Having preached on this passage many times, It’s hard not to come into it without preexisting ideas. It is, however, among my favorite stories in all Scripture. I’m not sure what it is about it, but I am strangely drawn to it. I wonder if it is that if I were to be a Biblical character, I think I would be one of the Magi.

Other than my early childhood years, I was brought up outside of the church. By the time I was of confirmation age, I knew little to nothing about Jesus, had never read the Bible, and wouldn’t know how to even if I wanted to. I was basically brought up to be a good agnostic. But within all of that, I have always had a strong sense of wonder and a strong sense that there is something bigger out there.

As a child and a teenager, I was hungry for spirituality. As an elementary aged kid, I would go to Mass with my best friend down the street when I slept over at his house on Saturday nights. It didn’t bother me at all. I loved the costumes, the sets, the pageantry, the ornate building, and the strange rituals, even though I understood none of it. I remember sitting in the pew looking up the big domed ceiling wondering what it was all about.

Later on in life, I remember participating in Shabbat and then going to Talmud-Torah class the following morning when I slept over at my Jewish friend’s house on Friday nights. Again, I was lost (especially since this time it was literally in a different language), but when those candles were lit and prayers were spoken, I was hooked. I wanted to be a part of whatever this was. Then I remember feeling more lost than ever the following Saturday morning being in a room full of 5th graders who were begrudgingly learning a strange language that connected them to a massive story. Don’t get me wrong, it was boring, but there was something there that I knew I was missing. I wanted to be connected to a bigger story like they were.

Enter the Magi: Outsiders. Mystics. Aliens… but true, authentic seekers. They had no business going to see the Christ child. They were gentiles. But they’re knowledge of some prophecies, an innate curiosity, and a spirit of wonder and adventure compelled them to go, to move, to seek. “They looked up and saw a star/ Shining in the East beyond them far”, the old carol sings. Don’t we all want to belong to and have the courage to follow “something beyond us far”?

Ultimately it was a star that led me too. I was an unchurched, agnostic who found himself on a mission trip in Mexico. It was in that Mexican desert sky that my agnosticism morphed into something more. That sky told me there was something bigger, and I did indeed belong to it. It wasn’t just for the robes, copes, and wafers of the Catholic faithful or just for the candlelight meals of the Hebrew speaking chosen. No, it was for me too. But how? How would I connect to it? In what forms would I express it?

For the magi, it was frankincense, gold, and myrrh. For me, well, I don’t know. The form just doesn’t matter to me anymore. I just want to be like the Magi, who broke through outer courts of religion and into the simplicity of a manger to get a glimpse of the Christ-child and give to him what they had. That’s me. Just a boy, strangely drawn to Jesus by the night sky, still journeying to find him, and give him whatever I have. As Christina Rosetti wrote in her beautiful hymn In The Bleak Midwinter:

Right on the heels of the genealogy, we move into Matthew’s telling of the birth of Christ. In the Gospel of Luke, we get a lot about Mary, the angel Gabriel’s words to her, the conception and birth of John the Baptist, and, of course, the most full telling of Jesus’ birth. But Joseph is largely absent. In fact, in the events leading up to the birth, his name is only mentioned once, nearly in passing (1:27).

But in Matthew, he takes center stage in the narrative, though he’s never quoted. And he’s in a tough spot: Mary is pregnant with a child from the Holy Spirit, but this story is not going to fly with the world around them. At best people will think she is pregnant by Joseph prior to their wedding, which is not good for either them. And at worst people will believe that Mary became pregnant through a man other than Joseph and that will lead to greater marginalization, particularly for Mary.

Joseph, however, can save himself. In this grossly sexist and oppressive culture he can claim he never had sex with her, making her an adulteress (because once you’re engaged, you’re pretty much committed in that culture), and then he can move on with his life. This is the option he chooses, however he decides to do it “quietly” so as to minimize the public shame Mary is certain to incur. But not so fast Joseph.

An angel appears to him and basically says, “no, Joseph. You’re in this too.” And he sticks with it. He’s in a tough spot. He is called to enter into this but to do essentially as a step-father. I feel for him. I really do. He’s kind of cast aside, made to go along with a plan in which he has little power, little voice, and an uncertain future.

There is a lot to this little story in Matthew 1 (Emmanual/”God is with us”, naming the child, Joseph’s faithfulness…), but as I read it anew there’s a part of me that says, “it’s about time”. It’s about time a man took the back seat in the narrative in the Bible. It’s happened before, but it’s rare. It’s a common theme when reading the birth stories of Jesus: “Poor Joseph. He’s so in the background… He doesn’t even say a word in the story… He gets little to no glory…” Yet we rarely if ever say that about any women in any stories in the Bible.

So let’s let Joseph sit in the back seat. Let’s let Mary take center stage and be the Holy Mother. Let’s let Joseph be put into the position of a servant, called to go along with it and relinquish some of his own reputation and wellbeing for the sake of Mary’s call. In this sense, let’s let Joseph be the “pastor’s wife”. Let’s not try to lift up Joseph and what a great guy he is to have his life altered because of his partner.

And, men, as culture continues to progress, at whatever pace, let’s practice taking on the spirit of Joseph by being okay with being in the background. let’s relinquish our privilege and submit to the leadership of the women around us whose ideas, thoughts, strategies, and power have been minimized and dismissed for too long. Let’s let go of the reins we so fiercely cling to. Because, well, it’s Mary’s time.

Poor, poor Joseph. Nah. He’ll be fine. And so will we.

I first began to read the Bible as a doubting, skeptical teenager determined to show my Evangelical friends what fools they were. I knew enough about the Bible to know that the New Testament was where the talk about Jesus began, but didn’t know enough to know that I didn’t need to start at the beginning. So I started at the beginning of the New Testament, which is, of course, Matthew 1:1. The first passage of Scripture I ever read was 17 verses of names I couldn’t read. What a snooze-fest. Stereotype confirmed.

But I was also brought up to read thoroughly and closely so I didn’t dismiss it, but I could not derive any meaning from it. It took me decades of Christianity to come up with any reason why the writers of the Gospel would waste such precious parchment space on this. It wasn’t until I took a class on Matthew in seminary that I realized that if you look at who those names are, you see that each one of them has a story, and those stories aren’t always so pretty, the most striking example to me being “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…” (1:6). The writer goes out of their way to remind us that David raped another man’s wife and then killed the man, and that’s part of Jesus’ history.

Except that it’s also not part of Jesus’ history, which leads to another reason these verses are so important that they are included in and even open the Gospel: They are not part of Jesus’ history because Jesus does not fall into the messianic bloodline. According to the story, Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, but Joseph is the one from the “line of David”, not Mary. If we are trying to establish that Jesus is the Messiah (which Matthew is), we have a very serious problem from the very beginning. Jesus doesn’t meet the qualifications.

But I suppose, then, one could make an argument that neither does David. Because you see, David’s great-grandmother Ruth was a gentile. That doesn’t quite work either. In fact, the genealogy is fraught with problematic stuff. But yet it gets to “Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.” If Matthew wants to convince people that Jesus is the Messiah, why does he not only open with this but even point out the problems?

Perhaps it’s this: The story all along has been flawed. It’s imperfect. The need by much of traditional Christianity to make Jesus and the circumstances around his “messiahship” perfect actually hurt the story. For all its “ugly”, one of the places where I find beauty in the Biblical narrative is in its humanity. Things don’t always work out. Just like life. God comes to us in the flesh and it’s messy and confusing, and though the prophecies are “fulfilled” they are not fulfilled so perfectly that it’s the end (nor the beginning) of their fulfillment. The idea that God is with us is an idea that has existed and will continue to exist throughout human history and humanity’s future.

Matthew opens up the Gospel exposing just how messy all of it has been all along so that we can enter into the mess more fully rather than try to resist it and clean it up. This is a theme that we will see throughout the Gospel: Who belongs, who counts, who matters is one big beautiful mess. There are not clean lines, praise God. Matthew opens the Gospel with a mess and it is that mess that Jesus will step into, and even expand, throughout the Gospel. The Kingdom of God is at hand. And it’s messy.

In 2016 Aldersgate United Methodist Church began a four journey into the New Testament’s Gospels by taking “A Look at Luke”. Last year we were “Abiding in John”. And this Christmas, 2018, we will launch our next in the Gospel series, “Moving Through Matthew”. Daily readings will begin on January 6th and will run up until Easter (which is late this year! And that’s a good thing, because this is the longest Gospel!). I will also be blogging daily, but I must confess, I will be cheating a little. I did a daily blog on Matthew in 2013, but I’ve always wanted to edit it. So though the daily blog for this series will come from old work, I will be fine tuning, tweaking, and changing things along the way.

So join us in the daily readings (a bookmark with the reading list will be available at and after our Christmas Eve service). Join us on the daily blog right here. And join us for the weekly sermon series (based off of Working Preacher’s Narrative Lectionary) at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in St. Louis Park, MN! Join us in “Moving Through Matthew”!

 

Aldersgate United Methodist Church is an inclusive, intergenerational community committed to making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. We believe that God loves, honors, and celebrates all people regardless of age, race, nation, gender identity, background, sexual orientation, abilities, or socio-economic position. We believe that God calls us to embody God’s radical love by cultivating a space free from harassment, judgment, hate, or discrimination.