Note: Due to technical issues we are only able to post part of the worship service
I imagine that Joseph had seen some sleepless nights. Here he was in the middle of planning a wedding with his beloved and betrothed, when out of the blue she tells him she is expecting, and they both know it’s not his child. She’d even told him that the child had no earthly father—something about an angel and the Holy Spirit overshadowing her—but he hadn’t heard much of anything she’d said after those two words, “a baby.”
He didn’t know how to feel or what to do. He knew what custom dictated he was “supposed to do,” what the law said he had every right to do. But then, even if her life was spared, it would in many ways still be over: disgraced, banished to the shadows, to say nothing of the child.
He had asked her to give him some time and it had been a few days longer than he’d intended, but late one night as he was finally closing down his shop—he’d been working non-stop since she’d told him the news, couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stop moving—in a state of exhaustion, he decided that he couldn’t go through with it, any of it. He’d break off the engagement, but do it quietly. “Be merciful, as your heavenly father is merciful,” was what his father had always taught him, what he hoped to teach his children someday. Maybe he’d help her parents send her off to visit her cousin down in the hill country, where she could have the baby in quiet. Maybe. But he would go and tell her all this in the morning.
And so with the knot still very much in his stomach, but for the first time since she told him the news, he was able to sleep on a cot right there on the floor of his shop. And that’s where it happened.
I.
Usually around this time of year, when we speak of “the Annunciation,” we think of the scene from the Gospel of Luke of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary and revealing to her what God has in store. Even the church year celebrates that event with Mary as The Annunciation, which comes every year on March 25th (you can do the math on how they arrived at that date).
And as beautiful as the Annunciation to Mary is, it’s easy for the Annunciation to Joseph to be overshadowed, so to speak. He’s the quieter member of the holy family, staying more in the background, rarely showing up in Advent banners, and always getting mixed up with the shepherds when you unbox your nativity set, a friend once joked. And to tell the truth, the church has always struggled with exactly what to do with Joseph—a struggle you can even see in scripture.
His story is recorded only here in Matthew. Luke mentions Joseph almost in passing in his account. John mentions him only twice, when others refer to Jesus as “Joseph’s son.” Mark doesn’t mention him at all by name, simply calling him “the carpenter,” nor do any of the other books of the New Testament. And even in the Gospel of Matthew, an argument can be made that his main purpose is to connect Jesus with the lineage of David—an important detail in making the case for Jesus being the Messiah.
But is that all Joseph is good for? His pedigree? Was Joseph’s only gift to the child Jesus a good, solid name to take with him, even when everyone knew he wasn’t his true father? (If that’s even the right term.) This is a part of the story we don’t often discuss in children’s Sunday school. In fact, for all the ways our Christmas celebrations are often “for the children,” you may have found yourselves thinking, as these verses from Matthew were read, that while this story is about a child, there are parts of it that really are not for children. And so these parts are easy to avoid altogether because they happen—like so much of life—in between the verses themselves, where the words themselves are silent.
II.
It’s like that classic closing scene from the movie The Graduate, when Benjamin Braddock, played by a young Dustin Hoffman, dramatically breaks up the wedding of his former girlfriend, Elaine, the daughter of the infamous Mrs. Robinson. He makes it to the church just in time to see Elaine kiss her new husband at the altar, and in shock, starts to scream her name and bang on the glass window at the back of the church. Startled, she ponders these things for an extended beat before calling back to him, and running to meet him, and they both fight off the wedding party, and finally her parents, pushing their way out of the church to the street in time to flag down a city bus, which they quickly board, climbing past the other passengers, he wrapped in the train of her wedding dress, until they finally take their seat on the back row. They laugh and smile at the other passengers, who stare at them blankly, and the bus begins to drive off.
But as it does, the camera is fixed on the two of them, she in her white wedding gown, his hair disheveled, and the euphoria of what they’ve just done gives way to the uncertainty of what happens next. Their countenance changes, and they take turns looking at each other, their eyes always missing. The bus drives on away from the camera, and the screen fades to black as Simon and Garfunkel sing The Sound of Silence.
It’s completely unsettling. And yet what happens after those seminal moments, in life as in scripture? What happened after the euphoria of the angels’ visits and the young couple’s decision to go through with it all? Of course, we know how the story ends, but what about what happens in the middle? How much life is lived in between the notches in the timeline?
Did those questions and concerns Joseph must have had disappear? What happened when people started to talk?—and people always start to talk. What happened maybe even weeks after the birth, late one night when the baby’s crying and the holy couple had one of those silly arguments that any newly married couple would have, especially when you have a newborn and you’re both half-crazy from sleep deprivation, and things get a little overheated and stuff that you thought was dead and buried gets resurrected and someone says something they don’t really mean—Did the angel tell you that too?
Or a moment in time recorded in scripture, when the young boy Jesus runs off to the temple and his parents think he’s lost and look everywhere for him, and when they finally find him, Mary says, Son, what are you trying to do to us? Your father and I were worried sick?! And he tells them, Didn’t you know I would be in my real Father’s house? Or is that how Joseph heard it?
We know what kind of blessing God gave the grown man Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan—This is my son, my beloved, in whom I’m well pleased. Did Joseph ever offer a similar blessing, I wonder? What was it? What did it mean, for both of them?
III.
Scripture doesn’t tell us any of this, but it’s there. If the incarnation is truly the incarnation, God “becoming flesh,” then it’s there. It’s not always pretty, but this is how God chose to come down to dwell among us: through a family, of all things. A family that we may well call the “holy family,” but was also, we must say, a blended family, which at times, I can tell you, feels like a family that’s gone through a blender. They may all be sainted by the church now, but we can be sure this family was still made up of humans, with all the same flaws and sensitivities and struggles and silences as your family or my family—maybe even more of them, truth be told, given the circumstances. But God redeems all of them, all of us, all the same.
There were no halos at that first manger scene or those tumultuous days leading up to it; there were just people, feeling their way through God’s dream for their lives and for the world. Just a baby, and its mother, and just a little left of center, just off the banner, her husband, Joseph, the other parent. Raising a child who was not his as his own, like so many others. The bearer of that special kind of love, strong enough to mend what has been broken, to bridge distances that once seemed too great to ever be traveled, to add something essential that was not even known to be missing. Right there in the Christmas story, a model for all the forms love, and parental love especially, can take.
And so it may be that it’s through Joseph that we can find our own way into the Christmas story, a story that, the older we get, can be hard to get to. There may be whole Christmases when we’re content to be onlookers, casually glancing at the nativity scene as we walk by to other things. But there will be other years—maybe this year—when we will feel compelled, or find ourselves able to conjure up the imagination needed, to place ourselves within it.
There may be Christmases when you find yourself among the magi: following a hunch, seeing where it takes you, not coming entirely prepared, and showing up a few days late—but you’re here, God bless you. Other years, you may be out among the shepherds, minding your own business, tending your own flock, when all of a sudden and before you can object, an angel descends upon you and leads you unexpectedly into the light.
There may even be times when you feel a kinship with Mother Mary herself. God’s favored one, covered in the Holy Spirit, bearing Christ into the world. Those times when you feel especially alive and included in what God is doing in the world. They don’t come around all that often, but praise God when they do.
But it may be more often the case that you find yourself in Joseph. The one who is with “the one who God is with.” Doing your best to find your place in a story you’re not sure is your own. Maybe not always knowing exactly what you’re doing, or why, but then a voice comes to you with the words you needed to hear: You’re right where you’re supposed to be.
The medieval church had a special Latin name for Joseph. They called him Nutritor Domini, which means “Provider of the Lord,”1 which, on the one hand, refers to Joseph’s role as the breadwinner in the family. But there’s also a more intimate sense to this title. Nutritor is the uncommon male form of a much more common female word, nutrix, which means “wet-nurse,” someone who stands in for the mother in breastfeeding a baby. So in a sense, this is what they called Joseph, the “wet-nurse” to the Lord, assisting Mary, doing everything he can to care for this child, and maybe even standing in for God.
IV.
The Christmas story tells of a love that’s hard to imagine. The creator of the universe coming down in the form of a delicate, precious, helpless little baby. And if at times over these next few days all of this is too much for you—if incarnation seems too mysterious, or the wondrous love of God too impossible, consider the love of Joseph, the other parent.
Provider, wet-nurse, of the Lord. Father to Jesus in the most loving sense, but not in every sense. Doing what he can and what he must to bear God’s love into the world. Finding his place in a story he never could have dreamt for himself, but now that it’s here, wouldn’t have any other way. Start with the love of Joseph and see where it takes you. You’ll find that all the rest of it’s not that big a leap after all.
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1 Quinn Caldwell, All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. p. 86-87. His meditation for December 19 was very helpful in inspiring this closer look at Joseph.