Behind the Scenes

When I think of Joseph’s role in the story of Jesus, I think of all the people behind the scenes in those dramas I love to watch.  The ones who work the lights and the sound.  You only notice them when they mess up.  The folks dressed all in black, who move the furniture around between scenes.  These people don’t get paid, not in community theater anyway.  They are often invisible to us.  Their names might appear somewhere in the back of the program; only their friends read far enough to notice. You might think these people don’t matter.  You would be wrong.  They do matter, and I hope they know it.  They are essential to the story.  Their joy in being a hidden part of the drama, their generosity with their time and skill, their faithful participation, make it possible for the story to be told.  

Our culture tells us something different.  Grab the spotlight, look good, flaunt what you got.  Those people all in black moving the furniture?  They’re losers.  The important people get attention. You gotta be somebody, make the grade.  

That, you know, is a lie.  What really matters is not where you stand on the ladder of earthly value.  The real drama is going on behind the scenes, where nobody is even looking.  Are you a faithful friend?  A faithful parent?  A faithful worker? Not all the time; none of us are.  But do you keep trying when you fail?  Are you a faithful, if imperfect, follower of Jesus?  Are you showing up to fulfill God’s role for you as best you are able, through joys and sorrows, despite your fears and your failures? For these things you may never get human recognition.  But your faithfulness is essential to God’s drama as much today as it was in Joseph’s times. 

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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

December 17, 2017

Joseph Was Faithful

Matthew 1:18-25    Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

23       “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

                        and they shall name him Emmanuel,” 

which means, “God is with us.”  24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife,  25 but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

I moved to Southern California when my son Mark was a toddler.  I still remember my culture shock when I first arrived here from Minnesota.  The weather was perfect.  All the time.  (Compared to Minnesota, anyway.) The traffic on Irvine streets went twenty miles an hour faster than in Minnesota.  People made interesting hand gestures at me when I drove.  And the news. The news was… all about show biz.  Movies, TV, theater, actors.  I learned that a job at Disneyland is a great job for an aspiring actor.  And I’ve met a whole lot of aspiring actors here in Southern California.  Some of them have become dear friends.  People who get degrees in theater at UC Irvine.  People who drive up to LA to audition as extras.  People who do community theater.  They work full time at their day job, and then they put in a few more hours for no pay, just for the joy of being part of the drama.

I just watch theater productions.  I especially enjoy if I know someone in the cast.  And my very favorite drama is the old, old story: about how God came to earth, and became one of us, a helpless child born in poverty.  Then he increased in wisdom and years (according to Luke), and around his thirtieth year he started teaching us and loving us and healing us, and challenging us to follow him.  He died for us.  But that was not the end of the story.  He rose, and his Spirit is with us even now.   And that old, old story is still being lived out, by us, today.  Emmanuel.  God with us.

This time of year we naturally concentrate on the birth part of the story.  The details of Jesus’ birth are probably not accurate history, that mash-up of Matthew and Luke’s versions if Jesus’ birth that we know as “the Christmas story.” But let’s take the story at face value for now, because it makes for some pretty good drama.

We tend to sanitize the Christmas story.  For instance, when’s the last time you’ve heard about the slaughter of the innocents?  Matthew Chapter 2.  I didn’t think so.  Tragically,  is still being acted out among the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the people of Syria, and sometimes in our own country’s schools and streets.  Today’s reading is another part of the story we frequently leave out: the angel’s annunciation to Joseph. 

Poor Joseph. He doesn’t have a single speaking part in the whole of the Gospels.  In the G-rated Nativity story he just stands beside Mary at the manger, looking like a third wheel.  Matthew and Luke sketch Joseph’s role in only the barest outlines.  Mark and John, not at all.  But we can read between the lines; imagine what was happening behind the scenes: do Midrash, as Jewish scholars call it.  Pretty quickly we realize that Joseph had plenty of drama to contend with.  And Joseph’s drama might have something to tell us about our faith.

For Mary’s annunciation, the angel appeared in person.  Joseph’s angel appeared only in a dream.  That kind of disorienting dream experience that could happen to anybody, and that could be totally explained away.  I imagine Joseph wanted to explain it away.  It’s a wonder he could sleep at all, given the news he’d just heard.  His fiancée was pregnant.  Not by him.  Devastating.  But he could put it behind him and start over, if he just… oh wait.  The angel said: go through with the wedding.   That angel Joseph could easily have explained away for his convenience.  It was only a dream, after all.  It would have been so easy for him to just ignore that dream.  Because whatever you believe about virgin birth, you can bet the neighbors didn’t believe a word of it.  Yet Joseph chose to be faithful.

This was probably not the role Joseph expected to play for God.  But he stepped up and took up that ego-crushing part in God’s drama.  He took Mary under his protection, and legitimized her child, and gave him a name and a heritage: descendant of the royal line of David.   Legitimacy and genealogy may not matter so much to us, but they mattered a whole lot back then.  

Next, Joseph is forced to drag Mary, nine months pregnant, to Bethlehem, ninety miles away from home, so that the occupying Romans can count her correctly for tax purposes.  And Joseph doesn’t have good enough connections in his ancestral town to find Mary a real bed, so this child for whom he has given up so much, in whom he has become so invested, gets born… in a barn!  Some provider for his family.  Can you imagine the shame?

Some time later, rich foreign dignitaries arrive, bearing gifts.  They know way too much about this special child, and they have revealed way too much to that power hungry old despot Herod.  The angel pops up in another dream, and tells Joseph: run for your child’s life. The journey to Egypt is over two hundred miles of walking through wilderness.  Jesus’ family become refugees, immigrants in a foreign land.  For Joseph that meant sweat and fear and gut-grinding powerlessness. 

The last mention of Joseph in our gospels is when he leaves Jerusalem years later after a festival visit, and accidentally forgets to take twelve-year-old Jesus home with him. Didn’t notice your own kid wasn’t in the caravan? Can’t control your son, can you, Joseph? Shame again. 

How did Joseph raise Jesus?  That happened behind the scenes.  By the time Jesus started his ministry, Joseph was only a memory.  But despite the loads Joseph carried, loads of dashed expectations and confusion and shame and guilt and fear, we can tell that Joseph did some things right.  He stayed faithful.   By “faithful,” I don’t mean that Joseph believed certain things.  I suspect he didn’t know what to believe.  He must have stopped trying to imagine what God was going to drop on him next.

Joseph was faithful because he took this role he was offered by God, though it cost him his reputation more than once. He was faithful when he went to any lengths to protect the child God had entrusted to him.  He was faithful when he persevered in that role even when he felt like a total failure.  Day after day, through joys and sorrows, Joseph was faithful in raising this child who later was called Savior, the child who brings us hope and healing two thousand years later.  It seems he raised that child well indeed.

I wonder how many of you noticed:  it was Joseph who got to name the baby.  Jesus.  Yeshua in Aramaic.  “God saves.”  A message of joy, that people in that place and time needed to hear.  We probably do too. But God does not always save in the way people expect.  A child, born in a barn, of parents who were nobodies, in a tiny occupied country.  Would you have written the story that way?  Nothing special at all, except God, and a few faithful people that almost nobody even noticed.

When I think of Joseph’s role in the story of Jesus, I think of all the people behind the scenes in those dramas I love to watch.  The ones who work the lights and the sound.  You only notice them when they mess up.  The folks dressed all in black, who move the furniture around between scenes.  These people don’t get paid, not in community theater anyway.  They are often invisible to us.  Their names might appear somewhere in the back of the program; only their friends read far enough to notice. You might think these people don’t matter.  You would be wrong.  They do matter, and I hope they know it.  They are essential to the story.  Their joy in being a hidden part of the drama, their generosity with their time and skill, their faithful participation, make it possible for the story to be told.  

Our culture tells us something different.  Grab the spotlight, look good, flaunt what you got.  Those people all in black moving the furniture?  They’re losers.  The important people get attention. You gotta be somebody, make the grade. 

That, you know, is a lie.  What really matters is not where you stand on the ladder of earthly value.  The real drama is going on behind the scenes, where nobody is even looking.  Are you a faithful friend?  A faithful parent?  A faithful worker? Not all the time; none of us are.  But do you keep trying when you fail?  Are you a faithful, if imperfect, follower of Jesus?  Are you showing up to fulfill God’s role for you as best you are able, through joys and sorrows, despite your fears and your failures? For these things you may never get human recognition.  But your faithfulness is essential to God’s drama as much today as it was in Joseph’s times.

I wonder if anybody is hearing this sermon thorough the filter of process theology.  If so, you might be thinking, “God doesn’t direct everything going on here. There is no script, no master plan.”  According to process theology, in each moment of experience there is the invitation to choose the good and the beautiful and the true. And then a new moment is created, with a new invitation.  That looks like direction to me, although the script is being written as we live it.  Improv, you might call it.  Improv actually requires more attention and skill of the participants than reading off a script.  Either way, our participation, our faithfulness, is needed.

We are starting a new chapter in the story of this church.  Faithfulness is required, so that we can be guided together, not necessarily into my vision of what this church can become, or yours, but so that we can create, together with God, the next chapter of this church’s story. 

And we are all still part of the old, old story, that is larger than us, and larger than this church. God With Us, Emmanuel, is still being acted out today.  God with us, not far away.  God here and now.  No longer in the form of a helpless baby, but in the Spirit of the Risen Christ, the Holy Spirit breathing into us, life and hope and love and purpose and joy.

If you haven’t yet become part of God’s evolving story at Brea Congregational UCC, please join us. I’ll be honest, it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work to keep a church going. And it is a joy and a privilege to work and play with people who care so much about getting out God’s message of love and acceptance and creative power to the world.

God doesn’t need us to be in charge, or to be successful, or fearless, or to remember any lines, or even to follow the story line.  Your faithfulness, you just showing up, your willingness to learn, and serve, and love, is what matters to God.  You matter to God.  Even if your name never shows up in the credits, this side of heaven.  Thank you, Joseph, for faithfully taking the supporting role.  And thank you, people of this church, for to bring the story of God’s amazing love to Brea, California this Advent season.  Amen.