Sermon December 23, 2007

I was in Peace Corps in Africa with a very good Roman Catholic friend. Whenever she was surprised by something, shocked, or in trouble she would exclaim, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Everyone makes a big fuss about Mary and she appears throughout the gospels, but Joseph plays a minor role, a supporting role. He is the epitome of the “strong silent type” of leading man. Silent no exaggeration. Indeed, he does not utter a word in the entire New Testament. Yet one of the miracles of the incarnation – God’s becoming an embryo, a fetus, a full term baby and ultimately a full grown person like us, is that Joseph believed that Mary’s child was from God and not another man.

The Jewish people are hypersensitive to the issue of paternity. In fact, even being considered a Jew, your mother had to be Jewish. I believe that is still their custom. Imagine Joseph’s feelings when Mary told him that she was pregnant with a child from the Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t you have had doubts? He was probably upset, angry and felt deceived. I suppose he felt hurt, betrayed and rejected. He knew and loved Mary, but a story like this – “a child to be born of the Holy Spirit” was incredible to say the least one of the miracles of Christmas is that Joseph believed Mary’s story. In today’s reading we can see him struggling. He loved Mary. He wanted to spend his life with her and sire her children. But all the evidence pointed to deceit, infidelity. Any marriage counselor will tell you that unfaithfulness is one of the hardest things to forgive in a marriage because it is such a fundamental violation of trust. Yet, here is what Mary was asking Joseph to do. God had to intervene. So he sends a messager to Joseph via an “angelgram”.

What you may ask is an “angelgram”? It was not written on paper. It was sent in a dream. God tells Joseph that this child in Mary is his child – God’s own. This child had a mission, a purpose. He is to save the people from their sins. In fact, the angel even names this child. He is not to be Joseph, Jr. he is to be called Jesus which was the Aramaic languages’ version of the Hebrew name Joshua. Aramaic was to Hebrew what Spanish or Italian are to Latin. Obviously, this was good news, but another miracle of the Christmas story is that Joseph accepted this dream, this vision as the truth. We often hear stories of the wicked step-father or the wicked step-mother who resents parenting a child that is not their own. Yet, Joseph is the model father. He does not say a word in the entire New Testament yet he accepts Mary’s Son, the Holy Spirit’s Son, as his and offers his love freely. He does all this on the strength of a dream.

I have always been fascinated by dreams. Often times they are so weird. Psychologists say that we process anxiety and stress through dreams and there by eliminate, or better to say neutralize the tensions that arise from fears. Dreams can be nightmares – visual expressions of our most intense inner fears. Dreams can also be the fulfillment of our deepest heart’s desires. We can murder our enemies in our dreams and there by process our anger toward them in a safe way. Also, we can fulfill our fantasies. All people on earth puzzle over the meaning of dreams. Joseph in the Bible’s book of Genesis was a great dreamer and interpreter of dreams. He rose to prominence in the pharaoh’s court because God gave him the ability to interpret dreams. Joseph saved his brothers and their families from starvation because of his dreams. Joseph played, his role in salvation’s story too because he listened to his dreams and the voice God sent to reassure him.

Joseph is a model for us in faithful living. A dream is not proof. A dream has to be taken on faith.

Yet doesn’t God often work on us through the power of dreams? Their is a sense in which all of us who live in this country, the United States, are the descendents of dreams.

Martin Luther King’s most famous speech begins with the words, “I have a dream.” His prophetic vision of an America fulfilling its destiny as a land where people were not judged by superficial things like the color of their skin, but rather the content of their character, is coming true. Even though our race relationships often still have a nightmarish quality, the power of King’s dream of a just society is more a reality than it was forty years ago.

This congregation began as a dream 25 years ago and because people believed and accepted the vision that God proposed, we stand in a manifestation of that dream. We are a church family, brothers and sisters in Christ and in no small way Joseph is our spiritual father. He accepted Jesus as his Son and loved him. We too accept each other as family too because the water that baptizes us and washes away our sin changes our DNA and sanctifies it – making us all as the book of 1st Peter says “Partakers of Jesus’ divinity”. We have an expression in English “blood is thicker than water” which refers to the ties of kinship that unite us. In the church though, the waters of baptism trump the ties of blood and our genes making us one in Christ.

St. Joseph is a model for us. He accepted his role and purpose on faith. He believed the unbelievable on the strength of a dream. He accepted the unacceptable, the shocking and embraced it. He did so because God touched his heart.

St. Joseph should be the patron saint of all step parents, cub scout leaders, teachers, policemen and anyone who takes on the responsibility of someone else’s child and contributes to their upbringing by protecting them, disciplining them and loving them.

Later on in the gospel of Matthew, we see him again listening to the Lord through the medium of a dream telling him to go to Egypt to protect the infant Jesus from Herod’s henchmen. He serves as a reminder that we too are called to protect the innocent, spend our resources to save those who are at risk and to give freely of ourselves as foster parents to the world in gratitude for the salvation we have received from the Immanuel who is “God with us”.