December 22, 2013 Matthew 1:18-25
Matthew 1:18-25
Jesus: God is in Common with Us
Fourth Sunday of Advent – December 22, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Okay: I’m driving down Portage Avenue and I pass by Elim Chapel.
And there they are advertising their Christmas Eve service with a catchy slogan.
And the catchy slogan is: Back to Bethlehem. Back to Bethlehem. Zoom! Away you go!
Does that appeal to you?
It sounds all nice and nostalgia-y, right?
Like: if only we could get back to Bethlehem, everything would be all right.
I don’t know.
Do we have to go back to Bethlehem to find God?
I know that we are open to this strong temptation at Christmas time to
go backwards in order to find God.
Go back to childhood, maybe, to discover something we’ve lost.
Go back over what we’ve done to discover where we’ve gone off the rails.
Maybe Joseph does this at some point.
I mean, here he is, engaged to Mary.
Except he’s not really engaged in that informal way in which we use the word now.
He’s betrothed to Mary: he’s got a legal, binding contract with her and her family:
they just haven’t taken the final steps yet of merging households and
consummating their marriage.
But for all intents and purposes, they are all but married.
And then. . . mess! Chaos! Scandal! Mary is already pregnant!
She could be stoned for this.
Or Joseph could do the kinder thing and divorce her quietly.
Which is what he resolves to do.
This is agonizing and messy.
Maybe at a later date Joseph goes back over all this in his mind. But really:
Would Joseph want to go back to this difficult and traumatizing part of his life,
with difficult emotions and painful decisions to be made?
Do you wanna go back to Bethlehem now? How’s that sounding to you now?
Sounds to me just like, well, today, this week, this month, this fall.
When it finally comes to naming the child, Joseph does as instructed:
he names the child Jesus.
In Hebrew the name is Joshua, meaning “He saves.”
And Joseph is reminded that Jesus will also have another name, Emmanuel,
Which means “God is with us.”
Jesus is a present tense kind of guy, not past tense.
He’s not named “he saved.” He’s not named “God was with us,” “God used to be with us,”
Or “God was with us till we screwed everything up.”
His name is, “God is with us, no matter what.”
And tt the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus will state, “I am with you always.”
And that is very very good news.
Jesus is with us. And Jesus saves.
We don’t need to go back to Bethlehem to find Jesus.
And we don’t need to go back to Bethlehem for Jesus to save us from all that harms us.
Jesus is with us now. And Jesus saves us now.
You think about all this with poor Joseph.
And with Joseph we discover a shocking truth: this messy business was actually all God’s doing.
God chose to act like this: like what was God thinking? I mean really?
You can bet that there were lots of people who continued to talk about Joseph behind his back
his whole life long.
People who called him cuckold.
People who called Jesus worse names.
Why did God make everything and everybody look so ungodly,
as pastor Daniel Harrell writes in the Christian century this week?
Why not make it very unmistakably clear that this child actually is God’s child?
Why not a public blaze of glory for the child, so that nobody would have to wonder
whether this child is really of God or not?
Why not have him born in a palace to really important people for starters. I mean really?
Then instead of all the returned invitations to the baby’s shower –
We regret we are unable to attend – we have another function. . . .
We’d love to come but we just can’t – Christmas is such a busy time. . . .
So sorry we can’t accept your lovely invitation. . . .
Instead of all these, if God could have just been more clear about this child,
that the child was indeed super important and godly and holy and divine –
If God could have just been more clear about all that then maybe instead of returned invitations,
Mary’s neighbours would have thrown her a baby shower “with swaddling clothes from
Baby Gap” and Hello Kitty onesies from Babies ‘R’ Us.
And instead of shabby stable and stinky food-box manger someone could have booked
luxury rooms at the Bethlehem Hilton.
Or better yet instead of painful labour, an undoubtedly difficult adolescence,
and all the mess and difficulty of growing up, why not just, as Pastor Harrell suggests,
“show up on earth on Good Friday and you’re back in heaven by Sunday.”
(in The Christian Century, December 11, 2013, p. 18)
Or – as I suggest – why not just skip Good Friday all together?
Wouldn’t that be best?
Then there could be no mistake: this Jesus is God in person.
Because – let’s face it – you always wonder whether it’s really God when God lets
the divine self die tragically and ignominiously on a nasty humiliating cross.
The thing is, friends: the word Emmanuel, which is not badly translated “God is with us,”
has more to it than that.
It comes from a word that means “to have in common with.”
It is related to a word that means “the people”:
a group of people is a people because they share something in common.
As Pastor Brian Stoffregen observes,
you could translate Emmanuel as “God is in common with us people.”
Jesus is God in common with us people. (http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt1x18.htm)
In common with our mess. In common with our suffering.
In common with our desperate circumstances.
In common with mothers in labour, in common with teenagers in a difficult time of life,
In common with all the human mess of growing up and suffering.
In common with our great and tremendous difficulty.
Jesus is God in common with us people.
Not Jesus was God in common with us people: but Jesus is God in common with us people.
And that is how Jesus saves – and that is how Jesus continues to save:
by continuing to be in common with us – and all our difficulty.
We look to many things to save us.
Money, wealth, power, possessions, our reputations, and especially these days technology.
There’s nothing we believe technology can’t save us from.
What am I constantly doing on my computer?
Hitting the save button, as if it will, as if it can do that for me.
But the angel this morning is telling us that only love incarnate can save us.
Jesus saves because Jesus is God in common with us.
I have spoken with several of you this fall who know this for a fact.
This has been a difficult fall for many of us at First Lutheran Church,
and I think many of us will be very glad to see the calendar turn to 2014.
But what I also know is this: many, many of you have found something saving in
this community and in the relationships you have found here.
And that saving something you have found is Jesus.
Who is in common with us now.
Who is the love we incarnate in this community – not perfectly, never perfectly.
But with enough grace and intentionality that we don’t have to suffer the illusion of
going back to Bethlehem to be saved.
Because Jesus is God in common with us now.
In common with our distress, and in common with our mess.
So much in common with us that Jesus can minister to us and heal us and forgive us
without us ever having to leave 580 Victor Street.
Because God is in common with us right here, saving us from all that would harm us right now.
If we are the body of this Christ,
then we are the ones called and invited to incarnate this saving love right now.
We take our eyes off Bethlehem 2000 years ago and we take a good look at our lives right now.
And we take a good look at the lives of people around us.
And we see the mess, and we see the pain, and we the difficulty, and we see the stress.
And we thank God for Jesus who chose to come not in glory but in shadowy questionableness,
not in Baby Gap splendour but in manger-y dirt,
not to the Bethlehem Hilton but to stable-y squalor,
not just for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday too.
Who chose to come to be God in common with us, right where we find ourselves,
and save us there, with divine love incarnate in one another – and nothing else.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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