Make It Your Own

Matthew 1:18-25

Joseph is thinking hard.

Pacing, maybe; rubbing his chin, or his forehead… because he’s been confronted with a dilemma. His wife – for all intents and purposes; even though they haven’t moved in yet – is pregnant. And the child isn’t his.

He didn’t make this wrong, but now he has to make this right.

He’s a righteous man, Matthew tells us. That means he loves God’s ways, he keeps the law – apparently both in letter and in spirit – because while he’s got to divorce Mary, to keep the community moral and upright, he’s trying to choose the gentlest way, because stoning her to death at the city gate – as the law suggests – would be extreme if it’s not her fault, either.

We don’t know if he’s in love with Mary – at least in the romantic, heart-throbbing way that many of us usually think about love. But he cares. So he resolves to do it as quietly and gently as possible, and – decision made – he goes to sleep.

And then we see his dream.

A vivid dream, full of presence and power.

A messenger of God appears and says:

Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. Name him Jesus. He will save his people.

Don’t be afraid.

I didn’t know he was afraid in all that thinking, but it makes sense.

Joseph’s plans have all been upended. This woman he was going to spend his life with, have kids with (just not this one!), grow old with… She’s got someone else’s kid, and some story about it not having a father, or being from God.

Is his wife crazy? Has she betrayed him, somehow. What’s going to go wrong next? How is he going to rebuild his life? Will he be able to? And what will people be saying about him, when Mary’s story gets around?

Worse – what if it that story is real?

He’s swimming in uncertainty, small and great – about his family, about God, about himself – and that’s frightening, even if you’re one of those people who loves surprises.

But he has this dream, and then he’s not afraid.

Or he acts like he’s not.

He does – without comment or question – exactly what the angel says.

He marries Mary.

He adopts the child. By naming him, he makes him a permanent part of Joseph’s family and heritage. He accepts the general assumption that this poorly-timed child is his, accepts God’s instructions that this impossible child is his, and makes it real.

The child isn’t his, but now the child is his,

and Joseph is bound for life to God’s promise that this child will save his people.

In naming his son, Joseph makes God’s promise his own.

Can you imagine making that promise – that you’ll take on that promise of bringing God’s salvation in your lifetime, through your work?

Who does that?

I read a lot of commentary on this story this week, and most of the scholars and bloggers I ran across seemed convinced that the point of this story is that Joseph is a perfectly ordinary man, so Jesus was born into a perfectly ordinary family – messy, full of failures and misunderstandings and mistakes – normal.

And that’s true.

But there are hints, here and there, of the opposite.

If you had your Bible open right now to the first chapter of Matthew, and you looked just two verses back from where our story started today, at the end of the long and informative genealogical path connecting Jesus to Abraham, you’d see that Joseph is the son of Jacob.

And you’d remember, naturally, that there’s another Joseph, son of Jacob, in the Bible.

And that that Joseph was a dreamer - a dreamer whose dreams made his family uncomfortable, who gets betrayed into exile in Egypt, but by dreaming and interpreting others’ dreams – by making dreams real and dreaming reality –  that Joseph saves a nation, saves his family: saves God’s people, the tribe God blessed to bless the whole wide world.

So perhaps it should not surprise us that this Joseph, son of Jacob, betrothed to Mary, hears God in his dreams, or that this Joseph takes on his role in the work of salvation without comment or question.

Even so, I suspect it wasn’t easy.

I suspect that he was afraid, more than once, when his plans went awry, and he found himself swimming in uncertainty, as he was sent here and there around the earth by dreams; 

as he was raising this child, who undoubtedly did every one of the things children do that makes parents question themselves and their choices - and then some, with the whole child-of-God thing going on.

I suspect he was afraid, and uncertain, in big ways, and in those little ways where you don’t realize until later that your discomfort or anger or indecision was fear, over and over and over again, and that he had to learn to remember his dreams, and to be not afraid.

Or at least to act like he wasn’t afraid:
to act as though he could – by adopting God’s choices as his own – make God’s salvation real, here and now, as he was making this child his own.

And that’s love.

Not just the sweeping, heart-throbbing feeling, but most of all the work of acting, over and over and over and over again, every day, as if you are not afraid in the midst of uncertainty, and discomfort, and unwelcome change.

Acting as if you feel that heart-melting sweetness, when all you can feel is tired, or hurt, or bored.

Acting as if someone else’s plan is your very own, beloved and welcomed, until your love and dreams make it real.

Somewhere, somehow, your plan for your life will go awry, or it already has.

Someday, somehow, each of us will find ourselves challenged to make right something you didn’t make wrong – in our families, work, or world.

When it happens, you might find yourself swimming in uncertainty, or you might know the gloriously generous thing to do, but be justifiably afraid of what it’s going to cost.

And in one or more of those moments and places, whether you dream it or not, God is whispering, saying, or shouting in your ear,
Do not be afraid.

The new and uninvited life before you is of the Holy Spirit.

Make it your own,

and be part of saving my people.

When that happens, you don’t have to say Yes, you just have to do it. Just have to love the uninvited guest or the uninvited life that God has put before you, to act as if you are not afraid, act as if God’s choice is your very own, over and over and over and over again, in daily actions, great and small.

And someday in the future, when the time comes to tell your part in God’s salvation story, the commentators and the preachers will point out that you’re a perfectly ordinary person, normal, like us, a perfect example of how we can do this too.

But the story will also be full of hints about how you’re actually extraordinary, how you’ve been chosen by God for exactly this,

because you have.

So as God’s chosen, my friends, like Joseph,

what will you do?