The accounts of Jesus' nativity sometimes have an otherworldly feeling to them, especially in the King James. Don't get me wrong, I love to hear them and they give me great joy and peace, but they were meant to convey the real account of real people.
For example, in Matthew's account we are told that before the formal marriage,
Mary is found to be pregnant. Now we know its of the Holy Spirit, but at
first Joseph does not. We are told that he is a just man and infer from his
actions that he is also a compassionate man as well. He believes he cannot
marry Mary, but has absolutely no desire to humiliate her either. It is while
he is thinking about what to do that the angel of God comes to him. Did the
angel come that day, the next week or a month later? Whatever the time interval,
Joseph is left to work it out as best he can. We know the eventual outcome,
but at this moment, Joseph does not.
Think about it. God's greatest plan is unfolding literally in front of him, but Joseph has no idea. You can imagine him with his tools in hand working on some project, his hands working automatically while his mind is in a turmoil. Undoubtedly he is heart-broken and confused. He is not vengeful but I imagine there were a few tears to be wiped away while he worked and thought about what he was going to do.
In the middle of his muddle, an angel comes to him in a dream and tells
him to marry Mary. She has not been unfaithful because the child is from
God, and God has a plan for this child.
Imagine being Joseph. We might think that would comfort him and give him
courage. Probably it did once he got over the shock of what God told him
in his dream.
In some ways, coping with a pregnant fiance was easier than what the angel
told him.
And God comes into our lives.
I just bought a new commentary on Matthew by Dale Bruner who taught at Whitworth
College in Spokane.
He speaks about Matthew's version of the birth of Jesus and points out that
in three verses, 18-20, Matthew two times
points out that this is of the Holy Spirit. Bruner says every conversion
to God is a virgin birth in asmuch as new life is always conceived by the
Holy Spirit, and not of the flesh. It is of God at work in our humdrum lives.
You wake up in the morning and for most of us, our first thoughts are
not, "what is the Holy Spirit doing in my
life today?"
You rub your eyes and squint at the clock and mutter, "what time is it?"
Then you ask rhetorically, "what's it like outside?" even when you hear the
drip...drip...drip from your evestrough.
You shower and as you do, the day's responsibilities start to form in
your mind.
If you are still employed, maybe you remind yourself what day it is, and
that gives you a sense of what will happen.
If you are retired or otherwise not employed, you remember the doctor's appointment
or the shopping you need to get done.
And so it goes.
You labor through the day, enjoying momentary pleasures, doing your best,
or at least trying to.
And at the end of day, you hit the pillow, gratefully and take your rest.
And as you grit it though, muddle your way through details, struggle with
your tasks, do you often think to yourself, "this is an incarntion"? I suspect
not often if at all.
But God is invested in your life too; at work in ways you cannot conceive
either.
Mary and Joseph's is totally more dramatic and mind bending.
We have to bend ours to see how God could possibly be evident in the nuts
and bolts of our days.
But the birth of Jesus was like this:
Into two very ordinary lives, God came so that into every ordinary life,
God could also come to invest those lives with something human flesh could
not do on its own.
But they were willing lives. Ordinary but willing and God is at work in them.
In fact, this is what the incarnation is all about. God comes into the middle
of our routine ordinary lives and leads us to something we could never have
conceived--hope, peace and joy in an unloving, unpeaceful world without
much hope or joy.
No matter who we are, if we are willing, God enters our lives and transforms
them...often upsetting them, but investing them with his Spirit.
Author and pastor Leith Anderson writes:
Several years ago I was visiting Manila and was taken, of all places, to the Manila garbage dump and saw something beyond belief. Tens of thousands of people make their homes on that dump site. They've constructed shacks out of the things other people have thrown away. And they send their children out early every morning to scavenge for food out of other people's garbage, so they can have family meals. People have been born and grown up there on the garbage dump. They have had their families, their children, their shacks, their garbage to eat, finished out their lives, and died there without ever going anywhere else, even in the city of Manila. It is an astonishing thing.
But Americans also live on the garbage dump. They are missionaries, Christians who have chosen to leave their own country and communicate the love of Jesus Christ to people who otherwise would never hear it. That is amazing to me. People would leave what we have to go and live on a garbage dump. Amazing, but not as amazing as the journey from heaven to earth.1
That is the incarnation of Jesus. God comes into our world and before
our often unsuspecting eyes, God works a miracle. The miracle is that we
have hope because we know we are not alone in life. We have peace because
we know that our mistakes and our errors are not permanent--God forgives
the real moral guilt we have then offers us a new life and a new path.
Jesus lay aside his inalienable rights and came to inhabit our corner
of the dump. He lived a fully human life in every respect, but was fully
God in that he was able to live cheek and jowl with us and the rats and to
be corrupted by it.
He leads us beyond our muddle into the light of God and God's hope, peace
and joy.
The birth of Jesus was like that.
And the angels sang,
Preached Sunday December 23, 2007
Dr. Harold McNabb
West Shore Presbyterian Church
Victoria, British Columbia
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