I Believe in Love: Daring Right Relationship
Matthew 1:18-25
December 20, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/DBUzIdSjLrY
We have had some memorable Advent seasons together. Of course Advent 2020 is going to be in its own category, but I am thinking about non-pandemic years. You might remember the time that the Advent candles were lit with a sparkler. Or the year that the children found feathers in Little Man’s room. They were obviously feathers from angel’s wings – evidence of the presence of the angels we kept talking about that year. Two memories from last year are the living Advent wreath performed weekly by our Youth and the stars over our heads in the sanctuary.
One of my favorites was back in 2012. That was the year that we had a custom-made backdrop of Bethlehem that stood against the wall behind the communion table. Designed by Jean and painted by several volunteers, it reflected Bethlehem in three time frames – that of Ruth and Jesus and our own time. That season we read the book of Ruth, one chapter each Sunday. Ruth was a foreigner, a Moabite. I spent a good bit of time those first Sundays going over all the reasons why Israelites didn’t usually associate with Moabites, about the enmity between them. I remember overhearing someone in coffee hour who was wondering out loud what was going to happen with Ruth. She didn’t know the story and was absolutely not expecting that Ruth would become the 29 times great grandmother of Jesus. That was going to come as a big surprise in the next week’s sermon. I was very tickled to overhear that little tidbit.
Today, I told Hank he could skip the genealogy that Matthew starts his gospel with. It’s a lot of names, many of whom we don’t recognize, but those of you who were in 2012 will remember that Ruth is in there. That is remarkable, because in Biblical times and even more recently, women’s names are not always recorded. In Biblical times, the family tree was definitely traced through the men. Matthew mostly sticks to that pattern, which is why it is noticeable when he breaks it.
In the line of Jesus’s ancestors, he names four women. There’s Tamar who put herself in the path of her father-in-law Judah so that he would initiate an intimate relationship. That was because he had otherwise refused to provide for her as widows were to be provided for.
Rahab ran a brothel in Jericho. Joshua sent two spies into the city and they ended up at Rahab’s place – go figure. When soldiers came looking for the spies, Rahab hid them, lied to the soldiers, and helped them escape the next night. In return, the Israelites protected her household when they captured Jericho. Rahab ended up marrying one of them.
Ruth, was an immigrant from Moab, who lived in Bethlehem with Naomi, her Israelite mother-in-law. Naomi urged Ruth to meet the wealthy Boaz on the threshing floor after dark. The end of that story was a baby named Obed, who was King David’s grandfather.
And then there is the woman that Matthew doesn’t name. He calls her the “wife of Uriah.” We know her as Bathsheba. But she was Uriah’s wife when King David treated her like she was his, and then arranged for the murder of her husband.
These are the women that Matthew goes out of his way to identify among Jesus’ ancestors. The bumper sticker that says “well-behaved women rarely make history” seems true here, except that it is mostly not the women’s behavior that brings them notoriety.
Baylor professor Beverly Roberts Gaventa says that “each of these women in some way threatens the status quo, and each is in turn threatened by the status quo. For example, [Bathsheba] threatens David with her report that she is pregnant, and he in turn threatens her by bringing about the death of her husband.”[1]
Then Matthew adds Mary’s name to the end of the genealogy. If we are paying attention, we might wonder what it is that Mary has in common with the other women. And we might notice that Mary’s pregnancy threatens Joseph’s honor and that his initial decision, to quietly divorce her, threatens her well-being and that of the child she carries.[2]
Mary has already said yes to the angel. She has a calling, a vocation from God. But what if Joseph doesn’t understand, doesn’t believe. What if Joseph doesn’t say yes to his own calling?
Joseph is a law-abiding person. He knows what the law requires – an investigation, public inquiry. The law exists to protect everyone, to keep evil out of the community. And Joseph respects the law. But Joseph must also be a person of compassion and mercy, because his instinct not to launch an investigation which will humiliate her, but instead to quietly divorce her. This seems the right thing to do.
Until he has a dream in which he is told to marry Mary. That challenges tradition. It requires him to go against his understanding of what is right and moral and just. Maybe he tells himself that it’s just a dream. Not to be taken seriously. Maybe it was his subconscious trying to give him an out, but really, that can’t be the right thing to do, can it?
One scholar says that Joseph builds a response of love in a world of law and tradition.[3] That, it seems to me, is a challenge we all face. What is the loving response? How do we know? Sometimes what is easiest is to pull out the rule book, to lean on tradition, on the way we’ve always done it, on the counsel of our friends. But easiest is not always right, is it? Often, the more loving action is more difficult. And often part of the difficulty is in finding the wisdom to know when to stick with tradition and when to depart from it.
Walter Brueggemann says “God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.” [4]
That is still happening. You and I are still being called to discern wisdom, to allow love to take precedence traditions and conventions.
Every day for the last few months, Jim and I have gone past a house in our neighborhood on our walk. One day, we noticed a Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard. The next day, another sign appeared. This one said “Blue Lives Matter.” It was slightly larger. But the Black Lives sign was still there. So that was interesting. The convention of our time is that people on the opposing sides of political issues cannot work together, cannot compromise on anything. To do so is to give in, to cede power. And it’s not just a matter of personal power, the argument goes. Each side thinks that other side’s policies and positions will destroy the country. With that kind of danger at play, the most loving thing to do is to hold one’s own ground.
So we were intrigued by this house with the competing signs in the same yard. We speculated about who might live in it. One day we saw a car with Florida plates in the driveway. We created a scenario in which grandma owned the house, but lived in Florida. We decided that the house was occupied by two cousins. In our made-up world, these cousins lived together while in college because it was cost-effective, but they each held fast to their political views. That was the story we spun for ourselves, until a couple of weeks ago. Then, Jim saw the people who really live there. They look like a middle-aged couple, a husband and wife who are probably empty-nesters. That was not what we were expecting. How could two rational adults stay married, and live together when they obviously have such opposing political views? Don’t they know that Black Lives matter and Blue Lives matter folks are supposed to be enemies? Don’t they understand what’s at stake?
As far as I know, their signs are both still up, buried under the snow now. I don’t know how they do it, but I’d like to think that love has found a way.
Another story. You might have heard this one before. It was a game of college softball. The Central Washington Wildcats and the Western Oregon Wolves were in the last game before their division playoffs. Sara Tucholsky stepped up to bat and she hit it out of the park. She was a senior and had never hit a home run before. The two runners on base ran across home plate and Sara should have been right behind them.
But Sara’s knee buckled as she pivoted towards first base. Her ACL was torn. She was in great pain, lying on the ground, unable to stand. The rules are that she had to round the bases, touching each one on the way, or her run would not count. Her teammates were not allowed to help. It looked like her first home run was not going to count.
But then, Mallory Holtmann asked a question. Mallory played for the other team. Mallory knew that Sara’s teammates could not help her, but Mallory asked the umpires if there was a penalty for assistance from her opponents. There was not.
So Mallory and her teammate Liz Wallace picked Sara up and carried her around the bases, lowering her to touch each base. Sara crossed home plate and was credited with her 3-run home run, the last and only one of her career. [5]
The convention is that you play by the rules and if someone gets hurt, they’re out. That’s the breaks. But Mallory had other ideas. Mallory believed that winning isn’t everything. She set aside that tradition to act in love on behalf of her opponent.
Now these two stories I’ve offered are kind of ordinary, aren’t they? No one’s life was saved, no great evil was overcome. But they might be closer to our everyday lives. God might ask us some of us to make a big choice, a life-altering decision like Joseph’s or Mary’s. But God might also ask for smaller ones, something in an ongoing relationship or in an unexpected turn of events. God will recruit as necessary. You and I are part of salvation history.
What the Bible teaches, what the story of Mary and Joseph teaches, hopefully what our own experience teaches, is that God still recruits ordinary people like you and me to bring about God’s purpose, to build a response of love in a world of law and tradition and even hostility. We believe in God’s strong love, even when, even when we don’t feel it. Amen.
[1] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Cynthia Rigby, eds, Blessed, One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, (Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002), p. 51
[2] Blessed One, p 52
[3] John Shea, On Earth as It Is in Heaven Year A (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004), p. 44
[4] Walter Bruggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), p. 172
[5]https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/sports/baseball/30vecsey.html