A
Reflection for IV Advent All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.
December 18, 2016 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Another Joseph’s Dream
This
week, the 4th Sunday of Advent, we have lit the 4th
candle on our wreath, the candle symbolizing love, and we tell a story of love.
Last week I talked at the Adult Forum as we were looking at the Gospel of
Matthew. I suggested that Matthew was a good Jewish boy who knew the Hebrew Scriptures
through the Greek translation called the Septuagint. He relies on the
translations because he doesn’t know Hebrew and does not understand Hebrew
poetry, but he keeps looking for ways that the Prophets could have foretold
what had happened in the Christ experience.
He turns to the first lesson from Isaiah and finds where Jerusalem is
surrounded by the Assyrian enemy and it looks bad for the Jewish people. Except
Isaiah, a prophet, a seer who sees the world with the eyes of God, sees a young
woman who is pregnant, and this new hope will be an outward sign of Emmanuel -
God is with us. The very name of this child will be a sign of hope. He suggests
that we look at this child and before it is born, we will know that God is
indeed with us. So what happens?
The
2nd Book of Kings tells us that the Assyrian army lays siege to the
city, ready to stave it into submission. However, unknown to the Assyrians, the
King of Judah, Hezekiah, had prepared for the siege with a tunnel leading from
the water source of the Gihon spring to the other side of Jerusalem. This allowed
them to withstand the siege, AND then a plague broke out in the Assyrian camp,
AND then there was a coup back in Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire,
AND the Assyrian army had to rush back to Nineveh to deal with the new
administration. The people looked at these developments and attributed them to
God being with them, Emmanuel. The pregnancy of the young girl had been an
outward and visible sign of love and became a metaphor for the deliverance from
the enemy as a sign of God’s love for God’s children in Judah.
In
the Greek translation of Isaiah that Matthew is using, the Hebrew word for
young girl, Almah, is translated into
the Greek word Parthenos which can be
a technical term for a virgin. Being a literalist, Matthew fixes on the virgin
term and ascribes that to the birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary. But his
interest in her is not to tell the story of Mary - he will leave that to Luke who
is more interested in women - but of Joseph’s love. Joseph loves Mary, but what
is he to do? The evidence tells him that he has been betrayed. The law requires
him to expose her shame and be ready to cast the first stone as was his right.
He loves her so much that he refuses to do what his honor demands and is ready
to quietly put her aside so that she can go off to a faraway cousin’s house in
the country and stay out of sight.
Matthew
is well aware of the story in the Hebrew Scripture of Genesis of another
Joseph, the dreamer, who dreams of his brothers bowing down before him, but who
is betrayed by those brothers and sent into Egypt. But Joseph turns the betrayals into the
feeding of those who betrayed him, rescuing them from starvation, delivering
them from their troubles. Joseph forgives his brothers by saying to them, “Do
not be afraid! Even though you intended to do harm to me; God intended it for
good, in order to preserve a numerous people.”
In
this story that Matthew tells, Joseph, like his namesake, will also have a
dream. A dream, like the prophet Isaiah’s vision, is a gift from God to see in
a different way. The dream asks him to see the young woman Mary’s pregnancy as
a sign not of despair but of hope, not of betrayal and shame but of love, not
of defeat but triumph. He awakens and takes the shame upon himself; people in
his town know how to count to nine. After the child is born he will retrace the
path of his namesake and go into Egypt. He will make himself an object of
betrayal so that he can forgive and pay the price himself. He will take defeat
and allow God to turn it into triumph. He will raise this child as his own and
teach him how to love by how he lives his life. Joseph is part of the birth of
a whole new way of loving and living.
Matthew’s
little story of Joseph becomes a metaphor for what Jesus will do in his
ministry. Jesus will see with the eyes of God. Jesus will be vulnerable so that
he is willing to be betrayed and will forgive the unforgivable. Jesus will
take the shame upon his very self in the cross and offer his life to pay the
price of love. Jesus will take the defeat of the crucifixion and allow God to
redeem it with the victory of the resurrection. In this small story is the
Gospel told in miniature.
Joseph
had a dream given to him. But the dream is not only his, that dream is ours as
well to cherish for ourselves. Can we say that we are helping in the birthing
of a new way of life for our children and our community? Can we say that we are
willing to give of ourselves so that others might find peace? Can we give up
what we consider our rights so that others might live? Can we take the evil
that others do and with God’s strength turn it into good?
Another Joseph’s Dream
Let
me dream Joseph’s dream today.
Not
the dreamer of brothers’ bows
to
the one who everything knows,
but
who listens to what angels say.
He
strips himself of his bedclothes
putting
on the new servant garb
finding
a way the news to absorb
that
an ego wasn’t what God chose.
Taking
the shame of other on him
absorbing
all the gossip sneerings
walking
proudly into the clearings,
shadows
abandoned, singing hymn
of
thanksgiving for being worthy
so
to help birth the new world be.
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