12/23/07                                                                          MATTHEW 1:18-25

“A FLYING LESSON FOR CHRISTMAS”

Rev. James Singleton

Whenever I read the story of Joseph I think back to April of 1982. Just three months prior, on January 19^th, Jan had given birth to our first son, Nathan. Here we were adjusting to our new lives as parents of a three month old child when Jan came up to me and said words that shocked me as much as any words have ever shocked me. She said, “Honey, I’m pregnant!”

My immediate response was, “What! How did that happen? It can’t be! We just had one. Are you sure?” And then, after the initial shock wore off, my mind began to whorl and the future came at me at a sickening pace. More doctor bills to pay, more clothes to buy, another mouth to feed, and two in college at the same time! How would we manage? How could we take care of a one year old and an infant at the same time? I was full of questions and had precious few answers.

So I have always felt an identity with Joseph when Mary came up to him and told him words that shocked him like no other words ever shocked him. How his mind must have begun to spin and how the future must have rushed at him all at once. There are countless paintings of Mary’s beatific face upon hearing the angel’s news, but no one has painted Joseph when he first learned the news of this child with forehead sweating and a gaze of utter bewilderment.

Joseph gets little of our attention. In fact, I nearly got into a fight with one of my brothers-in-law over Joseph whose name, ironically, happens to be Joseph. It falls to Joe every year to set up his parent’s Christmas tree and put the nativity set under it after the Thanksgiving meal. He dutifully did everything according to tradition except I noticed that he had a shepherd standing by the manger and Joseph standing out in where the shepherd should be standing.

I brought it to his attention, but he insisted that the shepherd was Joseph. I insisted it was a shepherd and Joseph was over there. He refused to believe me. So I had to remind him that I am a highly trained professional on this subject and trust me when I say that Joseph is the one who holds a lamp not a lamb in his arms. He eventually saw the light and brought his name’s sake in from the cold and placed him by the baby Jesus where he belongs.

Poor Joseph. Of all the characters in the Christmas story, instead of the one we most neglect, he’s the one we should most identify with. He’s befuddled and confused by this whole event, just like we are—unless you can honestly say that it’s no stretch of your imagination to think of God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, coming in the form of a baby, born to a peasant teenager, for the purpose of saving the world He created.  

But more than even being able to identify with Joseph’s bewilderment at Christmas, Joseph, more than any other character, has the greatest lesson to teach us on how to live the life of faith.

Poet W. H. Auden, wrote a poem about Joseph called A Christmas Oratorio. In the poem, voices act as Joseph’s questions and doubts that call out to him. Joseph is sitting down thinking about all that has been told to him when he begins to hear these voices:

“Joseph, you have heard
What Mary says occurred,
Yes, it may be so
Is it likely? No.”

And later the voices return.

“Mary may be pure,
But Joseph, are you sure?”

A third time the voices come:

“Maybe, maybe not
But, Joseph, you know what
Your world will say
About you anyway.”

Finally Joseph cries,

“How am I to know?
All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof,
That what my love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is love.”

I love the lines, “How am I to know? All I ask is one important and elegant proof…” Boy, can I identify with that. You see, I like to be in control of life. I like to have all the answers before I act. If I am faced with an important decision to make in life, I want proof that I’m making the right decision. I want a plan and I want to know that everything will go according to my plan.  

When Joseph first learned about Mary’s pregnancy, his initial reaction was to do something. He formulated a plan. He acted according to what made sense. He decided that he would quietly break off the engagement and allow her to slip away and have the baby where no one knew about them. He would secretly send her some money and his reputation would be spared, the child would be supported and Mary would elude the stoning that the law required of someone who committed adultery. It sounded like a good plan.

Joseph initially acts like all of us act. We like to act responsibly. We’re big into management. Before we have a child or get married or change careers or join a church or go to college or decide what treatment we will undergo, we do our research, we get answers to our questions, we calculate the costs, we look at all the angles, and we weigh the options.  

We don’t want any surprises. We want our feet solidly on the ground. We are not irrational people. We look before we leap because we want to know exactly where we will land. Does any of this sound like you? Then you understand where Joseph was coming from?

But then, right in the middle of Joseph trying to make arrangements for Mary to leave town, he gets a visit from an angel in a dream who informs him that the child is not from a one night stand but from the eternal God.  And the angel goes on to tell him that he is to keep Mary and keep the baby and, in fact, to name the baby Jesus because he will be the Savior of his people and of the world.

When Joseph awakens, he no longer has answers; all he has left are questions. Was this real? How do I know this wasn’t a dream from the spicy meatballs last night? What do you mean the baby is from God? How can this be? How can a baby save anybody? How will we survive the criticism? How do we explain this to our family and friends? Angel, dream, pregnancy from God, baby savior—none of this fit into Joseph’s plan.

Joseph is left with a dilemma. How does he live now? Does he stay in control of his life and go forward with his sensible arrangements where he had all the answers? Or does he dare forgo being in control and do what the dream angel said, even though he doesn’t understand any of it? “How am I to know? All I ask is one important and elegant proof.”

That is our perennial dilemma, isn’t it? Do we cling to our way of doing things, only acting when we have all the facts, all the answers, all the angles figured out like good engineers? Or are there times in life when we simply have to, as they say, let go and let God?

One thing I have discovered about life, regardless of how much I try to control it, it is never in my control. I never have enough facts; never have enough answers to make my decisions with rock solid assurance. There are always those unknowns that I can’t eliminate. There are the risks that I have no safety net for. Most of the major decisions I have made in life have been, what we call, leaps of faith.

 
Like Joseph, there are times when we are simply called by God to do something that makes no practical sense, or that we have no firm grip on, but we are called instead to simply trust—trust God and maybe to trust another; to trust love over answers.

 The late priest and theologian Henri Nouwen told the story of "The Flying Rodleighs” who were trapeze artists who performed with a German circus. Nouwen writes: “I will never forget how enraptured I became when I first saw the Rodleighs move through the air, flying and catching, as elegant dancers.

“The next day, I returned to the circus to see them again and introduced myself to them as one of their great fans…One day, I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troop, in his caravan, talking about flying. He said, ‘As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump.’

“‘How does it work?’ Nouwen asked. ‘The secret,’ Rodleigh said, ‘is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me to safety . . .’

“‘You do nothing!’” said Nouwen surprised. ‘Nothing,’ Rodleigh repeated. “The worst thing a flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It’s Joe's task to catch me. If I grabbed Joe's wrists, I might break them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end for both of us. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.’”

We are cautious people. We want proof, verifiable evidence, assurance, and guarantees. We don’t want to commit to anything without understanding what we are getting into, where it will lead to, what will be demanded from us. We’re leery of the fine print.

 But Christmas is about the irrational, unexplainable appearance of love in the midst of the world’s harshest realities. Christmas is an invitation to do what Joseph did, to be Joseph, to realize that we will never have all the answers. And if we wait to make only the decisions that we control and fully understand then we will never let go, never fly into the air and never experience the breathtaking miracle of being caught by the Catcher.

 Thank God Joseph put aside his sensible plan, ditched his reasonable arrangements, closed his eyes and let go of the bar. See him spinning and turning, screaming with delight as we takes Mary as his own wife and accepts Jesus has God’s own son. And see the look of relief on his face when he feels God’s large hands grab onto his wrists and assure him that despite all the risk and danger, he will not fall.

What constraints and reasonable plans are you being called upon to let go of? Life is not meant to be lived safely and securely on the ground where we are in complete control. The great moments in life are always a tumbling risk as we let go of what we think we need and fly through the air with hands extended, prayerfully waiting to be caught by the great Catcher.

 Nobody lived the life of faith better than Joseph whose early Christmas gift to we timid and so very cautious souls is a flying lesson.  

AMEN