Fourth Week in Advent (Year A)
Perhaps you have heard of the old Yiddish proverb: “We plan. God Laughs.” This wise proverb speaks to something that is very true. We often make plans in our lives and then those plans change. The proverb is not saying that it is a bad thing for us to make plans. In fact our plans and dreams can give us motivation and direction, especially as we consider where we feel God is calling us in the world. What this proverb gets at instead, I think, is that our lives will not always turn out the way we plan. Life is full of curveballs and unexpected events, and our plans and goals change accordingly. And while God may at times laugh at our well intentioned plans, some pretty amazing things can happen when those plans change.
I am not a sports person by any means but I have found this metaphor to be helpful. In football, the quarterback huddles the team together and they make a plan for their next play. With the plan in mind the teams line up at the line of scrimmage. But then something happens and the quarterback has to call an audible. They change the plan at the last minute and the team follows. They have to be flexible and change their plan if they want to make the touchdown.
When God created the world, I think God had a plan. God imagined creation to be in harmony. He had created the world and Adam and Eve in order to be in relationship with them. But then, unfortunately, Sin entered into the world, and Sin got in the way between God and humanity. Humanity began to turn away from God and go their own way and chase things that were the opposite of God. God’s vision for a perfect world was shattered. Yet God loved creation, and so decided to create a new plan. To put it in football terms, God needed to call an audible—to come up with a new plan for salvation and to reconcile the world once again. That audible was Jesus, a tiny baby born of the virgin Mary and laid in a manger, who would grow up to set in motion God’s new plan for reconciliation through the Cross. This new plan, of course, was radical and would change the world—and the plans of Mary and Joseph!
In our Gospel today we hear the story of Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph. We hear about Joseph as part of the Christmas story, and here and there in the gospels, but I think we forget the significance of Joseph. He was more than just the guy with whom Mary was engaged. As Jesus’s earthy father, Joseph is a descendant of David, and Joseph helps to connect Jesus to his Jewish history. Even Joseph’s name is significant, serving as a foreshadowing or allegory for what God is doing in the world through Jesus.
Think about this with me: do you know another character in the Bible named Joseph? In the book of Genesis in the Old Testament we hear the story of another Joseph. This Joseph was one of Jacob’s 12 sons, and happened to be Jacob’s favorite child. His brothers envied him for this so they came up with a plot to get rid of him. They sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt and told their father that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. This was the ultimate betrayal for Joseph, but thankfully God was with Joseph and through God’s grace Joseph became one of the highest officials in all of Egypt. And years later when a famine came upon the land, Joseph’s brothers had to travel to Egypt to buy food. Now of course Joseph recognized his brothers immediately, and he now had the power and every right to take revenge on them. But instead, Joseph ultimately decided to forgive his brothers, and not only that he then offered them all a home in Egypt. In short, Joseph took the evil of his brothers and through God’s grace turned it into a blessing.
In the same way, God through Jesus could have sought punishment on God’s people for their evil—our evil too, but instead through grace Jesus was born as a baby and then died on the Cross for the forgiveness of all sins. The Bible is pretty amazing to me, and it amazes me to discover how Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph of the New Testament, connects Jesus to Israel’s history and to the Joseph of the Old Testament. Through Jesus’s earthy father, Jesus is truly the Son descended of David and the Son of God—both fully human and connected to the human history of Israel, while also fully of God and the key to God’s new plan for salvation.
But let’s return now to Mary and Joseph in the Christmas story. At the beginning of our gospel today we learn that Joseph and Mary are engaged to be married. Now, I imagine Joseph probably had had a plan for his life—and the immaculate conception of Jesus wasn’t originally part of it! He was going to marry his bride and probably hoping for a life raising a family and working as a carpenter. Life wasn’t necessarily easy for anyone back then, but he probably had his next steps figured out and a picture of what his life would be. And then out of nowhere he found out that Mary was pregnant. In that moment I imagine his plans went out the window. He had been picturing a life with Mary and now he thought Mary had been unfaithful. This was an unexpected event and now he was trying to formulate a new plan as he decided to quietly dismiss Mary and start anew.
But before he got the chance to dismiss Mary, his plans changed once again! He received a vision in a dream, and God told Joseph to take Mary as his wife. God told Joseph that Mary would have a son through the Holy Spirit, and Joseph was chosen as a partner for Mary and expected to adopt this baby and be the earthly father. Now that certainly was unexpected. All of Joseph’s plans and imaginings for his life were flipped upside down, and he had no way of knowing what his future would hold with Mary and baby Jesus. It was all in God’s hands.
What I admire about Joseph, though, was his obedience and compassion. Once the situation was explained to him he took Mary as he wife—which would have been pretty radical for that society under the circumstances. As a man in that day and age he would have had every right to dismiss pregnant and unwed Mary. She would have been left high and dry as a single woman and Mother, and if Joseph had left the prospects for Mary and baby Jesus could have honestly been pretty dismal.
But Joseph didn’t let that happen. By taking pregnant Mary as his wife he was honoring and obeying God and accepting all of the challenges that would come with this new plan. He was promising to protect Mary during her pregnancy, and to stand with her as the scandalous rumors likely flew for the unwed pregnant woman. And most importantly, he was promising to adopt baby Jesus as his own, to protect him, guide, and teach him as he grew. And raising Jesus was surely an adventure—fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, losing the young boy in Jerusalem, and eventually watching his beloved adopted son go to the Cross. Joseph and Mary’s lives turned out nothing like they expected with lots of ups and downs, but with God’s grace they raised Jesus and ultimately played a part in God’s plan for salvation.
From this story we get a glimpse of God’s love for humanity and creation. When Sin entered the world and God’s plan for a perfect humanity fell apart, God created a new plan by sending Jesus into the world. That is the depth of God’s love for us to send his own Son, the Word Become Flesh, to meet us where we are and to create a new way for us. Through Jesus our hope is secured, and we can live in hope knowing that we can never go too far from God’s reach. God will keep coming and keep trying to meet each one of us wherever we are. God is patient, and God is good at making new plans.
We can also learn from the example of Mary and Joseph. Both of their lives took unexpected turns and they didn’t know what their futures would be like, what adventures, joys and pains they would have as the parents of Jesus, but they both put their trust in God and followed the course. God is good and God is faithful, so when our own lives change and we are entering into the unknown, we too can trust that God will be at work and with us in whatever may come. Through God’s grace, some pretty amazing things can happen when plans change—things like a baby born in a manger and sent to bring hope to all the world. Thank God for changed plans. Amen.