4 Advent A
Transcribed from a
sermon given on
December 22,2013
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Joseph was a good and righteous
man, someone who loved God, and yet he was asked to do a very ungodly thing. By
any righteous conception a man should not be asked to marry a woman who is pregnant
with a child that is not his own. What a thing to ask of someone.
He was considering himself to be
righteous and compassionate by just setting her aside quietly. Maybe sending
her off somewhere else for a while because of the potential humiliation. He didn’t
want to punish her, which is saying a lot for a man who is engaged and
discovers that his wife is six months pregnant, and not with his child. Most
men would be quite angry and want her to be punished. And back in that culture
it was even more so that way. She deserved to be punished. But he was a
righteous man. He had compassion.
And then in a dream an angel sent
from God asks him to do something that is ungodly, unlike what a godly man
would do - marry her. To marry a woman who is not just suspected of being with
other men, but a woman who is pregnant. To take a child that is not his own and,
by marrying her, accepting it as his own child. What a humiliation. What a
breach of honor to him and to his family. But you have think back to what is
was like in such a different culture. Even if it was his physical child it
would be a humiliation because it would say that he acted inappropriately by
being with her before the wedding day.
What a thing for God to ask. But
then that is the way God is. God seems to ask God’s friends to do outrageous
things. If you look at scripture you find over and over again all the heroes of
scripture have been asked by God to do outrageous things. Go all the way back
to Noah building an ark in the middle of the dessert, with everybody laughing
at him. And then Moses who had escaped from Egypt, just managing to get out of
there before getting caught and punished for having killed an Egyptian. God
says to him that he should go back, and don’t just go back, go back and go
right up to Pharaoh who is after you and tell him to let the slaves free. You have
to remember that in that culture the slaves were the foundation of the whole
economy. That would be like going to the head of General Motors and saying pay
all your workers four times as much as you currently do and get rid of all your
machines. Moses tried to get out of it. He said “I don’t speak very well.” And “Pick
somebody else.” But God loved him too much to pick someone else to do that job.
Over and over again we have
stories like that. We have Joseph, the namesake of the Joseph the father of
Jesus. The first Joseph who was the youngest son of Abraham. He also was a
dreamer and had important dreams. He had a dream in which all of his brothers
were bowing down to him, and he made the mistake of telling his brothers about
this dream, which made the brothers quite angry. It ended up with the brothers
selling him into slavery in Egypt. God asks really strange things of people.
But Joseph eventually was able to say it was a good thing that this happened because
he was able to predict the famine, and he was able to save his family who were
hungry and starving. It was God at work through a quite difficult life.
God is no less unexpected in how
he treats the people of the new Testament. Once again asking them to do ungodly
things. We have the story in Acts of Peter having this vision of a great sheet
on which all the animals of the earth, all the unclean animals, the animals
that Jewish people are not suppose to eat, and a voice says, “Peter go and eat.”
And Peter responds, “I don’t eat those kinds of animals. I’ve never eaten those
animals. I don’t do that.” Three times told to go and consume unclean animals,
food which a Jewish person is not supposed to eat. To do something that
appeared very ungodly, that would make him unclean. That would make him not a
pure Jew. And yet the vision asks him to do that, and he realized he was being
asked to open himself to the Gentiles and open Christianity to the Gentiles. He
did not want to do that. That was not a godly thing in his mind. It was
certainly not what he would have expected God to ask of him.
And then of course we have Paul.
Paul who was well trained in his religion. He knew as much about God as
anybody. He knew what God would think and do, and he was sure that God didn’t
like the Christians so he was working hard to get rid of them. Until on the way
to Damascus he was kicked off of his Donkey and blinded and became the greatest
spokesman for the Christian faith. A very ungodly thing to do in his old way of
understanding God.
God keeps asking people to do
things they don’t expect, to break our expectations, because there is a danger
when we have expectations of God. The best quote I found about it was from Sr.
Laurel O’Neal who wrote, “God is constantly breaking open our expectations in
order that they do not become calcified as religion.” Interesting way of
thinking about expectations.
When we have clear expectations
of God it can become ridged, and become a ridged sort of religion instead of an
experience of the living God. Because, you see, God is constantly changing. God
is being and doing. God is not static. If God were static, God would not be immortal.
Immortality means constant change. When something stops changing it is dying.
God is becoming. Who was, and is and is to be. God is change. So any time we
think we know what God is going to do or what God wants, God comes along and
surprises us.
When I was in seminary we enjoyed
this joke. The question is how do you make God laugh? How do you make God
laugh? Tell God your plans. My friends at seminary did not plan to be in seminary.
It was a surprise for all of us in one way or another.
We think we know what we are
going to do. We think we know where we are going to be. We think we know what
God wants of us. We think we know what we ought to do. And God laughs - because
God has much better plans, much more interesting plans, for each and every one
of us.
Christmas is a wonderful
opportunity to think about breaking out of our expectations. It celebrates a
moment of God breaking into the world in a new It celebrates a new way of
knowing God through a little child, through a human being. It is a wonderful
time to remember that.
It is also a time when we carry a
lot of expectations about what Christmas is suppose to be. We make comparisons
to the Christmas of the past, and to the Christmases of the Christmas cards or the
TV shows. We all have idea of what Christmas is supposed to be. But often it
doesn’t live up to what our expectations are for Christmas. Sometimes we may be
alone at Christmas and that is not what we think it is supposed to be about. Or
we may have a family that gets together and doesn’t get along very well. But on
TV they always seem to work it out by the end of the hour. Or maybe you
suffered some deep lose during the past year and that lose becomes more magnified
by all the joy around you.
This Christmas as you have your
expectations and your plans look forward to God breaking into them - breaking
apart your expectations and coming to you in a new way that you have never
expected. Be ready for God making Godself known in unexpected and glorious ways
as his love comes to us and guides us and invites us to be different than
anything we ever expected.
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