From Generation to Generation:
We Can Choose A Better Way
Matthew 1:18-25
December 11, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: The Courageous Choice by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity ©A Sanctified Art LLC sanctifiedart.org
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/2qGMmGGiVy0
Last Sunday, we remembered the time Gabriel came to Mary to ask her to bear God’s Son. We remembered that she was afraid and that she said yes anyway. That is a familiar story to us. We know it so well that it may get in our way when we read today’s text. You see, Matthew doesn’t seem to know that story. Joseph certainly doesn’t know it.
What Joseph knows, somehow, is that Mary is pregnant. We don’t know how Joseph knows this. Maybe he noticed the morning sickness and figured it out. Maybe she told him, but if she did, she didn’t tell him the part about a visit from an angel. She didn’t tell him the part about where she was faithful to him and was pregnant any way. Don’t you wish someone had been a fly on the wall to record that scene for us? But that is not the story Matthew tells.
What Matthew tells us is that Mary is pregnant and Joseph knows it. And he knows that he is not the father. They are betrothed, which is more like being married than being engaged. To be betrothed is to be married but not yet living together. The only way to get out of a betrothal is by dying or divorcing.
Apparently Joseph wants out. He is undoubtedly hurt, probably feeling duped, humiliated, betrayed, and angry. But Joseph is righteous. He is honorable. He wants to do the right thing for himself and for Mary, despite his personal pain. And so, Matthew says, that Joseph was unwilling to expose her to public disgrace and planned to divorce her quietly.
To divorce her quietly means not asking his best friend for advice about the situation. It means not going down to the pub and having a good cry in his beer with whomever happens to be there to listen. It means not telling his mother or his sisters so that they can each tell their best friends. It means simply going to the rabbi and signing the paperwork without giving any reason for his actions.
Think about this for a minute. What might have happened if Joseph had carried through with this plan? Well, for one thing, people who didn’t the truth might have jumped to conclusions. Believing Joseph to be the father, they might have assumed that he was the jerk for abandoning her and their child. For his part, Joseph probably thought that he was just making a way for Mary to marry someone she actually wanted to be with. Maybe he loved her that much. Matthew says that he was a stand-up guy, the kind who would do that.
Joseph has already made a good choice. He is already doing a good thing, the best thing he can think of, when the angel comes to him in a dream and invites him to do something even better.
Maybe, until the dream, he thought there were only two options – divorce her publicly and ruin her reputation and get back at her for humiliating him, or divorce her quietly. Those were the only possibilities, so he chose the most honorable one. But the angel said “do not be afraid” and presented him with a third possibility. He can choose an even better way.
Gareth Higgins grew up in Belfast, Ireland during The Troubles, that conflict over whether Northern Ireland would remain part of Great Britain or gain the independence to unite with the Republic of Ireland. It was a period of about 30 years characterized by street fighting, sensational bombings, roadblocks, and imprisonment without trial.
Gareth says that when he was growing up, you didn’t know who to trust. “Everyday activities like opening doors, turning a car-ignition key, going to a movie or having a conversation with a stranger were fraught with suspicion. Would the cinema be evacuated because of a bomb under a car outside? Would the stranger be one of those lovely friends you hadn’t met you or would they tell other strangers things about you that could get you killed? Were your loved ones dead or just stuck in traffic?”[1]
There were two competing narratives that shaped his childhood. The dominant story was that you had to choose a side -- either support for Great Britain or for Irish re-unification. Whichever side you chose, you knew that the “other side” had caused the conflict in the first place and that your side was merely defending itself.
That was the prevailing story. Pick a side and do the best you can because nobody knows how to fix this.
But, there was another story too. It was a story of people who refused the options presented to them and looked for a better way. Gareth says, “Many people were willing to let go of the old certainties about winning and create communities of beautiful, life-giving ambiguity rather than the superficial gratification of being right. People were allowing their imaginations to be funded by the heart, the mind, and experimentation rather than dogma. People were refusing to use violence to get what they wanted and were caring for the suffering and the bereaved. People were initiating conversations with their political opponents, including those who might harm them, and moving into neighborhoods where they didn't 'belong' in order to show that everyone belongs. People were laying aside vengeance in favor of cooperation."[2]
We can choose a better way. Joseph models that for us. Choosing a better way requires a desire to do the right thing and time to step back from the immediate context, to consider all parties involved. It involves imagination, like that which can operate in dreams. In the Biblical world, dreams were often the place where God communicated with people. “Dreams are the way God frees us and rebirths us and pushes us into new life.”[3]
A visionary like Joseph or Dr. King might take a dream and work to make it true, while others shrug it off and get back to “real life” in the light of day. This might be what Frederick Buechner called the “dark side of Christmas” – that God comes to us in such a way that we can always say no. “God comes to us in the hungry [wo]man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon.” [4]
God comes and waits for a response. An angel whispers to us in a dream, or some other equally unlikely being persuades us not to be afraid, not to walk away, but to find the even better way, the unimagined possibility, the quiet, courageous, creative option waiting to be born.
Joseph makes a quiet decision that, at first, seems like it only affects him and his family, but it will ripple for generations. Jesus’ life and Mary’s would have turned out very differently otherwise. Mary also made a choice that affected the future. I often wonder how many women before her refused the offer that Gabriel made.
You are probably familiar with the Iroquois concept of seven generation thinking. It calls us to consider the effects of our actions on our descendants to the next seven generations. An interesting twist on that idea is to put ourselves in the middle of the seven generations, reflecting on the life spans before and after ours. The idea is that an individual might have personal/material contact with someone 90 years older than they are and that person might have personal/material contact with someone 90 years old than they. The focus then becomes a timespan of 180 years before and after any individual life. We are born into a continuous ribbon of generations, with the past 180 years as an immediate presence in our lives.[5]
Just for grins, I went back 180 years to see what kinds of things were happening then. I learned that in 1842, unions and the right to strike were ruled legal in the United States and that inhaled anesthesia was used for the first time.
In 1870, (152 years ago), a man named Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
In 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in New York City and in November of that year, a woman named Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in an election. Because it was illegal for women to vote, she was arrested. At her trial, she was fined $100 which she never paid. And also in 1872, despite enduring a stroke and the death of two of his daughters, Louis Pasteur created the first laboratory-produced vaccine.
Each of these long-ago actions and so many others continue to bear fruit in the now. That may give us some appreciation that our choices will echo past our own short lifespans. Our dreams, our imagining what is possible, are ways that God frees us and rebirths us and calls us into new life.
One more example. The place we now call Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, (150 years ago). There is a campaign going on right now to celebrate and preserve the park for future generations. People who make a donation of $1500 or more will receive a free annual park pass for this year and also one valid in 2172, which is 150 years from now.[6] That pass will surely become a family heirloom passed through the generations until the birth of a descendant who can use it.
I love the creativity behind that campaign. It makes me wonder what choices we are making as the Body of Christ now, that will impact the faith of people who come 150 years after us.
God comes to us in ways that we can refuse . . . or accept. God comes and waits for a response. We can believe the dream that Emmanuel is with us, that God is still being born among us.
Barbara Brown Taylor summarizes it this way, “The heart of this story is about a just man who wakes up one day to find his life wrecked: his wife pregnant, his trust betrayed, his name ruined, his future revoked. It is about a righteous man who surveys a mess he has had absolutely nothing to do with and decides to believe that God is present in it.”[7]
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1]Gareth Higgins, How Not to Be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021). p. 26
[2] Higgins, p. 27
[3] Susan R. Andrews, “Pastoral Perspective: Matthew 1:18-25,” Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew, Volume 1, Chapters 1-13, Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013).
[4] Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), p. 14
[5] https://www.ecoresolution.earth/resources/seven-generation-thinking
[6] https://www.yellowstone.org/inheritance-pass/
[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Believing the Impossible” in Gospel Medicine, (Lanham, Maryland: Cowley Publications, 1995), p,157