“Live In Love”,

Matthew 1: 18-25

Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, Dec. 22, 2024

Christmas is a season full of traditions. Santa Claus and his reindeer, the Christmas tree, lighting the Advent candles, Christmas caroling, Mexican posadas, the traditional Christmas Eve candlelight service, or, in Cameroon, the traditional Christmas Day worship service. Some unusual Christmas traditions from other lands include caroling with a horse’s skull in Wales, decorating the Christmas tree with spider ornaments and spider webs in Ukraine, and a relatively new tradition of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken for Christmas dinner in Japan. When we lived in rural Puerto Rico, my students came caroling on horseback, an old tradition there. 

Each family has its own unique Christmas traditions as well. We always watch “A Muppet Christmas Carol” together, and we celebrate Three Kings Day (also known as Epiphany) with more presents, a festive meal, and a King’s Cake, with a token Baby Jesus hidden inside.

These Troester family traditions date from when we lived in Puerto Rico, where the traditional Christmas celebration centered around the Three Kings, who brought presents to kids who left out shoeboxes filled with grass for their camels. Traditions can be a lot of fun and can be a way of making us feel that we belong to our family or culture.

Yet some traditions outlast their value. The story is told of a woman who always cut the end off the ham before cooking it. When asked why she did it, she said, “because my mother did.” When her mother was asked about it, she also replied that she did it because her mother did. When the grandmother was asked why she always cut the end off the ham, she said, “Because the pan I used back in those days was too small to fit in the whole ham!”

According to pastor and writer Erin Wathen, in her book we have been studying this Advent, Calling All Angels, one of the themes of Matthew’s gospel is the difference “between honoring tradition and being held captive by it; between knowing the past and believing what might be possible in the future…”

Even good traditions can sometimes pose challenges. At the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, we see this theme playing out. Joseph, a righteous man, discovered that his fiancée Mary was with child, and not by him. In those days, that was a serious infraction of the law. The legally binding nature of an engagement in those days meant that she could even be punished as an adultress. The sentence would be stoning to death. But Joseph was compassionate and did not want to “expose her to public disgrace,” much less stoning, so he planned to divorce her quietly. 

It was at that moment when an angel appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.” “Do not be afraid.” But what did Joseph have to fear? He was not the one in danger of stoning or facing the difficulties of childbirth in those ancient times. His fear had more to do with what people would say, what they would think, with the loss of his reputation or maybe even facing ridicule. He might also have been afraid of God’s punishment – after all, he thought Mary had broken one of the commandments – his heart was probably broken, too.

But the angel reassures him, “the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Not only that, but this was a special child, one who would “save his people from their sins.” Perhaps that idea gave Joseph even more to fear – he must have realized that he was being asked to be the earthly father of the Messiah. Was he up to it?

A little aside here – for those of you thinking about getting married someday. When God chose a husband for Mary, God did not look for a handsome, powerful, or wealthy man. Instead, God chose a good man – someone who followed God’s  laws, but who was also compassionate and kind, a person who trusted God. Joseph believed the angel’s unlikely story and accepted Mary as his wife. Joseph also had self-control: the Bible says that he “had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son.” There is a lot that young people could learn from a study of this short passage.

I mentioned that Joseph had faith. Fearless faith can transform lives and can even transform the world. How did faith transform Joseph’s life?

Fear can paralyze us, but because Joseph had faith and courage, he obeyed the angel and took his place in God’s plan. His life would never be the same again. In her book, Wathen asks us to “Imagine how this story would have been different if Joseph had bowed to societal expectations and not listened to the angel? If he had responded to his situation from a place of fear instead of a place of faith?” Yes, God would have found a way for Jesus to be cared for as a child, but the story would have been vastly different, and Joseph would not have had a part in bringing God’s kingdom to fruition.

One thing we can learn from Joseph is the lesson of breaking free from tradition when God’s vision for the world demands it. Judaism had become stuck in a place of legalism: where tithing herbs such as mint and dill was more important than helping one’s needy neighbor, where minute attention to Sabbath laws was more important than healing the blind or lame. They were stuck in a patriarchal system in which women had few rights and widows and orphans were sometimes left to starve in the streets.

Jesus came to show us God’s heart by giving us a new perspective; by showing us what is most important: Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbors as ourselves. It’s simple to say, but takes a lifetime to live out. Joseph was a righteous man, who probably followed all the Old Testament laws as well as he could, yet he understood that compassion, kindness, and faith were more important than rigidly following rules. Perhaps that was one of the reasons God chose him for the earthly father of the Messiah.

Ultimately this story is not as much about what Joseph thinks or even what he believes: it is about what he does. He quietly accepts Mary as his wife, cares for her and her son, and raises Jesus as his own child. His actions challenge us to put our faith into action. Are there traditions or cultural norms that we might need to overcome in order to show God’s love and compassion to others? Is fear holding us back from welcoming those who are different: people of different faiths and cultures, immigrants, the LGBTQ community? Have we made the church too narrow, so that some people don’t fit –

like the woman who cut off the ham to fit in her too-small pot? Would we welcome an unmarried pregnant teen, as Joseph welcomed Mary? What if she were undocumented or homeless?

This Christmas, let’s not just talk about the love that came down. Let’s find ways to show that love to others – to our families and friends, of course, but also to those on the margins of society. What would it look like if we who claim to be Christians actually lived out Jesus’ teachings to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? We are called to be “ambassadors of God’s love in the world”: feeding the poor, housing the unhoused, welcoming the stranger. Writer and activist Parker Palmer calls this the work of “bringing Christmas back down to earth.” Erin Wathen adds, “It is the discipline of recognizing our own responsibility to transform reality – to be peacemakers, to fight for equality, and to seek justice for the poor, even when the world remains fearful and uncertain” – maybe most of all when the world remains fearful and uncertain. Like Joseph, we might need to let go of some of our old ideas, and be open to what God’s Spirit is saying.

Some traditions are good, but some might be holding us back from truly loving others as Jesus would have us love.

I’ll close with a story from Calling All Angels:

“It was a very cold night. The family had traveled for many days over treacherous terrain, and they were so weary; but there was no room for them. Everyone else had been traveling too, and everyone was cold, and everyone needed a place to rest… The family joined a long line of others who had recently come into town, not entirely sure of what they were waiting on, or who would meet them, or what help the strangers might be able to offer. Finally, at the head of a long queue, some kind folks showed the family through a door and into a warm room where a bed had been prepared with fresh linens, a place set for them at the table, a hot meal served with care.

Because on that very cold Christmas Eve night, when they could have been home by the fire or out doing some last-minute shopping, church people in El Paso, Texas, opened their doors to migrants who had just crossed the border.

They knew that on a night so cold, shelter beds would be hard to come by. Harder still for the undocumented, because while the city had set up various emergency shelters, only those who turned themselves in to border patrol and had the paperwork to show for it were allowed to stay in the shelters. Many were, of course, afraid to do so. But all around the border town (and others like it, all across the southwest), God’s people chose to welcome the Christ of Christmas by welcoming migrants and giving them shelter, no questions asked. Because God’s people opened the door, a migrant family—young parents with a baby boy—did not have to brave the cold alone as strangers in a strange land…” And the good news is this: Love came down at Christmas, to meet us right where we are, and to show us how to love and how much God loves each of us.  Let us pray: God, thank you that you love each one of us. May the love we profess for others be genuine. Like Joseph, may we have the courage to act on our love and not just speak it. Thank you that you came to live among us to show us the way. Amen.

With thanks to Erin Wathen, Calling All Angels: An Advent Study of Fearlessness and Strength. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press and Presbyterian Publishing, 2024.

©Deborah Troester, 2024