Joseph's Yes

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday of Advent , December 18, 2022, by the Rev. Holly Huff.

Especially in this pregnant season of Advent, we talk a lot about Mary. Mother of our Lord, Theotokos, the God-Bearer, she shows us the blessed possibility of a human being entrusting herself to God’s care in every moment. When the angel appears with a stunning message, Mary says yes to God wanting to be born in her: “Let it be with me according to your word.” Pondering the angel’s message in her heart, Mary embodies it with her life, lives it out into the world, as the mother of Jesus. The word is made flesh from her flesh; God takes up our human nature through her human nature. And she invites us to do likewise: say yes to God wanting to be born in us, too, now. “Let it be with me according to your word.” 

So we talk a lot about Mary, and Mary’s yes, and rightly so. Joseph is a quieter figure, steadily standing to the side in the manger scene. Today’s passage from Matthew reminds us that Joseph too says yes, Joseph too is interrupted by an angelic message and surrenders his life to God’s strange and beautiful work squirming its way in like a fussy baby, dissolving all his plans. 

Some lament Joseph’s absence from the spotlight, but I suspect Joseph is just fine with this arrangement. Joseph’s great virtue is humility. Being humble is not to think badly of ourselves or, God forbid, to make a great show of our deference and self-denial, calling attention to how very humble we are! Yikes. As C.S. Lewis put it, “A really humble man…will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” Humility is an openness to the truth, the truth of our dependence on God in every moment, and a willingness to allow what God is actually giving us, right here, right now, to overwrite all our sweet stories about who we think we are and how we think our life should go. 

When Mary turns up pregnant, Joseph starts making plans to quietly dismiss his apparently unfaithful fiancée. He doesn’t want to expose her to public disgrace, so he’ll just dismiss her quietly. Let’s consider that for a moment. He’s not going to make a show of rejecting her, he’ll dismiss her quietly. What are our own habits of quiet dismissal, all the ways we say to parts of the One Body, “I have no need of you”? How do you and I habitually exhibit this sort of callousness to the world around us and insensitivity to the claim made on us by the Others who surround us? Quiet dismissal shows up as a subtle form of arrogance, thinking we know what our lives should be, quietly dismissing, hardly even seeing all the forms of reality springing up before us when they don’t align with our own predetermined story. 

Joseph, making plans to quietly dismiss Mary, has just resolved to do this—when he has a dream, which we hear of in today’s gospel. An angel has a message for him. “Do not be afraid”—this is always the calling card of the angels. “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. 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.” In this dream space beyond the thinking mind’s usual forms of calculation and attempts to control, Joseph hears not just the words of the angel but truly hears God’s invitation to him and he does not dismiss it but says yes. Yes, he will welcome what is before him; yes, he will be faithful and steady; he says yes as he offers himself to his wife and to this child for whom he stands in the place of parent. 

(Incidentally Joseph shows us the beauty of all adoptive parents and step-parents and surrogate parents who from a place of steady and faithful humility learn to honor and care for and love this child, just as they are. Freed from the commonplace illusion that one’s children belong to them because they made them, a beautiful non-possessive love can arise.)

So Joseph says yes. He lays aside his picture of himself, his plans for his life, the stories of who he thinks he should be. He disregards what others may think or say about him, and says yes to the strange and beautiful thing God is doing, unexpected as it is. He plays his part in it faithfully, nevermind that it is a background part forever destining him to rub shoulders with smelly shepherds and oxen in the creche. This man we call Joseph the Worker does the work he is given to do not out of grinding duty but with simplicity and care because it is simply given to him. “Let it be with me according to your word” in another guise, lived out in the particularity of Joseph.

Joseph embodies true humility by opening to God’s purposes, releasing all need for control and for credit. He lets the angel’s message dissolve his plans, wash away what he had resolved to do and open a new way forward: life as it is giving itself to him in that moment. There is no difference at all between life giving itself to us in each moment and God giving Godself to us in each moment. When we live from quiet dismissal, what we miss is that we are dismissing, snubbing, and shooing away the Christ child himself, Emmanuel, “God with us” in every moment. When we harden ourselves, resolving to do what we’ve planned on our own, we miss God coming to us, right now in the unexpected gift of our life just as sideways as it is. 

That’s what the wonderful collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent calls “your daily visitation,” and it is this visitation, God’s coming to us, that will purify us; not our own efforts but Almighty God’s daily visitation will day by day carve out space from our small constricting stories of self and deliver us into the promised land where we have space to receive what is given. Jesus visits us daily. He’s not “just” visiting, not popping in for coffee before heading out again. But he comes to us, daily, with all the royal formality implied by visitation. He honors us by coming near, not despising our humanity but taking it up, inhabiting it, assuming it utterly to infuse every inch of it with divine presence. We have been Visited. This is no houseguest who comes to visit and goes away again. We are visited, and visited and visited, day after day, moment by moment. 

Emmanuel, God is with us. Can we hear that, I wonder? “God is with you” sounds trite when applied as a Band-Aid for suffering, usually by those uncomfortable with grief. It veers into that awful genre of Hallmark-isms along with “God needed another angel,” “They’re in a better place now” and any condolence that begins with the words “Well, at least…” Such platitudes are pious forms of quiet dismissal, ways of renouncing grief and shielding ourselves when other people’s pain threatens to shake our hearts, too. Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” “All works of love are works of peace.” We fear to enter each other’s pain, and yet it’s already shared: we belong to each other. As part of Christ’s one Body we rejoice together and we mourn together, not in a way that is forced but utterly naturally. What happens to one of us happens to us all, and as we surrender our hearts to the love always offered to us wearing away and dissolving all our plans and preconceptions and the false boundaries of a supposedly separate self, we find the love of neighbor naturally welling up. Love your neighbor as your very self. Your neighbor is part of your very self. We belong to each other. Grafted into the Body of Christ as Paul describes in the letter to the Romans, we have all been “called to belong to Jesus Christ,” and in the unity of that Body we find that “All suffering is like my suffering; all joy is like my joy.” If you want to tell someone in pain, “God is with you,” and have it ring true, you’ve got to back it up with a Joseph-like steadiness and humility—not dismissing but attending, willing to be by their side. I am with you, too. “We belong to each other.” 

God is with us, and by opening ourselves to this daily visitation in the stuff of our life exactly as it is giving itself to us in this moment, we can tap into a pure compassion that is grounded and strong. Not a flimsy empathy sourced in sentiment, always liable to be overwhelmed by the enormous grief of the world, but the bedrock reality of love that is abiding and strong. Emmanuel is our compassion, God with us: with us in pain, with us in extremity, in sickness and fear and death, with us in every limit situation where we’ve come to the end of all we know how to do and be. 

That accompaniment, that daily visitation is the one sure place, our rock and refuge through all we weather in this life. Receiving this Visitor, we practice turning toward our life, welcoming this moment with the humility of Joseph, trusting God is in it, not dismissing but saying Yes, receiving each day as the daily bread we know it is.