A sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson, at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville on Sunday, December 21, The Fourth Sunday of Advent. Title: ‘Cremated Turkeys.’ Text: Matthew 1:18-25.
I speak to you in the + name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our culture and the media both load our Christmases up with false expectations of family harmony and good cheer. The images and expectations put upon us allow Halmark and the shopping mall catalogues to define the ‘perfect Christmas.’
In the weeks before Christmas many of us will invest a great deal of time and energy trying to achieve that picture-perfect Christmas. Some of us will feel emptiness or sadness that our lives and families prevent us from having the sort of Christmas that we believe we ‘should’ have.
In today’s Gospel Reading of the story of Mary and Joseph, God’s work clearly upsets comfortable social expectations and conventions. The first Christmas was not produced by a flawless lead-up and elaborate preparations dictated by convention. Quite the opposite. Certainly, most people would not expect the incarnation to happen through the life of a young, unwed girl, Mary. We easily forget what a scandal the incarnation and the virgin birth really were, that behind the pretty manger scene lies both a wonder and a scandal.
I invite you to think about your own experience of Christmas. I am sure that most of us will have had the experience of having failed—sometimes despite our very best plans— to live up to the notions of the ‘perfect Christmas.’ In our experience there was the time when all the members of our family came down with the nasty stomach flu on Christmas day. There was the time when our St. Catharines family were all on the way to our house in Toronto—and bringing the Christmas dinner—because the birth of our own first child was expected any day. The family, and importantly, the turkey, were two-thirds of the way to our house, when they had to turn back because of a snowstorm. Then there was the year the family did come to our home for Christmas dinner and we cooked the turkey. The problem was the thermostat on our oven malfunctioned, and the turkey was essentially cremated. In our experiences, these Christmases were far from perfect, and yet on each of these occasions, Christmas came, Christ was born, and God was with us.
The Gospel Reading we have heard this morning reminds us that the preparations for the first Christmas were anything but conventional and were far from ‘proper.’ Joseph, who Matthew refers to as a “righteous” man, discovers that his soon-to-be wife is pregnant. As readers, the narrator has informed us that the child is of the Holy Spirit, but such things are unheard of at this point to the characters in the story. To Joseph, the pregnancy is a violation of social convention and moral ethics for an unmarried woman. He decides to divorce Mary, which is by far the more humane of his customary options. Perhaps out of kindness, or regret, he decides to do this quietly in order not to shame her, and he realizes that things are not going to be as planned or as convention would have it. Mary has simply violated the important moral rule that she should not be pregnant already at the time that the marriage would take place.
We are all like Joseph at times, are we not? We go about our business and do not want to make trouble; we prefer to handle things quietly without a fuss. Perhaps this text reminds us that things we want to do loudly should be done quietly. In light of this story, it is helpful to think about the ways that the faithful thing to do, and the faithful way to be, are sometimes at odds with social convention, or what we might consider within our rights in any given situation. This is a difficult truth to learn.
Joseph did not violate convention to be politically rebellious, or even to know his own goodness. He violated convention and remained faithful to Mary because God, as God often does, intervened in an unexpected way. God sent an angel to appear to Joseph in a dream. The angel basically said, “I know this is not what you expected, or what you desired, Joseph, but it is going to be okay. God is about to do something wonderful, despite the fact that according to custom and law you are in a socially unacceptable situation.”
This is one of the messages that this text brings to us—that unexpected things, things outside of convention, and sometimes outside of what we might want to claim as our ‘right,’ can often be wonderful signs that God is at work. Amid all our less-than-perfect Christmases, the trees that are not quite as perfect as we would want them to be, the lives that are not as perfect as we would want them to be, God does something wonderful. Amid all our less-than-perfect lives, God is at work.
Somehow Joseph must trust the strange news that it brought to him: that this child is from the Holy Spirit; that he already has a name, Jesus; and that he will save people from their sins. Some of us had a conversation this week about what it means that Jesus ‘saves us from our sins.’ What could it mean that are saved from our sins by a child who lies in a manger? Often, we think too technically about salvation and atonement theory, getting caught up in later debates about exactly how Jesus makes the forgiveness of sins possible. All of that comes later.
What begins here—what God announces—is a human being who will somehow show us a different way to be. I am sure that many of us will be able to think of ways that someone has brought us some measure of salvation. Someone has saved us—perhaps through love or intervention—from doing something that we regretted or would have regretted doing. How many times has the wisdom of love, or of another, shaped and informed our action to save us from disaster?
The news catches Joseph off guard. At this point in the story, he is totally unaware of the journey that will take the one whom he will call Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from the manger to the temple, to the cross, and to the empty tomb. If Joseph had been told all of that, it might have overwhelmed him even more that the message he did receive. But this is what God does for us, when God opens a door, or gives us a vision, and beckons us to trust and follow.
I can think of many times when either social convention or my own sense of justice, or my right to gain some satisfaction for some grievance, for example, was turned around because God called me to do something else. The poet David Whyte notes that for most of us “the call will not come so grandly, so biblically, but intimately, in the face of the one you know you have to love.”
These are the small steps that God calls us to take. As Mary and Joseph journey towards Bethlehem and the first Christmas, they did not know where God would take them; all they knew was that something wonderful had been promised and that they had been beckoned to follow. So too the gospel calls us to rise and follow God’s call, not knowing where the journey will take us, or the path that God has set before us.
As we stand on the threshold of Christmas, let us release the heavy burden of the ‘perfect’ holiday. Let us set aside the Hallmark expectations and the pressure of flawless traditions. If your Christmas feels a little scandalous, a little messy, or a little broken this year, remember that you are in the very best of company. You are standing exactly where Joseph stood.
God did not choose a path of convenience for the first Christmas, and he often does not choose it for us today. Instead, he invites us into a deeper ‘righteousness’—not one that follows social rules for the sake of appearance or satisfaction, but one that rises in the middle of the night to follow a difficult, beautiful, and unexpected call.
So, as you leave this place, look for the ‘Emmanuel’ to appear in your own life. Look for the God who is with us, not just in these orderly pews or our curated dinners, but in the cremated turkeys, the interrupted plans, and the intimate faces of those we are called to love. Like Mary and Joseph, we may not know where the road leads or how the journey ends, but we can trust the One who beckons us to follow.
Rise, then, and follow. For even in our most imperfect moments, something wonderful is about to be born. Amen. +
