(Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25)

It hadn’t occurred to me until just now (I don’t know why, it seems obvious once you see it), but in these two passages—Matthew’s account of the angel’s message to Joseph, and Isaiah’s message to Ahaz, which Matthew references—there’s a remarkable contrast between the two men who received those divine messages. The obvious one is between their social status; but more than that, there’s a sharp contrast between the two in faith and obedience.

Doesn’t it seem strange to you—lots of people ask God for signs; the Old Testament is littered with examples—but here, God’s prophet actually invites someone to ask for a sign, and Ahaz says, “No thanks.” He cloaks it in false piety, saying, “I don’t want to put the Lord God to the test”; which sounds great until you remember that God made the offer. Why does he do that? I could be wrong, but I think it’s because he honestly didn’t want the sign; he had his own plans for political and military deliverance. He’s fighting Syria and Israel, and his idea for dealing with them is to bring Assyria down on them—to ally himself with the tiger to get rid of the fox.

Really, that wasn’t all that bright an idea, as the long-term consequences would be severe; but he was trying to deal with his problems on an ordinary level—ordinary for a king, anyway—by means of plans he could devise and events he could at least hope to control. He was trying to solve political and military problems by political and military means, and here’s the prophet coming along with an offer from God to solve them in a way that was completely out of the ordinary and beyond his control. To that, he says, “No, thank you. I don’t want that.”

In retrospect, knowing how the story ended, we can see how foolish Ahaz was; but in our own lives, in our own context, it’s much, much harder to see. Intellectually, we understand that God is out there and doing stuff—we say it, and at some level, we believe it—but in terms of the day-to-day operation of our lives, we don’t live by faith in what God is doing, we live by faith in what we can see and touch and quantify and control. When we have big problems (as certainly Ahaz did), we tend to look to big people rather than to God—to politicians, to the rich, to the famous, to the influential; to big corporations and big government. And yes, God can and does work through them as much as through anyone else; but he doesn’t need to, and he doesn’t rely on the powerful to accomplish his purposes. This time of the year above all others, we should remember that, because the birth of Jesus dramatizes the point with exceptional force.

Jesus’ parents came from Nazareth, a small town which lay in a high valley among the hills of Galilee; they were far from rich or powerful. They may have been poor, given that when they presented Jesus at the temple, they offered the sacrifice of the poor, two small birds, rather than a lamb; but it occurred to me this week, those were unusual circumstances—they had just made the trip to Bethlehem, and their families were mad at them. In a world with no bank accounts, ATMs or credit cards, the fact that Joseph couldn’t afford a lamb right then doesn’t mean he was poor in general. We think of Joseph as a carpenter, but in our terms, it would be better to call him a builder, even a general contractor; no doubt he did work with wood, but he probably did a lot more with stone, and the bulk of his work was most likely in construction.

That said, while economic times were pretty good, and building houses was a good way to make a living, this was still a man working for a living in a small town; Joseph was not a man to whom Rome would have paid any attention, save at tax time, nor a man who you would ever have expected to wind up in the history books. History is usually about those who are blue in blood, not in collar. Sure, he probably hoped Messiah would come, just like many in Israel did—but to have any part in his coming? Messiah was for Jerusalem, and he was for Nazareth, and his plans for his life would have been much smaller than that. No doubt when he and Mary were betrothed, he looked for nothing more than a happy marriage, a healthy family, and at least one son to learn the trade.

And then one day, Mary came to him and told him she was going to have a baby. One would think he must have been the first person she told; and one would also think he must have felt like one of his houses had fallen in on him. I don’t know if it made it better or worse when she then took off for Judea to visit Elizabeth and Zechariah, leaving Joseph alone to wrestle with everything; either way, it had to have been agonizing.

He had been dishonored—or so he thought, and so the whole society would think—and he had no option but to divorce Mary; engagements in that culture were as binding as marriage, they could only be ended by divorce, and not only Jewish but Roman law demanded that a husband divorce his wife if she were guilty of adultery. If Joseph failed to do so, he would have two choices: let everyone think he had gotten Mary pregnant, or be subject to arrest by the Romans for facilitating prostitution. Either way, he would be shamed, subject to the scorn and contempt of everyone around him. What’s more, in divorce proceedings, Joseph could have claimed her dowry—whatever assets she brought with her into the marriage—and reclaimed any bride-price he had paid, thus coming out of the matter with his revenge and a tidy profit.

But instead, we see the first indication that Joseph, for all his ordinary life, was truly no ordinary man. Where financial considerations, the desire to save what he could of his reputation, and simple anger and hurt would all have pushed him toward a public divorce, instead he decided to do the best he could for Mary, rather than for himself. He had to divorce her, but he resolved to do it as quietly as possible, minimizing her public dishonor at considerable cost to himself. Justice would have permitted him to do much more, but he chose instead to treat her with mercy, which was a remarkable decision. Indeed, it was truly Christlike.

So Joseph comes to this decision, then goes to bed; he tosses and turns for a while, no doubt thoroughly miserable, and finally falls asleep. And in his sleep, an angel comes to him and says, “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. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And then the angel was gone, and I imagine Joseph sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, the room dark, but the light of the angel still shining in the backs of his eyes.

And then—he didn’t try to fight it, he didn’t say it was just a dream or try to explain it away: he did what he was told. He believed the angel, and he accepted Mary’s story, and he acted on it. Sure, it was impossible to believe; but then, what had happened to him was impossible to believe, too, but it had happened. It would cost him his honor in the eyes of his community, it would mean great shame for him and all his family, but God had commanded him, and he obeyed. This showed remarkable faith in God, and an even more remarkable willingness to follow God into the teeth of all the displeasure and contempt the world, and his family, could throw at him. It’s hard, hard as a door slammed shut, to buck the demands of family and society for God’s sake, but he did it.

We really need to appreciate this: Joseph gave up his life when God called, with no idea how much of it he might ever get back. He gave up his reputation, he gave up revenge, he gave up his own plan for how his life should go . . . he surrendered his life. He could have rejected the dream; he could have refused the call and chosen to keep control of his own life. Instead, he chose to put himself in God’s hands and accept the part God had for him, even though it meant being a fool to the world and a pariah to his family.

And because of that, he got to be there when God came to earth, a baby who would become a man whose footsteps would shake the world; and in so doing, in surrendering himself to the plan and the hands of God, Joseph surrendered himself to joy: the joy of the angels; the joy of the shepherds; the joy of all creation. His extraordinary obedience brought extraordinary reward.

(2 Samuel 22:1-4, Micah 7:8-20; Luke 1:57-80)

I have to admit, this passage from Luke gave me fits. There’s a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I don’t just want to stand up here and tell you interesting stuff; and I had trouble finding the sermon in it. To be sure, it’s a great story. Elizabeth gives birth, and her family and the whole community rejoice. They wait to name the baby until he’s circumcised, and everyone around assumes he’s going to be named Zechariah after his father—until Elizabeth interrupts, “No, he’s going to be called John.”

Well, now that wasn’t how things were done, because sons were supposed to be named after fathers or grandfathers, and John wasn’t a family name. The neighbors seem to have figured Elizabeth was cutting her husband out of the decision—they clearly thought he was deaf as well as mute—so they asked him directly; to their surprise he wrote, quite emphatically, “His name is John.” Note that—not will be, but is. God named that baby before he was even conceived, and he’s been called John since before he even existed. With that, Zechariah’s speech is restored, and he begins praising God—and the community falls back in fear, recognizing that God is at work, wondering who on Earth this child is going to be. It’s a great scene, and it would be easy to talk about Zechariah putting his faith in God and receiving his reward; but is that really the point?

Then you have this great song of praise, commonly called the Benedictus; interestingly, he’s praising God for giving him a son, but that’s really not the focus of his song. It’s been said that every man wants his son to be a star, but we don’t see that in Zechariah’s words; instead, he essentially says, never mind the star, the sun is rising—and my son, you get to go ahead of him to let everyone know he’s coming. It’s a wonderful declaration, drawing once again on Malachi, which we read a couple weeks ago. It would be easy to turn it into a nice little moral lesson about how we should value people for how they point us to Christ, not for how impressive they are in themselves; which is true enough, but that isn’t the gospel heartbeat in this passage.

More interesting is verse 72, which our English translations blunt a little bit. Zechariah declares that God has raised up a horn of salvation for his people—the image is of the horn of an ox, with which it strikes and drives back its enemies—and then he says, “to do mercy to our ancestors.” Again, the idea here is the Old Testament word hesed; our concept of mercy tends to be pretty passive and pallid, just a matter of letting the guilty off the hook, but here we see the biblical concept of the faithful, covenant-making love and mercy of God as an active force, God taking decisive and powerful action to deliver his people. And even more interesting, Zechariah says that in bringing his people salvation from their enemies, God is doing mercy to their ancestors—he is fulfilling the covenant promises he made to them.

If you really stop and consider what Zechariah is saying, you have to be struck by the grand sweep of his vision; and here, I think, we strike something that is the gospel word for us this morning. We have the real tendency to collapse our view of God’s salvation to just one thing. Classically, for evangelicals, it’s personal individual spiritual salvation from sin, which can lead into a sort of “me ’n’ Jesus” isolationism. Equally classically, for liberals, it’s social justice—political liberation from oppressive societal structures. With the American evangelical move into political engagement that began a few decades ago, salvation began to be somewhat identified with moral transformation of the culture. You wind up with dueling theologies as political campaigns.

None of these visions of salvation is big enough; none matches the vision God gave Zechariah. There is definitely a political element to the deliverance he foresees, as the enemies of the people of God will no longer be able to oppress them—they will be removed as enemies, either by their destruction or by being brought to repentance. That cannot be removed from the picture, because the deliverance God promises is not merely internal and subjective. At the same time—and this is where so many in Israel missed the boat—his deliverance is not merely political, either; the language of verses 77-79 goes far beyond that. The Lord will deliver his people, not merely from political bondage to Rome, but from spiritual bondage to sin; he will free them, and guide them by his light, so that they will at last walk in the way of his peace.

Now, here again we have a word that cannot be captured by its English translation, though shalom is rather better known. This doesn’t just mean “peace” as in “peace and quiet” or “not fighting.” Rather, the idea in this word is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will, and thus, second, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety; this in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life to which Jesus will call those who believe in him, and which he will make possible for those who believe in him.

Along with this, there’s also the aspect of his salvation we see in verses 74-75: God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is what we might call the social aspect—the bridge between our individual deliverance from sin and the political deliverance of the people of God from those who do evil: God saves us in order that we may serve him with our whole lives, and in fact that opportunity to serve is part of the blessing he gives us. That service is not merely activity on God’s behalf, but is a way of life submitted in humble obedience to him—conformed to his holiness and righteousness, accepting his definition of what is good and right rather than insisting on our own ideas and preferences.

The salvation of God in Jesus Christ unites all these elements, because God is on about redeeming a people for his name; he saves us as individuals, but not just as individuals, and he isn’t saving us only from our individual sin, but from all the sin of all of us together. That’s why Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the work Jesus has entrusted to us as “the ministry of reconciliation,” because in delivering us from our sin and giving us peace with him, part of his purpose is to give peace between us—to cleanse the sin not only from our own hearts, but from our relationships. As he gives us the humility to bow before him and accept his good instead of our own, so too he gives us the humility to bow before each other and accept each other’s good instead of our own.

God is on about redeeming our hearts, our relationships, our families, our churches, our culture, our society, our nation, our world—in fact, all of creation. His deliverance comes at every level; his salvation operates in every area, in every aspect. He will not stop until the knowledge of him fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, and all people bow the knee to him as the only Lord and God, the only authority, the only one to be obeyed, the only one deserving of worship.

(1 Samuel 2:1-11; Luke 1:39-56)

God didn’t come when he was expected. He didn’t come during the crisis of conquest, or the heady days of the Maccabean revolt, or the hopeful (if brief) period of independence; in any of those times, the opportunity for a national deliverer to arise and restore Israel to its glories under David and Solomon was apparent, but God didn’t come then. He didn’t come where he was expected either—he didn’t show up in a palace, or among the priests, or with the rich and powerful; indeed, he didn’t even come to the capital city of Jerusalem, the city of God. His coming was not in an extraordinary time, or an extraordinary place, or to anyone whom the world would have considered special or important in any way.

Instead, God came where the world wasn’t looking, when its head was turned. He came at a time that was like most times—neither one of great prosperity and success, nor one of crisis and great need. He came to a place that was like most places, not a center of culture nor a community of power and wealth, but just an ordinary small town where nothing much ever happened once, let alone twice. And he came to an ordinary family, no one to whom society would have given a second glance, people who were completely anonymous in the broader scheme of things. The most extraordinary event in human history—the birth of God as a human being—began in the most ordinary context you could possibly imagine.

And in this we see the gospel. We see God working salvation completely by his own initiative and power and grace, completely apart from any human effort or plan or expectation. Mary does nothing to earn this or make this happen; neither did Elizabeth or Zechariah. Yes, Zechariah and Elizabeth were faithful and godly people, and Mary seems to have been a young woman of deep and serious faith and character as well, and that’s clearly part of why God chose them; but the choice was all God’s, none of their doing—for them, there was only to receive his blessing with gratitude and faith.

We also see here that God does not judge people the same way we do; as he told Samuel, where we look at the external stuff, he looks at the heart. The world would never have chosen Elizabeth or Mary for anything important, but God did—because he knew better. He doesn’t honor our hierarchies, our evaluations, our priorities; he inverts and upends them. He doesn’t follow our agendas, he does what he will and calls us to follow him—and he does so in a way that drives home the fact that we neither know nor control as much as we think we do.

Now, there are those who use Mary’s song in political ways, as justification for their political agendas, but to do that is to miss the point and drastically shrink its vision. Human revolutions may bring down the proud, but they only replace them with other proud people; in most cases, they end up being hijacked by those who are hungry for power and greedy for wealth, and you wind up with folks in power who are no better than the ones they overthrew. Human schemes to humble the rich and raise up the poor don’t really change the system, they just shift the balance of winners and losers. That’s all they can do, because they’re all about our goals, our agendas, our efforts, and our desires—they’re about us, and focused on us. What God is doing is very different.

The great theme of Mary’s great song of praise—underscored by God’s choice of her and Elizabeth—isn’t rich vs. poor, but the humble vs. the proud. God has brought down those who are proud “in their inmost thoughts”—those whose pride is deep in their bones, who think they have no need of God. They are oppressors, perhaps of whole nations, perhaps of their wives and children, because they don’t respect others—and they don’t respect others because they don’t respect God. They feel free to use and take advantage of other people if they can because they’re strong enough to do so and they bow to no law but their own; but God has brought them down.

Now, to be sure, we can’t hide from the fact that if we look around, we can see a lot of the proud doing just fine, to all appearances; God keeps bringing them down, and more keep rising up. As we’ve said before, we live between the times—the kingdom of God broke into the world with the coming of Jesus, and is already here in us his people, but it has not yet been fully realized; in the vivid image of Swiss NT scholar Oscar Cullman, we live between D-Day and V-E Day, when the outcome of the war has been decided, but the enemy has not yet given up fighting. The proud may not know they’ve been brought down, but Mary is right: their final defeat has already been accomplished.

If we lose sight of that, it’s probably because we’re looking for hope in all the wrong places. We keep looking to the proud, to the powerful and influential, for deliverance. We look to politicians to fix our country’s problems, to government or big corporations to solve our economic issues, to people we see on TV to reverse our moral decline—and we forget that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who’s famous is proud in their inmost thoughts—though being famous tends to breed that pride—nor am I saying that God doesn’t or can’t use powerful people. Obviously he can and he does. But we need to remember that “God helps those that help themselves” is Ben Franklin*, not Scripture, and Scripture doesn’t tell us that God gives grace to the mighty. God gives grace to the humble.

This is the key, and it’s the crux of Mary’s song: God is holy, and his hesed is for those who show him reverence. If you haven’t been here when I’ve talked about hesed, stick around and you’ll hear about it—this is one of my favorite Old Testament words, in part because it’s so rich there’s no good way to translate it. Our English versions render it a lot of ways—mercy, lovingkindness, covenant love, covenant faithfulness, faithful love; but really, it needs a sentence at least. Hesed means love in action, steadfast love that always keeps its promises, unswerving loyalty and faithfulness, complete commitment and unfailing reliability; it’s the way God treats those with whom he has made covenant. It’s what the Jesus Storybook Bible calls his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

This is the love of God, the mercy of God, the faithfulness of God, for his people whom he has chosen—not because we were impressive, wise or wealthy or powerful; indeed, as 1 Corinthians tells us, God quite deliberately chooses the unimpressive in order to make it clear that the wisdom and the power and the riches are all his. He chooses us in our weakness and foolishness, and he gives us his Holy Spirit; and by his Spirit he gives us Jesus, whom he has made our wisdom, righteousness and holiness and redemption. He fills us with his love, and he teaches us to worship him, and him alone. What matters is not that we are good enough, talented enough, important enough—none of us is; what matters is that he has chosen us, and he is more than able.

* Note: though not original to Franklin, the phrase is best known in the US through its inclusion in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

(Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38)

What we see here is God announcing his plan to do the impossible. In the first place, it’s physically impossible—Mary’s a virgin. She’s betrothed to Joseph—and just so we’re clear on this, betrothal is what they had back then in place of engagement, but it was much stronger; it entailed all the commitments of marriage with none of the benefits, and it lasted a whole year. So, she’s legally bound to Joseph, but they’re still living apart, probably with family making sure they don’t sneak off and do anything inappropriate. There’s absolutely no way she can be pregnant. But she’s going to be.

The physical impossibility, though, is secondary; it’s only to underscore the spiritual impossibility: this baby born to a virgin girl would be God. The angel doesn’t really push Mary to understand this fully, and she probably didn’t until much later; it was far too great an impossibility for anyone to comprehend at that point, and Mary was overwhelmed enough as it was. It’s all there, though.

In particular, note verse 35: the child will be called holy and the Son of God—why? Because he will be conceived, not by normal human action, but by a direct miraculous work of the Spirit of God. He will be fully human, but he will be more than merely human, right from the absolute beginning. He will be God become one fragile human being; the creator of the universe, the Word by whom the world was made, will take up nine months’ residence in a woman’s womb.

It’s a wonder, this; it’s a wonder we keep collapsing into sentiment and trite moral lessons because even now, even as many millions of times as the story has been told, it’s still too big for us to really grasp. The maker of all that is, the one who holds our incomprehensibly vast universe in the palm of his hand, as an unborn baby doing backflips and kicking his mother in the bladder; Almighty God with messy diapers and a rash. As the British poet John Betjeman asked in wonder,

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, incomprehensibly, gloriously true: the infinite, all-powerful, all-glorious Son of God, the source of all life through whom all things were made, reduced himself to a zygote in the womb of a humble girl in a backwater village on the edge of civilization, to be born among the animals and laid in a feed trough by parents who were soon to be fugitives, to live as a homeless wanderer, to be falsely convicted and wrongly executed, to rise again from the dead—and he did it all for you, that you might know him, and know he loves you.