How our story begins

Genesis 1-3 (we're using a paraphrase from The Peace Table story bible)

Episode 1: The Beginning

On a walk to the park this week with the 12^th graders from my daughter's school, the German foreign exchange started excitedly pointing and laughing at a row of yellow school busses parked together. She whipped out her phone and snapped photos to show her friends. How American! 

What is “American” culture? High school proms and hot dogs? Hollywood? Infighting? As Americans, are we connected to a shared history or cultural identity that we feel comfortable naming or claiming or can even agree on? (To be fair, our nation isn’t even 250 years old). 

 

Even if you are someone with a strong connection to your particular heritage and cultural identity—like Joyce and Norm and their the Czech Hall, where in two weeks we could all go eat kolaches that Joyce will help make, and hear Czech songs and watch Czech and Slovak dancing—as modern people, more tuned in to our newsfeeds than our neighbors, it's easy to feel these days like we are rootless. How many of us know stories about our grandparents’ parents (or even their names)? In this day and age, each one of us, it seems, is now carving out a life for our own selves from the endless buffet of options. To navigate this super confusing and overwhelming life, we turn to WebMD, YouTube how-to videos, Amazon reviews, and political commentators. 

How do we really know who we are? Where do we turn to remember whose we are?

 

Today I want to remind you that no matter what else is true about who each of us is, we are all people of a deeper story that extends beyond time. We belong to a tradition, ancient and broad, spanning the whole globe and stretching thousands of years into human history. Like all family trees there have been rotten branches, tragedies and trials, happiness, healing and hope.  Among our shared ancestors are villains and heroes, poets and prophets, but mostly ordinary women, men and children whose lives and choices became part of our legacy. 

 

And this is the book of our story. The Story. The biggie. The story of our faith, our ancestors, the tradition that holds us and the God who came in to share this life with us. 

 

This book is messy and it’s confusing, because it is super ancient, and we have so little in common with people who lived so long ago. We don’t even understand how they tell stories, or why, so sometimes we read this book like it’s trying to make us do something, or think something, or coach us on earning God’s approval or avoiding God’s condemnation. 

 

But really, this is a family scrapbook. In this book a whole bunch of different people, in different places and different times, experience in different ways, who this God is and what God is up to in their lives. So, in this way, we also have lots in common with the people in this book. Because we get scared too, and we don’t like feeling weak or vulnerable either, and we tend to think we are not worthy of love, and we compare ourselves to others, and we turn our backs on people who need us, and we wonder what a good life is and how to live it, and we forget whose we are and who we are all the time, just like they did.

Our ancestors told the stories, and shared the poems, and recounted the battles, and prayed the prayers, and sang the songs that made it into this book, because doing these things reconnects us to whose we are and who we are.  

 

But this is also more than a book. It’s a glimpse into a story that’s still going on right now. Christ has risen and lives in and through us, so this book helps us ask who God is and what God is up to here. And we trust that when we read it, the Holy Spirit speaks to us, and helps us hear and see the God of our ancestors right now.

 

And, like any story, the beginning tells us right away whose story this actually is. It all begins with God.  

From nothing, emptiness and impossibility, in the dark, God creates.

God doesn’t paint a still-life and hang it on the Almighty wall. God sets in motion an interconnected eco-system of energy and synergy, plants and animals, days and nights, tides and seasons, creeping things and flying things, microscopic and cosmic geometry and color, joyful peace and noisy harmony. 

And every time God makes more, God looks at it all and calls it good. Ooh! That’s good, and that’s good, and that’s good too! This life is good! Goodness is the beginning and the reason for it all. Our tradition gives us the word Shalom – wholeness, peace, in the complete belonging of all things to God and each other. 

 

When God finishes making everything and calling it good, God rests, and calls the rest good too.  In Shalom, God hangs out with creation and just enjoys watching life be itself.

 

So the first thing we know is that the story of us begins with God. And this world is good and life is for enjoying goodness with God. 

 

Our Peace Table story bible does a great job giving us the gist. But if you decide to read along in the Bible you will see in that in these three chapters we’re looking at today, Genesis actually has two different stories of creation. 

 

The first one we just saw: God creates, God calls it good, night and morning then another day, makes more stuff and calls that good too. In this one, human beings are the pinnacle of creation, made last, and made in God’s image to share in God’s care for all the rest of it. Humans are invited into the work of God and also the rest of God, as agents of shalom.

 

In the second version of the beginning, human beings don’t come last. The human creature comes before the rest, held in God’s very arms with life breathed into its nostrils from God’s own breath.  And this earth creature is there to watch God finish creating, gets to see the plants and trees grow right up out of the ground. God places the creature in a beautiful garden - here is the home I made for you, for you to live in and care for.

 

Then God chooses to be vulnerable. The uncreated Creator loves the earth creature and invites the human to love God in return. But in order for a yes to really be yes, there has to be a no as well. Is it love if there is no other option?  So, among all the fruit trees of the garden, God puts one tree the human must not eat from.This is the boundary I set up; here you do not cross. 

 

And then God notices it doesn’t work for there to be just one human. There needs to be another, a partner, “a helper” it says, the way God is a helper (same verb in the Hebrew).  For there to be the image of God there needs to relationship, like there is relationship in the Trinity itself, so God begins creating animals from the dust, forming them and bringing them one by one to the earth creature– what about this one?

And whatever the human names the animal, that is what it becomes. Side by side, God and human, creating and naming. And as much joy as there is watching the rest of life come alive, there is not another creature that can be a fit for the human. 

 

So God causes the lone earth creature, literally this adam, from the earth, adamah, to sleep. Then, instead of from the dust, God takes from the material of the creature itself and forms another – like it, but different. And now there is male and female, sameness and difference, together reflecting the image of God that couldn’t be reflected in one solitary earth creature. The old creature has ended, and the new creature awakens to belonging, and they are named Adam and Eve. They are both naked and not ashamed. They are fully themselves with God and each other, with no desire to be anything other than who they are, no fear or mistrust, and no reason to hide. They’re together in shalom, in the goodness and belonging of God.

 

Now we return to the part of this story where fear comes in and mistrust begins, when the snake convinces the humans that God can’t be trusted, and suggests, why not be in charge like God instead of living as creatures who belong to God and each other? So they cross the boundary of God’s care and do the one thing God told them not to do.

 

Now they really do know it all: all the potential for things to go wrong as well as right, all the places for pain and lies, all the ways we are different and could hurt each other. And they get scared, and sad, and worried, and jealous, and suspicious. Trust is broken. Filled with shame and fear, and they hide from God. 

 

But God never lets go. God never gives up.  God even has compassion for our shame. God meets us where we are and gives us what we need. So, God calls them from their hiding and clothes them. Like a parent dressing a child in jammies before bed, God wraps them up in love and takes care of them.

From the very beginning, and no matter what, we are God’s beloved. And in all of our beginnings and no matter how we might turn away from God or try to be God, God keeps taking care of us and God’s story of Shalom keeps going. 

 

When we go to school and to work, when we stop working or finish school, when we are young and when we are old, when we feel secure and when we feel lost, when we feel connected and when we’re ashamed of what we’ve done, when we care for others and when we break trust, when we remember and practice our belonging, and when we let fear tell us who we are and whose we are and we hide from God and each other, no matter what and always, God holds us in love. 

 

Our story starts and ends with the real, living, present God. 

You and I are people of Shalom, meant to share in God’s care for the world. We belong to a God who takes emptiness and impossibility and brings life out of nothingness and light into darkness, and invites us to rest in the goodness of God. This reality is our root system, our culture, our shared language, and the lens that shapes how we see the world. Let’s keep telling each other our story.

Amen.

Present and Thankful

 "Rejoice" is a pretty churchy, peppy word. When you google “rejoice” you mostly get silhouette images of people with their arms raised to the sky against a sunset or mountain backdrop. If you were an alien doing research on our planet you would think that rejoice meant walking around at dusk with your hands up.  But we Christians know it means just feeling enthusiastically cheerful and thankful all the time, with the hands of our hearts raised in permanent gratefulness. Just kidding. Paul wrote this in prison. Sitting on a filthy floor in chains is the image you don’t see when you google “rejoice!”   

I’m not going to lie, I have my own photo of my 23 year old self silhouetted against a spectacular Fijian sunset with my arms raised.  But even so, when the Sunday school poster or Christian bookmark tells me to Rejoice! I recoil.  I don’t like being told what to do or how to feel.  And that’s pretty much how this verse has been used.  When this passage says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” I can remember the exact place I was sitting in my cousins’ living room, when my aunt walked in, turned off whatever spicy scene was on the TV, and quoted that verse at us.
 
Being told to rejoice, be thankful, have gratitude, focus your mind on what’s true, can feel like some kind of Miss Manners advice, Christian behavior modification, or politeness training.  
Apologize for hitting your brother. 
Tell your sister you forgive her.  
Count your blessings.
Say Thank you to Grandma for the present.  
Leave a generous tip.
Rejoice and give thanks to God always.
 
And it’s too bad. Because while things like apologies, confessions and gratitude can be coerced or disingenuous, they are also some of the most authentic and important stuff of relationships. When we genuinely apologize, or truthfully confess, or say Thank you and actually mean it, we are at our most honest, present, vulnerable and aware. We are living our humanity and interconnectedness. We are receiving the gift of this life, the gift of the other person, and the gift of our own living and breathing self.
 
God made the world good. Goodness is all around us, even in the midst of what’s bad, and gratitude invites us to notice.  To rejoice in the good doesn't deny the evil or the brokenness, it doesn’t ignore struggle or suffering. Giving thanks acknowledge the goodness that is also, always here, because in Christ God is always here. Gratitude stills and quiets us us to pay attention with wonder and reverence, and then points that awe right to its source. And so gratitude is one of the shortcuts out of the way of fear and back to the way of God, whereas cheerfulness, platitudes and politeness are not.
 
When Paul writes “rejoice always!” from his prison cell, he is not giving the Philippians an attitude pep talk or a lesson in etiquette. He’s touching something really deep that can’t be captured on the front of a greeting card and can’t be crushed by chains or hardship either.
 
At all times, rejoice in union with God, Paul says. The Lord is here. Don’t be anxious about anything, but let God know everything that is on your heart, with both longing and thanksgiving, tell God know what you need. And God’s peace, which defeats all human logic and comprehension, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
 
That’s something. 
 
Gratitude is powerful. And it is prayer -whether we acknowledge it or not. When thanksgiving rises up within us, we are enacting our connection to God, even if we aren’t aware in the moment that’s what we’re doing, even if we are not believers in God. We are praying. To be grateful we must be present. We are constantly departing the present moment by actively regretting the past or persistently anticipating future. Gratitude overrides this. In the moment of gratefulness we are present in the very presence of God who is always here with us. And that is prayer.
 
The truth is, while we need reminders sometimes, and structure too, we don’t actually have to work that hard at feeling thankful.  Because we’re hardwired for this. Gratitude is a basic human need, a natural human and deeply spiritual response that arises, unprompted, when we are paying attention.

And Paul gives us a way to pay attention.  
Whatever is good, he says, whatever is true and just and honorable and pure, think on these things.  What we look for, we will find. If we look for division and hate, injustice and pain, we will find it. It is there. We spend a lot of time and energy practicing looking for what’s wrong.  
 
And if we look for hope and love and sacrifice and generosity we will find it. Because that’s here too.  If we live open to delight and wonder, beauty and awe, that is what we will receive.  Even in the midst of what is broken, redemption is breaking forth.  We can practice looking for life.
 
Someday time will be wiped away, and we will exist in the suspended joy of being alive, of being in God’s full presence and being wholly, truly, fully alive.  Gratitude lets us see the kingdom of God now.  When we pause in gratitude, we live in a moment out of time. We get a sample-sized taste, a foreshadowing of God’s future, a future that comes not from the present but from the promise. Instead of a future filled with the consequences of past choices or the impossibilities of human limitations, gratefulness dips us into the future beyond time, when what remains is the eternal moment of gratitude.
 
We don’t come together in worship to be polite to God, we come to be reoriented again to the Kingdom of God breaking into this world. We are not here to get a lesson on saying thank you, or pressure about how grateful we should all be.  We come to be awakened to what’s real – to be reminded of our belonging to God and each other because we are practicing it together and that will help us practice when we are apart.
 
So today, instead of any more discussing gratitude, we are going to experience it. This is not going to be a dress rehearsal for the “What are you thankful for?” conversations around the table on Thursday.  (Though, it may help). We are going to practice paying attention to what is good and true and beautiful and wonderful. We are going to let ourselves be present, in this moment, with God.
 
Reader - you are invited to do this practice we did in worship. Set aside 10 minutes. Grab a pen and paper. You won't regret it.

A PRACTICE OF GRATITUDE
For the next few minutes, you are invited to simply be present here, and be willing to notice. Read each phrase and you're invited to write down the first things that come to mind. Don’t edit or force or direct – just let whatever wants to come spill out.
 
Begin with a moment of silence. 
 
In this moment, in this place, with these people, I am thankful for…
When I think of the people I call mine, I am thankful for… 
When I consider the connections I have in the world, friends, neighbors, coworkers, I am thankful for…
When I think of my body, I am thankful for…
When I reflect on my life in the past few months, I am thankful for… 
When I think of things this year that have been painful or challenging, I am thankful for…
When I think of this world, I am thankful for…
When I think of God, I am thankful for…

Is there a category you wished would’ve been mentioned? Something that you felt gratitude for during this time? Take a moment now to jot down anything else you would like to express thanks for…
 
Now read back over your list. 
 Let yourself feel what you’ve written down.  
Let yourself receive the gratitude. 
 

Amen.

A life well-lived

Psalm 1

On the 4^th of July, for over 30 years, NPR broadcasts a reading of the Declaration of Independence.  Arguably the most famous line in the document is the first line of the preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  

America is unabashed about the pursuit of happiness.  It’s written right into the foundation of things, and we have not held back from that pursuit.  It’s a high value in our culture.  Ask a parent what they want for their kids and most will say we only want our kids to be happy – only, like that’s a basic prerequisite and everything else is harder, or bonus. 

  It hasn’t always been this way – for most of human history, happiness wasn’t something people went after – it would never occur to them that happiness was something you could pursue. You just lived your life, and if happiness came to you from time to time, you were glad, but it was not an expectation or a goal. 

But we modern people spend our lives chasing happiness, and it seems to be always just out of our reach. Maybe we’re not pursuing it hard enough, or the right way, or perhaps it’s being hoarded by a few and we need to figure out how to pry it out of their hands and take it for ourselves.

We act like happiness a limited commodity, something that can be claimed, or given to those we care about, or taken away from us. We work really hard to prepare for future happiness, we save and plan and dream – always looking ahead, always anticipating how happy will be when…or if only… we do this so well that we often miss how happy we are until it’s passed, and then we look nostalgically back and pine for how happy we were when…

We’re jealous if others are happier than we are. We even sometimes rejoice in their suffering.  Not the really terrible stuff, like death or sickness or anything, we’re not monsters after all. Just the little things, the petty jealousies and pedestrian comparisons that eat away at us one little bite at a time.  If they’re happy and we aren’t, where did we go wrong? How did they get it right?

All this to say – the pursuit of happiness we’ve got down to a science. 

That, we are pros at. 

Happiness itself, though… 

We have entered the 'Psummer of Psalms' around here.  We’re spending the season immersed in this prayerbook of our faith.  This Psalm begins the whole thing.  It’s the start of this collection of prayers that have been prayed by everyone from Jesus Christ to St. Augustine to Martin Luther King Jr. to your own dear grandma. 

And as prayers, they are not all the gentle ones we like to pin to our fridge. There are psalms for the whole range of human experience. 

Angry? There’s a psalm for that!  

Sad? There’s a psalm for that! 

Feel like you’ve lost your faith completely?  There’s a psalm for that! 

Want to jump out of your skin with infectious joy and bottomless gratitude? There’s a psalm for that! 

Being chased down by your enemies and your life is on the line? There’s a psalm for that! 

Looking through a spiritual lens, Bruegemann describes three basic types of Psalms that come from and address the human experience.  They are Psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of new orientation.

The first group – Psalms of Orientation, talk about the goodness of God’s law – which is God’s guidance and instruction, God’s direction for how life is to be lived, and God’s good creation.  They celebrate the stability and trustworthiness of the highly functional world God has created. They are Psalms that remind us that God is good and has got it all in hand, and that we can trust God and live securely in this world God has ordered.

That’s lovely, but what about when everything falls apart and all you thought was trustworthy seems not to hold? There’s a psalm for that!  

The Psalms of Disorientation rage and complain and grieve and vent and seek answers.

And then there’s the classic move of our death and resurrection God, who takes us from the ashes of the old and opens us to new life, freedom, and hope, with Psalms of new orientation. These are the prayers that accompany us when a new relationship to God, the world and ourselves begins to take shape.

We are spending a couple of weeks with each type of Psalm. And this week we begin with Psalms of orientation.  It’s no mistake that the first Psalm in the whole book is one of these.

And it starts with the word Happy. 

Not blessed – like some kind of favor of God, but happy.  Contented.  That warmth in your chest sense that you’re living a good life, that feeling of well-being that we’re always running after.  

Here is what our Psalmist says, and I paraphrase:

Happy is the person who doesn't follow the advice of those who are out to harm others,

 or take the path carved out by those only in it for themselves, 

or get caught up in deriding, belittling and mocking others. 

This person’s delight is in God’s guidance, and they ponder it all the time.  

It makes them strong, and steady, and sure.  It makes them thrive.

Evil intentions, selfish ambitions, insulting and despising others  - it will all disappear like dust in the wind.  That way of living can’t stand up to the light of truth.  

There’s no place in the gathering of love for those who’ve chosen deception, egocentrism and contempt. 

Those who’ve rejected their belonging to God and each other will not be there.  

That whole way of life will perish.  

But God is intimately connected to those who seek obedience to God’s way of love.  

This way of Life lasts forever.

Happiness is not a goal to strive for.  It is a description of a state of being.  Like a tree by abundantly flowing streams, with all the sunlight and water it needs, not yanking up it’s roots and running off after treasures on a far off horizon, not trying out this spot, and this, or maybe over here will be better. Allowing yourself to be planted here. Tended to.  Fed by unending nourishment that come up from the deep.  Growing sturdy, deep roots, and wide, full branches.  Flourishing. 

The question isn’t What will make me happy? 

But, What is a good life?  What is my life for?

Pursuing happiness will not make us happy. Instead, we’re invited to dwell in goodness. Sink into God’s way.  Seek ye first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. That sort of thing.

Jesus said it this way, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.  If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete." (John 15:9-11)

We forget that about God.   God’s commandments are to love God and each other.  God’s instructions exist to give us the best and fullest life, the life we were made for, a life of joy.  There is no better way to live than this. “O! The happiness,” the original Hebrew exclaims,  “of the one who lives this way!”

I can feel it bubbling up, the skepticism, it feels too simple, maybe.  But instead of criticizing it as a formula that fails people, or calling it something only secure and stable people can hang onto, I’d like to pause us here.  And let this Psalm meet us. Let it draw us toward this trustworthy God. Let it open us toward each other. Let it make us curious about the way of God it speaks so highly of.  

I promise we will get to the struggle psalms and the psalms for difficult times.  And we will get to the ones that invite us into something deeper and rebuild our world after it’s fallen apart.

This first Psalm is giving us the foundation. The basics. The intro.  

It says: There is a way of God, and we can live in it.  When we do, we will be happy.

Last week we talked about times we’ve experienced God with or through this congregation. 

We talked about recognizing God in the moments that shimmer, those experiences that, for a beat, remind us we are alive, or awake, connected.  Sometimes it’s a heart wrenchingly sad moment, sometimes it’s exhilaratingly joyful. Maybe it’s a time we feel profound peace, or a quiet mind, or a painful realization of our own need for God, or an awakening to a deeper awareness.  When we feel our connection to each other, when we feel our belonging to God, the universe, the greater story, those are experiences of God.  

This Psalm invites us to cultivate in ourselves a readiness for that.  Live like it’s possible.  Meditate on God’s word.  Listen to God’s instruction. Try to practice it.  Pause before bed in gratitude; greet the day acknowledging God’s presence.  Seek first the Kingdom of God.  Abide in my love.  Love one another.  Know that if you keep turning your head and heart to this reality, you will get better and better at seeing it around you and feeling it within you.  

My friends and I went for a long walk in the woods that ended on a steep hill. We huffed and puffed up the hill and one friend said, “I thought when I got in shape this wouldn’t happen anymore. Well, I’ve worked hard and gotten in shape, but here I am, still huffing and puffing.”  The other friend replied, “Of course you lose your breath. It’s hard work.  But you recover faster now.”  And it was true. Within a minute of reaching the top she was breathing normally again.  “Well look at that!” she said.

When we meditate on God’s ways, when we let God’s instructions to love God and one another shape us, and seek to practice it, it’s not that we wont mess up.  It’s that we will recover faster.  Like our bodies, our souls remember the true orientation. Like a compass swinging wildly and then settling back on true north, when we lose our way, we come back to it sooner.  

Of course it’s hard. Of course we forget that we are connected to God and each other. Of course we act out of selfishness or meanness, jealousy or anxiety.   We get caught in the delicious trap of skepticism and scorn that cuts us off from others.  We hurt one another with our words and make self-centered choices.  Of course we get distracted by the pursuit of personal happiness that makes our life slip through our fingers like tasteless dust.  

Of course we do.

But we don’t sit there. 

We don’t stay there. 

We don’t walk in that way and make it our path.  

We recognize it, and we recover.  And our recovery gets faster the more we practice. 

We reorient.  We repent, we forgive, we show mercy, we receive grace.  

We return to the good life we were made for.  And deeper and deeper our roots grow, wider and wider our branches stretch, and O, the happiness!

The power in the Psalms of Orientation is that they can often become for us Psalms of New Orientation. 

We may think at first glance that they’re basic. Maybe that they have nothing to say to us.  But when we start to pray them they tug at our sleeve and say, Come back.  Stop and listen.  Let it in.  Here’s where you begin again.  

God is good.  God is trustworthy.  This is written into the foundation of things.  

Regardless of our circumstances, we can always seek to live God’s way of love, or to reject it. 

Regardless of our hand in life, we always have a choice to live cared for by our creator and caring for each other, or rejecting our creator and rejecting each other.

 Happy are those who choose the way of God.  

Their’s will be a life well-lived.

Amen.

This is the first of a four part series on the spirituality of the Psalms.  

You can read the rest here: 

Part 2 - Starting and ending this way

Part 3 - Praying the dangerous ones 

Part 4 - Telling the stories that change us

Dying to Labels, Rising to Love

St. Joseph & Baby Jesus, by Jason Jenicke

ADVENT 4: Love (Grace Embodied, Part 4. Go here for Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3)

Matthew 1:18-25

Our text says Joseph is a good man. A righteous man.  He has an impressive pedigree and follows God’s ways. On paper, he seems like a solid choice to be the father of God incarnate.

This is comforting right off the bat, because we like to know who are the good people, and who are the bad ones. These are really helpful categories in our world. Knowing what makes people good and what makes them bad helps us aspire to be good people, and also  to know who the bad people are upfront so we can reject them in good conscience.  

It really messes with us when those we thought were good turn out to be bad, or those we thought were bad do something good. 

We like our categories clean. We like our aspirations clear.

But in the bible, when we start out thinking people are good, we often discover they’re not.  And more often, the people God chooses don’t even start out good to begin with – consider Adam and Eve, Sarai and Abram and Hagar, Solomon and David, the judges, kings, and prophets, and every one of the disciples.  "Good" is not something the biblical narrative is concerned with upholding.  In fact, it seems eager to tear it down.  Perhaps because if God chose the good people, the always upright, clearly worthy and obviously noble people, we might assume that their goodness is the reason they are included in God’s plan.  And while we often tell the story of our faith that way, that is not at all how the scriptures themselves tell it.

If God cared about upholding some standard of goodness God could easily have waited a few months until Mary and Joseph were properly married.  Nothing unsavory or disreputable, no need to put Joseph in such a conundrum or make things awkward and potentially life-threatening for Mary – who could legally be stoned for being pregnant by someone other than her husband.

But God is out to shatter our belief in what is right and true, what is earned and lost, important and marginal, and pull us instead into a different reality, one of wonder and mercy and trust, where God sets the terms, not us. We are creature; God is creator. We are made to receive ministry and share it with others, by a God who ministers to us in our need. We are not made to earn, or prove, or uphold something on our own.

God moves in impossibility, and not through our credentials or categories, or whatever ever false gods or measures - whether outside or inside religion – that we have erected to judge ourselves and separate ourselves. 

To participate in God’s backwards and upside down reality, we have to shed the upright and clear-cut ideas we’ve put our trust in, the ones that tell us who we are and how we should be, and whether we are good or bad. In order to be ministers, we have to release what we thought we were or should be. We have to face and let go our false selves, in order to find our true selves loved by the source of all Love.  

Our good-personness must die, and we must be resurrected into the grace of God who claims us, not because we are good, but because God is love. 

Joseph starts out this story a good person. And then he becomes a good person in an impossible situation.  His contracted fiancé is pregnant. It is not his child. He prays and frets and grieves and then he resolves to do the only good thing, the right thing in the eyes of God: to dismiss her quietly.  Dissolving their marriage contract will cause her as little risk or embarrassment as possible, and it will preserve his own dignity, honor and reputation as a good and righteous man before God.  This is what God would want him to do.

Nope. The angel tells him. It’s not. God wants you to do something else entirely.

God redefines "faithful" for Joseph. It doesn’t mean good. It means coming-alongside.  Getting your hands and your reputation dirty. It means living in impossibility.  

This is not your child.  And yet he will be.  You are to name him and raise him and love him.  And you will walk in the shadow of the whispers your whole life.  Up against your doubt, inside of this foolishness, you will live, right there against your own fear and questions and inability to even to control your own life or narrative, you will be asked to be faithful.  To accept what God is giving you and follow where God is leading you.  And you will take on guilt. You will appear to be something that you are not – this child’s father, and in so doing, you will become his father after all.  

Joseph goes from upstanding, ethical guy, good person, to one who must constantly trust up against his doubt. He must trust again and again that there is more going on than we can see, and must be willing to live into the unknown where the rules that made sense yesterday no longer hold sway. He will let go of who he thought he was to become who he is meant to be.

But it’s not just his understanding of himself that must change. It’s also his understanding of God.  Before he proceeds, he needs to decide who will be God- the god who he thought god was?  The one that called him to be a decent human being, a good person who minds his own business and is worthy of admiration and respect, in a world of competition and scarcity and judgment and fear and earning God and human favor, where women get stoned for adultery and the “right” thing to do is to dismiss her quietly and go about your business? 

Or the God who comes to him in angel and dream telling him that there is something beyond what we can see and hear and touch that is impossible but real? The  God who invites him to step into a different reality from here on out, one defined by love and standing-with-you-ness, and grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, where everybody has enough and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise? The God inviting him into a future that is unfolding right before him in foolish and backwards and extraordinary ways?

When he gets up from that dream, and does what the angel tells him to do, he enters into a conspiracy with God that undermines the whole system by which the world operates, and so he will forever be outside it, judged and misunderstood, but he will also be set free.  

The old way is dead for Joseph. And he has no choice about that.  The new way opens up before him and he gets to say yes to that.  He will join Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah, in bearing this secret, this absurd glory, that nothing is impossible with God, that the creator of the universe is coming into this world, alongside us. 

And you, Joseph! You will be the first to hold him in your arms! You will give him your parentage and so also your lineage- through you he will be in the line of David as prophesied of the Messiah.  

And it will be your job to name him “God with us,” and raise him, not as a good person who is respected in society and honored in the community, but as a vagabond and a subversive, who dines with outcasts and sinners and operates by a different playbook. He’ll live and preach not good and bad, but grace and redemption, forgiveness and freedom, connection to God and each other, abundance, gift and shalom-wholeness for all.  

So do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.  Love her. 

Name the child Jesus.  Love him.  That is your calling.  

And so Joseph wakes in the world a different person than he lies down to sleep.  His old life dead. He rises to into a life defined by love.

God’s love is where it all begins and where it all ends. A force so great it has no opposite, love made us, claims us, and draws us in share it with each other and find our true selves in that sharing.  Love is the reason God created, the reason God came in. That nothing might keep us from this love.  Not even our efforts to be good, and worthy of such love.  

To participate in the way of Christ is not to seek to be good and avoid the bad, but to be faithful, that is, broken, honest and real, to trust up right up against our doubt. It's learning to trust again and again that there is more going on than we can see, and being willing to live into the unknown, letting go of who we thought we were to become who we are meant to be.  It's lonelier and more uncomfortable than just going along with the clear-cut labels and aspirational categories the world provides.

But it’s also what sets us free to truly receive the vast and bottomless love of God, the love that comes spilling out in forgiveness and mercy and peace, hope, and joy, and moves through us into the world. 

Tonight we lit an Advent candle for Love.  Come and find yourself held in that love.