4th Sunday of Advent
Matthew 1:18-25
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. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 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. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by God through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of God commanded. He took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.
Expect the Unexpected
A few months after my ordination, I had the honor of officiating my sister’s wedding. I only got choked up once, right at the very end when I pronounced them married, but I rallied, and was able to present them as a couple to the people who were there, and to the folks joining us through Zoom.
The way we had set up the Zoom meeting was just a normal Zoom meeting because we didn’t expect a ton of people, and we didn’t think our online guests would get up to any shenanigans. But, the way Zoom works is, of all of the cameras that are feeding into the meeting, and as far as Zoom was concerned, the camera at the wedding was just another camera, whichever camera is picking up the most noise is the camera that everyone that everyone gets to watch.
Now everyone on Zoom was supposed to be muted, and they weren’t supposed to be able unmute themselves. But somehow, my brother-in-law’s family in Chicago managed to do just that. So, after Max stomped on the glass, because his family is Jewish, and everyone shouted “Mazel tov,” the Chicago group started cheering and singing, and we all heard them, even though we weren’t supposed to be able to. So, everyone who was watching online ended up watching the group in Chicago for the rest of the ceremony, instead of watching the wedding. But, as I’ve been told by many people, it’s not really a wedding if something unexpected doesn’t happen, so you just have to have a sense of humor about these things.
A lot of times, we associate “the unexpected” with things going wrong, with things happening in ways that we didn’t want for them to happen. Unexpected things often make people upset or anxious. Sometimes there’s crying, and not the good kind, especially when things go wrong at a wedding.
Can you imagine what it must have been like for Joseph, to receive the unexpected news that his fiancé was pregnant? He must have been upset. After all, if not for the dream that God sent him, which in itself was another unexpected event, he wouldn’t have gone through with the wedding at all. And, in a culture where men had all of the power, and women had none, in a culture that told him he had every right to walk away from that situation, Joseph is named as righteous, because he stayed by Mary’s side. And, Matthew sets us up to understand just how unexpected that was.
Our gospel reading starts with verse 18, but if we look at the beginning of gospel, chapter 1, verses 1 through 17, we see that Matthew has laid out Jesus’ lineage, or at least Joseph’s lineage, Jesus’ legal father. The list focuses on the men, of course, because of the time that it was written, but there are a few women mentioned here, and a couple of them are kind of surprising. We have Tamar, who was mistreated by her father-in-law, Judah, because he believed that she was to blame for the death of two of his sons. And, we have Bathsheba, though she isn’t even mentioned by name, maybe because her story is a little too scandalous? We all know about King David spying on her as she bathed on her rooftop, and his subsequent plotting to have her husband killed. It’s practically a plotline from Desperate Housewives. It seems like these women were specifically included here to point out how unrighteous these men were, as a counterpoint to Joseph’s decision to do the unexpected righteous thing.
“Unexpected things happen” is probably one of the most prevalent themes of the Bible. Our gospel reading today is full of them, from the unexpected pregnancy, a surprise for both Mary and Joseph, to the unexpected dream, the unexpected decision by Joseph to stay with Mary, someone who based on the culture of the time, he would have had every right to set aside. If Joseph had done the expected thing, if he had done what any other reasonable person would have done in his situation, we would be telling a very different Christmas story right now. We might not be talking about a birth in a manger, and the Joy inherent in that story, despite all of the unexpected surprises and hardships that the people involved in that story had to experience to get there.
My sister’s wedding happened in 2020, during the height of Covid. It was a scary time, a surreal time. I really could not have imagined that I would live through a worldwide pandemic in my lifetime, especially one as devastating as Covid. My sister never intended to get married during a pandemic. She almost couldn’t find a venue because most places didn’t want to host a wedding with a bunch of people gathering together during that time. But, she did find one, and she limited the number of guests to twenty people. And, the wedding was beautiful, and fun, and she was surrounded by people that she loved, and it was a day filled with Joy.
As most of you know, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time. In order to get down to Southern California for the wedding, I drove the nearly 400-miles to my parents’ house in Ventura County. In order to protect the people that I was living with, as well as the congregation at Sleepy Hollow Presbyterian Church, I did a “quarantine road trip” after the wedding, staying in a different motel each night for 6 nights as I slowly made my way back. On the second to last day of the road trip, I saw a sign for Wilder Ranch State Park. I had never heard of Wilder Ranch State Park before, and I hadn’t planned on stopping there, but I decided to check it out. One of the great things about travelling at a leisurely pace is that you get to stop and do pretty much whatever you want to do.
I was really glad that I stopped there because I was blown away by how beautiful it was! There were these sheer cream-colored cliffs that rose up out of the water, with huge waves crashing at the base. Over time, the waves had carved out these little hairpin coves and even a couple of natural bridges, I had no idea the California coast could look like that. The trail ran along the top of the cliffs, and with every cove that I reached, I was surprised by another amazing sight, a dripping cave filled with ferns, enormous tide pools, a group of sleeping harbor seals, and the wonder and beauty of creation just washed over me and I was filled with this sense of joy. And, I realized, I would have never stopped at this park if not for my quarantine road trip. And, even though Covid was terrible, is terrible, and it’s made things so difficult and so tragic for so many people, still, we can always find things to be thankful for, and we can still find those moments of joy.
Encountering the unexpected doesn’t have to mean giving up, or lost opportunities. Sometimes it means getting out of the way so that something better can happen. Sometimes it means accepting that our expectations weren’t necessarily correct.
We always like to say that God works in mysterious ways. That’s just another way of saying “Expect the unexpected.” The Jewish people weren’t expecting their messiah to come in the form of a baby. They were expecting a king, a warrior, someone who could free them from Roman rule and lead them. That’s what they expected when they thought of someone who would “save his people from their sins,” like it says in verse 21. But, verse 23 explains what that actually means, “They shall name him Emmanuel, which means, “God is with us.” Salvation won’t come through power or force, violence or war. Salvation will come through God’s presence with us, through relationship and trust. When Jesus arrived, he didn’t bring with him swords and shields, or an army of heavenly warriors. He brought with him Hope. He brought Peace. He brought Love. And, he brought Joy. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
