God Insists

Isaiah 7:10-16, Matthew 1:18-25

Like any good Hallmark movie or holiday sitcom episode, today’s Christmas story starts with a relationship problem: Mary is pregnant and it is not Joseph’s kid.
There’s the implication of infidelity and the story starts with a pending divorce.

You and I, the audience, know what Joseph does not: that there’s no infidelity. This is a misunderstanding, a lack of knowledge, that’s pulling the couple apart. We also know that Joseph is a good guy. An upstanding, solid, faithful guy. One who does right and for whom good things should happen.

It’s got all the essential elements of a good holiday story and now we’re invested. We want it to work out for them, so we are primed for resolution.

In contemporary Christmas stories, resolution comes from true love, seasonal good will, fate, or the intervention of the family dog. Divine intervention is not the usual method of resolution in the stories we see on TV.

Matthew’s readers might be better primed to expect the action of God, but for Joseph himself – as it would be for you or me in most of our own relationship problems – an angelic dream is probably pretty unexpected.

I mean, Joseph wasn’t praying for a miracle.

He wasn’t looking for salvation – not for himself and not for the whole nation of Israel.

He was just trying to solve a family problem, as best he could, without hurting anybody else worse than he had to. He’s trusting to himself to do the right thing, and letting that be enough.

And then this dream.

An angel of the Lord – unmistakably a divine messenger – appears in his sleep and speaks directly to him: Don’t be afraid, Joseph.

Don’t worry about the consequences, don’t try to manage this quietly to avoid scandal. Go ahead. Marry Mary. Name her son as your own: he is going to save his people from their sins.

Wait, what?

It’s one thing to have God’s assurance that Mary hasn’t betrayed him. But parenting the Savior of Israel…? Parenting the Son of God is not the solution to his relationship problems Joseph was looking for.
But it’s what he’s getting.

The narrator steps in here with an explanatory note: It’s like that other story, remember? The one Isaiah told, about a pregnant young woman whose child is a sign of God with us.

Matthew’s first audience would have gotten that reference as a confirmation of divine intention, a cultural reference to expectations of the Messiah who would come and fix the world for God, whom Israel has been waiting for so long.

And many might also remember the context of that reference – you and I heard a little of it this morning:

Isaiah the prophet is talking to King Ahaz of Judah, who is under threat from the neighboring kings of Damascus and Samaria, determined to sweep Ahaz up into their fight with Assyria, the big bully in the neighborhood. That’s a situation always dangerous for the little nation caught in the middle.

Isaiah wants to encourage Ahaz to stand firm as God’s king, not get swept into foolish choices by fear. So Isaiah invites him to ask God for a sign: for guidance and reassurance and support.

Ahaz declines.

It’s okay; he’s fine. No miracles necessary.

I won’t test God, he says. I don’t need to see what’s in the divine rescue kit.

Independence is a fine thing. But refusing to depend on God - depending instead on one’s own self - is a profound failure if you’re the king of God’s people. It’s a dereliction of duty, a betrayal of your responsibilities to God and to the people you’re supposed to lead.

It’s a lack of faith. And a lack of faithfulness.

So God – speaking through Isaiah – won’t have any of that.

You don’t want a sign? I’m giving you a sign.

Look, see this pregnant young woman? Her child is the sign that God is with you; that’s his name, even. And by the time that child is weaned those threatening kings will be a distant memory, forgotten. Less than two years, probably.

God is going to save God’s people whether you ask for it or not.

God is going to save Ahaz and the kingdom of Judah whether or not Ahaz is willing to accept the help.

God is going to be born of Mary; God is going to save God’s people, whether Joseph was looking for it or not. The stories we hear today insist that God is going to save even if it never occurs to us to ask.

God is proactively faithful to us, to God’s people, God’s whole world, whether or not we ourselves are faithful.

God insists on being with us when we aren’t looking for help, or for company.

God is going to help, to save, even when we say, “No, thanks, I’m good. I’ve got this.”

God insists on proving trustworthy when we would much rather trust ourselves.

That’s amazing.

The proactive generosity of God is beyond our imagining.

And it can sometimes be a little hard to accept.

Not for Joseph, apparently. Joseph wakes up and does exactly what God proposes to him; takes up his role in God’s salvation.

Joseph apparently hears and accepts the angel’s assurance that he has nothing to fear from the uninvited eruption of salvation into his life.

But it can be hard for many of us.

I know I find it a lot more attractive – much easier! – to put my trust in myself than to accept uninvited help.

When I’ve got my head down into a task, a challenge, or a problem to solve, uninvited help and unasked solutions seem like interference. When I’m methodically testing every single bulb to find the burnt out one in that strand of lights on the Christmas tree, I don’t want your whole new lights. I’m not ready to hear that the tree looks great without them, either. And telling me to quit worrying about the lights because Jesus is going to come anyway is….

well, it’s true. It’s reassuring. (But I still want to fix the problem my way, too.)

And when it’s a bigger battle than tree lights – serious illness, grief, a dangerous scarcity of money or a frustrating scarcity of time, or the sometimes avalanche-like overwhelm of the holidays?
Well, like Ahaz, I like to say I don’t want to put God to the test. I can manage it myself. Because it’s emotionally hard to depend on a solution, a salvation, that I can’t control myself, can’t even imagine, and just have to trust.

But that is exactly what God invites us to, today.

God invites – calls – us to test out the reality of God’s proactive, generous love for ourselves. To accept God’s insistence on helping, though it’s almost never the form of help I thought I wanted, and rarely as comfortable as what I planned.

God invites, calls, us to accept the uninvited offers of signs, of reassurance and encouragement that come our way and to believe that God is at work to disarm the threats to our faith, our love, our wholeness, even (sometimes especially!) when we might be able to do it ourselves.

To learn to look for salvation when we don’t feel the need. To look not only for my own salvation, but to expect the desire and action of God to transform the whole world.

What we hear today is an invitation – really an implied command – to be, like Joseph, faithful in our acceptance of God’s faithfulness to us. To receive God’s faith toward us, God’s absolute insistence on Immanuel, on God being with us, now and always, to the end of the age.