Faith, like life, is messy. This has been on my mind a lot, after thinking about Matthew’s Gospel (1:18-25) where he talks about Joseph and the birth of Jesus. Fr. Bill Ortt’s sermon stirred me up and Debie Thomas‘s essay on the same passage in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” sent me into overdrive.
In the Gospel, Joseph finds out his fiancé Mary is pregnant, not with his child, and plans to send her away quietly. What the law required is that he should publicly shame her and that she might be stoned to death. But Joseph’s heart demanded something different of him. Send her away quietly.
And then, in a dream, an angel tells Joseph not to worry, to stay with Mary, whose child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and to help raise her son, who they are to name Jesus. He learned this in a dream.
Fr. Bill, describing what Joseph decided to do said, “Instead of following the letter of the law, displayed the heart of God.”
And there is the thing–look at the “law” over centuries–the law changes with the times. The loving heart of God is unchanging, constant, eternal. But that doesn’t make it easy to follow or live into.
Debie Thomas in her essay, “Into the Mess,” says:
“It is the humble carpenter’s willingness to abandon his notions of holiness and embrace the scandalous that allows the miracle of Christ’s arrival to unfold.”
This is not to dismiss Mary’s role and the need for her willingness to be the mother of Jesus. Luke’s Gospel looks at the birth story from Mary’s perspective, and has an angel speaking to Mary. Matthew looks at Joseph.
Saying yes was the first step, the same as it is with us today. But this is going to lead for an entirely different life for Joseph than he could have possibly pictured for himself. He has to let go of everything. Thomas writes:
“In choosing Joseph to be Jesus’s earthly father, God leads a righteous man with an impeccable reputation straight into doubt, shame, scandal, and controversy. God’s call requires Joseph to reorder everything he thinks he knows about fairness, justice, goodness, and purity.”
Think about that. Based on a dream, would you say yes to God’s calling in that situation? Joseph had to let go of his notion of all these things, to live a completely different life than he dreamed for himself–saying yes to God had a cost for him. It also had a reward, but in order to see it, he had to let go of what he thought he knew.
Fr. Bill, in thinking about the character of Joseph, said he must have been a young man. Why?
“The young dream, the old remember.”
As we get older, we are less likely to listen to our dreams. We are more inclined to look back and discern things by comparison, by whatever logic we can discern from our lives; we are less open to the new and the strange.
What if we could stay open? What if we could continue to dream as we get older? What if we could find a way to keep or develop soft hearts?
Fr. Bill picked up another thread in his sermon that I want to weave in here. In talking about Christ’s birth, he said, “God himself became vulnerably present in the world.”
God as vulnerable. Both in the person of Jesus, but also in the way he deals with us. He asks, we can say yes or no. And this comes back to the idea of God as Love.
I recently picked up C.S. Lewis’s “The Four Loves” from my bookshelf and started reading it, based on coming across this quote online:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
To love is to be vulnerable. What normally happens to us as we get older, in response to the pain, suffering, and heartbreak that happens by living, we seal ourselves off. We harden. We build walls in self-defense. And this is what the world has largely come to look and feel like.
But we can choose a different way to be. It takes courage, it takes heart, it takes being vulnerable.
In his book “Consolations,” David Whyte writes about “Touch.” He says:
“Touch is what we desire in one form or another, even if we find it through being alone, through the agency of silence or through the felt need to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass on the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of another’s hand; even the gentle first touch of an understanding, which, until now, we were formerly afraid to hold.”
Even the most introverted want to feel deeply. We want to experience connection. We want to touch and be touched. To touch, to feel, we have to be open. And being open isn’t just to the good stuff, the stuff we want, but also to that which can wreck us. Whyte continues:
“Being alive in the world means being found by [the] world and sometimes touched to the core in ways we would rather not experience.”
Maybe that is along the lines of what Joseph experienced before his dream. This isn’t what he had signed up for. This isn’t the life he had mapped out. But he was open. And through and after his dream, he said yes to a life, a calling, that none of us can fathom.
Because he was open. Because he was willing to let go of what he thought he wanted. Because he said yes.
Whyte finishes his thoughts on touch looking at being untouchable:
“To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness; a sign of fear rather than of strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational, and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.”
To wall up and go numb is a cop out. It deprives us of really living.
Life, like faith, is messy. In order to experience those things we all want–love, joy, happiness–we have to open and vulnerable to those things we want with everything to avoid, heartbreak, pain, suffering. That’s the mess of it.
Joseph and Mary became the earth parents of Jesus. Their saying yes changed everything for all of us. We don’t hear much more about Joseph in the story–it wasn’t about him, ultimately. And Mary watched Jesus being killed. Again with the mess.
Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us, God tells us, it’s worth it. Love is worth it. Life is worth it. The mess is part of it. And not just part of it, but an important part of it.
I love how Debie Thomas thinks about the mess. And invites us to do the same:
“Do not be afraid of the mess. Embrace it. The mess is where God enters the world.”
To live, to love, to be open. To have the heart of God and to become vulnerably present in the world.
Amen.
