A Beautiful Christmas Story

We don’t know how it happened, not really. Many struggle with believing it is factual all together. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to explain it. How did Mary come to be the mother of Emmanuel, God with us? The science of the day did not understand conception. We can go into that later, at Fellowship Coffee, if you’re interested. The science of today requires a miracle to explain the mechanics.

Since early in the 2^nd Century, Christians have affirmed, first in the Apostles’ Creed, then in the creeds that followed that we believe in Jesus Christ, God’s “only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,”

By 325, at the Council of Nicaea, the faithful were trying to work out exactly who Jesus was: Son of God, only-begotten of the same substance as God the Father, truly God, by whom all things were made, so Jesus is Creator, who came down and was incarnate and was made man. In 381, after more debate at the Council of Constantinople the Nicene Creed was amended to include “incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”

There are Biblical scholars who point out that Matthew’s goal in writing is to connect the dots for Jewish people in the late 1^st Century, he’s writing sometime around 80-90, so 50 years or so after Jesus’s lifetime on earth, that Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament. One of those prophecies is the passage from Isaiah that Nic read this morning. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, read “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” The problem that Biblical scholars raise is that the original text, in Hebrew, does not use the Hebrew word for “virgin.” It uses the word for “young woman.”

I happen to have no problem believing that God, who created the laws of the universe, who determined the patterns that all life would follow, who set into motion the processes and systems that support and bring forth life, I have no problem believing that God can suspend them or do a different thing.

I agree with German Reformed theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s assessment in his work The Way of Christ. The goal for Matthew and Luke “is not to report a gynaecoloigcal miracle. Their aim is to confess Jesus as the messianic Son of God and to point at the very beginning of his life to the divine origin of his person” (Moltmann, 82).

Fully human. Fully divine. We can’t understand it. We aren’t supposed to. The beautiful part of this story is that Joseph couldn’t either. There’s a fun clip that I watched again this week – of the nativity scene in Nate Bargatze’s Nashville Christmas. The “angel Nate” shares with excitement that there will be lots of songs about Christmas – mostly about snow and winter fun, but some borning ones about Jesus, and some about Mary, and the wise men, and Joseph asks – And me? To which Angel Nate just shakes his head, no.

We don’t tend to pay much attention to Joseph, but his story is the one that teaches us the most about how we welcome Jesus in our lives.

Matthew tells us that Joseph is a righteous man. He tries to live according to the law of Moses, to do the right thing, to seek to do God’s will as he makes his way through his day-to-day decisions and interactions. He’s a good guy, an upright man. Trustworthy. Respectable.

He has entered an arrangement to be married. His family and Mary’s family are compatible socio-economically. He is trained as a carpenter and has started working. She is young, still lives in her father’s house, but in a year will be of marriageable age. The agreement has been formalized. They are betrothed.

Everything is really going well for Joseph. Lots to be excited about, thankful for. And then the news comes. Mary has been found to be with child. Bringing shame on both their families. He can make a public display of her and protect his family’s reputation just a bit. According to Old Testament law, he could have her stoned

Presbyterian pastor Rev. Tom Long writes about Joseph as a model for the Christian life. “He learns that being truly righteous does not mean looking up a rule in a book and then doing the ‘right thing’; it means wrestling with the complexities of a problem, listening for the voice of God and then doing God’s thing. To be a faithful disciple means prayerfully seeking to discover what God is doing in the difficult situations we face.”

He decides to divorce her quietly. The rumors will still be whispered, his family will also bear the shame, his honor and future will be damaged, but it is the most kind thing he can do. Joseph is righteous and compassionate.

Matthew doesn’t record for us how Joseph wrestled. He doesn’t record Joseph’s prayers. We don’t get told about the conversations he had with other faithful people he respected about what he should do. It is the answer that we receive. Surely, he wasn’t sleeping well, and as he tossed and turned, he dreamed. God’s messenger appears to him and assures him that he need not fear to take Mary as his wife. The child she bears is Emmanuel, God with us. And is to be named by Joseph, the sign to the community that Joseph accepts him as his son.

His name is to be Jesus, “the Lord saves,” for he will save humanity from their sins.

Joseph understands what true righteousness means. He receives the message God sends and joins “with God to do God’s work in the world” (Long, WBC, 14). “When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the messenger of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him – Jesus.”

A son is given and received. The boundary between divine and human blurs and mingles. Not in a way that we can explain or document. In a way that we can only receive.

It is a beautiful story – Christ is born. Emmanuel – God – has come to live with us, as one of us.