Homily for
The Fourth Sunday in Advent
Sunday 18 December 2016
The Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
A Parish of the Diocese of Bethlehem and The Episcopal Church
Readings:
You may have heard the joke about the
Protestant who arrives at heaven and is greeted by Jesus upon entering into
heaven: “I know you’ve met my Father, but I don’t believe you’ve met my mother.”
Ironically something like this could be
said even more so of righteous Joseph, the husband of the Mother of Jesus. We know very little concerning Joseph. There is no mention of him at all in Mark’s
Gospel or in John’s. Matthew and Luke
make reference to Joseph in connection to Jesus only as a child. The last occasion where he is mentioned is
when Jesus is 12 years old and the parents leave Jerusalem without the boy.
And yet even though we know very little of
Joseph, in what little we know, there are little pieces that are very
significant and should not go unnoticed.
In today’s Gospel the Apostle and Evangelist Matthew makes a point to
show Joseph as a righteous man whose greatest desire is to do the right thing
before God as well as to avoid bringing shame upon any other human being, even
if any shame brought upon them might be rightly earned by that individual. These desires, indeed the whole of Joseph’s
character, are tested when Mary, his betrothed, is found to be pregnant. At a moment where Joseph has determined to
respond to this news, an angel of God speaks to him and reveals what in fact is
happening and how righteous Joseph should respond faithfully to God and
honorably to Mary.
This is a remarkable story that we hear of
Joseph. We see how he responds to God,
and with Matthew we see why it is that he is called a righteous man. But keep in mind that the whole point of this
story in Scripture is not that generations of readers of the Gospel would
marvel at this man’s righteousness. The
point to this is that we who hear the Gospel are also called to be righteous
before God, and in that righteousness we are called to such high character that
we are unwilling to expose not only our friends but even our enemies to public
disgrace.
How fitting this reminder is for us as we
draw near to the close of Advent. Prior
to the first Advent of Christ, Joseph was told not to fear and to believe even
to the core of his being that the child in the womb of his fiancée, Mary, was
not the son of another man but rather the Son of God. Joseph, we knew the prophets well, and with
his people longed to greet Messiah at his coming, was told that the very child
in the womb of Mary was that long-foretold Messiah. The angel revealed all this to Joseph, and
invited him in the Name of God to believe once more. Joseph could have walked away from that
encounter and dismissed everything revealed to him. But being a righteous man, a godly man, this
simply was not in his character. Joseph
believed the message of God even when that message, in human wisdom, could
easily be dismissed as a fairy tale.
Now, my friends, we stand in a similar
place to Joseph, awaiting the Advent of Christ.
Unlike Joseph we are not awaiting the arrival of a child. We look for the coming of the King of Kings
and the Lord of Lords, the Firstborn of the Dead who rose victoriously from the
tomb and proclaims life that is stronger than death. In these Advent days we have heard some
images that could be written off as fairy tales by us much as the story of a
virgin impregnated by God the Holy Spirit could have been written off by Joseph
if he were anything less than the righteous man before God. We have heard the Scriptures proclaim a
coming day when instruments of warfare will be no more, and the desire to learn
and engage in war will be gone. How
ironic it is that in these Advent days a whole city in Syria has been utterly
destroyed by instruments of warfare, even when innocent lives were taken and
those who were seeking to bring relief to the wounded were targeted.
We have heard how the coming of the Christ
will also bring about the day when the lion and the lamb will lie together
peacefully and will eat together. This
of course has nothing to do with actual lions and lambs. The point of the Scriptures here is that the
fullness of the presence of Christ and the Kingdom of God is that “natural
enemies” are so transformed by God to live in unity and peace, in companionship
and love towards one another.
Add to this that all of this is added to the
greatest message that we receive on the greatest celebration of our faith to
which we are called again and again.
Nothing – not Christmas or Easter or anything else – is greater than
Sunday. Each Sunday is a celebration of
the Resurrection! Each Sunday we
proclaim the message that Jesus Christ, God Incarnate in our humanity which he
first created, has risen from the dead and given us hope as well as faith. Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, in the light
of his resurrection, sounds forth the promise that as he lives even though he
died, so shall we live forever in God’s Kingdom, even though we die in this
life and this world. Jesus holds before
us a vision of a new day in God’s Kingdom where sin and death will be no more,
where suffering and illness will be over, where life and love given and
received between God and us will never cease.
But how can these things be? It seems too good to be true, especially when
we are distracted by this world and the hopelessness of the images where there
is a clear absence of anything resembling righteousness before God and the
desire to maintain high character with one’s friends or especially one’s
enemies.
Today we receive the story of righteous
Joseph as a model of what righteousness and character are and how they are
lived out in faithfulness to God and in service to other human beings. And in that model we find an example of trust
in the message of God that led Joseph to embrace and believe the good news even
when it may have seemed almost too good to be true. We receive this not that we might press on towards
Christmas. We receive this witness in
order that in our own lives we might be found righteous, as once Joseph was so
found before God, and that when Christ appears in all of his glory at the end
of our days, at the end of all days, we might be found faithful and believing
in the Gospel, which is indeed good news for us and the whole world, even if at
times it might seem too good to be true.
Father
Timothy
Alleman
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