleep when the electrical fire started or he would be dead also. This is a double tragedy because Colin is still recovering from a car accident 8 months ago that almost took his life, a wreck that was not his fault. He has been through some events at the age of 24 that most people never experience in a lifetime.

He is experiencing what all of us who have lived long enough know too well-that life is unfair and that life is very painful and tragic at times AND that God will see us through those times through friends and church and family and others who care for us because of what we hear today: God is not “up there” somewhere or “out there” somewhere distant and remote and far away. God is right here with us, and most of the time when we look for God we miss seeing God because we don’t look low enough. We don’t look low enough to see the God who comes to us through a humble working class couple who give birth to their first child and put him in a feeding trough for a crib. We don’t look low enough to see the God who comes to us through humble, dirty, smelly shepherds whom God chooses to get the first birth announcements about the birth of the messiah.

Joseph hears from the angel that the birth of his son means that God is with us-God is with us in Jesus. If we are looking for God, the first and best place to look is at Jesus.

One professor says it this way: we cannot think about God without seeing Jesus. We cannot look at Jesus without also seeing God!

What is God like in your mind? Is God the cosmic puppeteer off up there in heaven thinking about the next disaster to send to people? I think I’ll send this flood or this hurricane tomorrow to those people. I think I’ll send cancer to this person next week. I think I’ll send this young couple a baby with multiple disabilities. I think I’ll burn this family’s house down.

That is a grotesque picture of God but it is very, very common. It does not allow for any accidents. It does not allow for free will and freedom of choice or random events-Jesus believed there were just some accidents and random events.

That awful, uncaring image of God is what caused John Wesley to say to the determinists and Calvinists of his day, “What you mean by God is what I mean by Satan!!”

What is your picture of God? The cosmic policeman who is just waiting to catch you doing something wrong? The Judge who is about to punish you for your sins? Is it Ann Lamott’s image of God as the high school principal in the gray suit who is looking through your permanent records and frowning and shaking his head?

The Christmas story says, when you want to see God, look at Jesus. Look at the Jesus who is on the side of the outsider and the underdog. See the Jesus who is willing to touch the lepers and to welcome the marginalized and to fill the hungry with good things and to send the smug and arrogant away empty handed. Look at the Jesus who hated hypocrisy just as much as you do and who is not the namby, pamby, meek and mild milquetoast you thought but who is willing to turn over tables of merchants who are cheating people in the name of God and who is intolerant of self righteous corruption particularly corruption in the name of religion.

Look at that Jesus, Emmanuel, and remember, this is what God is like. This is what God is like.

And in this season of Christmas we have the chance to not just learn about that Jesus who is born in a humble place, but we are invited to follow him because as Joseph learns, his name in Hebrew, Yeshua, means that he has come to save us, to help us, to deliver us, to set us free. That is good news of great joy for all people. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

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