With my son’s due date coming up, this final Sunday of Advent is also the final Sunday before I go on paternity leave! Seems like an appropriate week to talk about the earthly father in the Christmas story, right? The Gospel reading for this week is Matthew 1:18-25.
Some helpful direction for this sermon came from Aaron Klink’s essay in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1 and James Howell at MinistryMatters.
How many of you have ever seen the game show Family Feud? The concept is that a panel of 100 people are asked a question, and contestants have to guess the most popular answers.
For some end of year fun at Confirmation this week, we played our own Christmas version of Family Feud. One of the questions in our version was “Name one piece of a Nativity set.”
Here are the correct answers: Baby Jesus (56), Manger (23), Wiseman (5), Mary (4), Angel (3), Sheep/Lamb (3), Donkey (3).
Notice anyone missing, especially after the Gospel reading we just heard? Out of whatever survey group was asked this question, not one person’s first answer was Joseph. I’m not really surprised no one thought first of Joseph, but don’t you feel a little bad for him? Every nativity scene has Joseph, but he’s always a supporting character.
Maybe it’s because the Bible doesn’t tell us much about Joseph. In fact, he’s not even the main guy with that name in the Bible – the book of Genesis spends about 12 chapters on the story of Joseph the son of Jacob. That’s the Joseph with the coat of many colors. The Joseph we’re talking about today is mentioned in the New Testament in two chapters in Matthew, a chapter and a verse in Luke, and one side comment in John. That’s it.
We know by profession, Joseph is a builder of some sort, probably a carpenter, although the Greek word could mean a stonemason or woodworker. And the only reason we know that is because someone asks of Jesus, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?”
In the story Matthew is telling, Joseph’s primary importance is that he is a descendant of David. Matthew is writing his book to a mainly Jewish audience, and he’s trying to convince them that Jesus is the savior they’ve been waiting for, the Messiah whom God had promised generations earlier through the prophets. The prophets had promised the Messiah would be a descendant of the great king David, so Matthew starts the story of Jesus with 17 verses of genealogy, laying out the connection all the way from Abraham through David to Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
The connection gets a little sticky, because as we hear in the next section after the genealogy, in the section I just read, Joseph isn’t biologically the father of Jesus. But he takes Mary as his wife and names her son Jesus, and by giving Jesus his name, he adopts him into his line.
Luke’s genealogy for Jesus, by the way, is quite different than Matthews, perhaps because Luke is connecting Jesus to David through Mary’s line, so his genealogy lists Mary’s ancestors. Joseph serves a vital function, but he’s barely a character himself. He doesn’t even get any lines of dialogue.
I saw the new Star Wars movie on Thursday, and one of the trailers was for a movie coming out in July called Free Guy. In that movie, as far as I can tell from the trailers, a guy gets up every day, goes to work, and the same strange things happen around him, like bank robberies and airplanes flying through the city streets.
Eventually, he realizes he’s a character in a video game, but he’s not the hero of the story. He’s a background character, part of the scenery.
I wonder if Joseph ever felt like that. I think what’s remarkable about Joseph is that he understands he isn’t playing the lead role.
In a sense, that’s true for all of us. You’re only the main character to yourself. To say it another way, everyone is the main character in their own story, but only in their own story. Understanding that concept is part of growing up, and it can be good news. As a baby, you’re the center of your own universe. Everything revolves around you.
As you grow up, you realize other people have their own perspectives too. In psychology, it’s called “theory of the mind.” You start to realize other people have feelings and thoughts too. There’s a challenging stage, usually around junior high school, where you think that everyone is paying attention to you, so you become extremely self-conscious.
As you mature more, you realize everyone is the hero in their own story, and most of the time, people aren’t paying nearly as much attention to you as you are to yourself, and life gets easier.
Part of growing as a Christian is learning to put others first, learning to follow the example of Jesus who came and gave up his own life for the sake of others. It’s the call of Abraham, who’s told that he is blessed to be a blessing to others.
It’s the words of Jesus, who said it is more blessed to give than to receive, and of Paul, who said do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, according to the measure of faith God has assigned.
In Matthew’s story, Joseph didn’t ask for any of this to happen. He didn’t set out to parent the Savior of the World. He’s a righteous man, Matthew tells us, someone who cares about serving God and doing the right thing.
He’s engaged to Mary, and remember that engagement then was really the first stage of being married. They’re not yet living together, but they are in a publicly committed relationship.
So when Joseph finds out Mary his betrothed is pregnant, it’s a problem. No doubt he felt hurt and betrayed, but he wants to do the right thing. He doesn’t want to make a scene or stir things up. He looks at the evidence before him, and he decides on the least disruptive course of action.
He has the legal right to much more, up to demanding that Mary be stoned for her obvious unfaithfulness to him, but he resolves to do the kindest thing possible and dismiss her quietly. He’s convinced this is the best thing for both of them.
And it probably is the right thing for him to do, until an angel shows up and explains that Mary has not betrayed him. There’s something very different going on.
God is doing something new. His wife Mary is going to give birth to the Son of God, and this will be the fulfillment of a thousand years of prophecy, and this child will be God with us.
Because we think of Joseph so rarely, I don’t think we give him enough credit for what he does. He believes the angel in his dream, and he continues to quietly do the right thing. He trusts God. He takes Mary as his wife, ignoring whatever anyone else might think. He accepts that this child is going to be far, far more significant that he will ever be. He understands that his role is to protect the child, to faithfully raise him the best way he can.
Soon after Jesus is born, Joseph will have another vision, and he’ll need to flee from King Herod’s soldiers, to cross the border with his family as refugees fleeing to Egypt. He’ll give up everything he has to protect his family.
As you get ready this week to celebrate the birth of the most important child in history, I encourage you to consider the people in the background, the people like Joseph who aren’t the main characters, but who by their quiet faith allow God to use them to change the world.
As you pay attention to the background players, remember that you don’t need to be the hero of the story. But like Joseph, you have a part to play in the work God is doing today. You have a role to fulfill. You have a calling.
Joseph has a tendency to hang out in the background of the nativity scene. But perhaps that’s where he sets the best example for us. Perhaps our calling too is to stay close to Jesus, to humbly trust God to be faithful.
Amen