We all need “an angel of the Lord” watching over us, sometimes.  Joseph, a light sleeper, seems to have found his.  Being tipped off in his dream this time to, “get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and he remained there,” Matthew says, “until the death of Herod.” 

It seems the holy family was resting in peace in Bethlehem, the city of bread, where their little one, the bread of life was born.  Perhaps they would have been content to reside there in the city of David for the rest of their days.  But God has other plans.   All too soon, the Magi arrive and disrupt everything, unwilling to let their mission go to find Jesus.  But for wise men with a vision, they could be awfully dumb!  As Fred Craddock has said, “You do not ask the king, “Where’s the king?”  Especially, don’t ask a Herod, all of whom were ruthless, in their own way, beginning with this one, Herod the Great, on down to his three sons – one of whom Jesus will encounter on Good Friday. 

“Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him,” the angel tells Joseph.   So off they go to Egypt, as so many did in those days, to seek refuge.  Abraham and Sarah were refuges in Egypt too, which had disastrous consequences when Abe sells his wife out, as his sister, to Pharaoh, who has eyes for her.  And the other Joseph, son of Jacob, the first dreamer, sold into the slave trade by his jealous brothers, ends up in Egypt.  He too engages with the Pharaoh, and certainly makes the best of a bad situation, by saving himself and his family, and ultimately the nation of Israel, making a way for Moses to be able to lead God’s people back home, some generations later. 

Joseph, the dreamer in our gospel lesson, together with Mary the God-bearer, turn out to be excellent providers and parents for little Jesus.  They don’t deal directly with Pharaoh, like Abraham and the other Joseph did.  They’ll leave that task to Jesus himself.  They are simply open to “the angel of the Lord” who comes to Joseph repeatedly in his dreams.  They are obedient to the Spirit.  And so they are both God-bearers in that sense, vessels of faithfulness.  The vision and mission of the gospel-good-news is driving them, and they are content to let God set the course, with Jesus as their co-pilot.  As far as we know, they don’t ask any questions about why the holy innocent children up to age 2 are slaughtered in Bethlehem, after they escape.  But whether they admit it or not, there are always politics and consequences, there are always the Herod’s in this world, who will rise up in opposition to the holy, the innocent, and the just, and so there is always a cost to following Jesus. 

‘Matthew’s point is clear then: there are two kings; there are two kingdoms, one of violence, and one of peace. Violence has its sword drawn against peace, but at every turn, Herod’s attempt to destroy Jesus is thwarted by the will of God revealed to, and carried out by Joseph’ [Fred Craddock]. 

Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of South Africa, once marveled at Prime Minister Nelson Mandela’s pursuit of peace and democracy.  He said, Mandela could easily have reacted differently.  He could have come out swinging and turned to violence as the answer for the black majority of South Africa.  That certainly was much of the treatment he received at the hands of the ruling white minority for most of the 20 plus years he was imprisoned or in solitary confinement, and cut off from his family.  Things could have been very different.  Like the messy situation in the Ivory Coast today, where the incumbent ruler Laurent Gbagbo, refuses to leave after losing in the recent elections.  But Mandela was more optimistic, and more skillful, than that.  He drew on his simple, rural, upbringing, and love from his parents, to give him strength, and the courage to persevere.  Instead of strong-arming and civil war, he ruled over a peaceful transition to power, and then teamed up with Bishop Tutu to form the Truth Commission to work a deed of openness, confession, and even forgiveness, where possible, in the midst of great stress, national grief, and a mountain of past injustice. 

Nelson Mandela seemed to have “an angel of the Lord” watching over him, steering him through more than one life or death situation, to finally guide him to become Prime Minister.  But he didn’t do it through prayer alone.  He collaborated, looked to his supporters, negotiated with all, took his best stab at moving forward, endured a number of dead ends, before finding the path to walk down that we now recognize as the road God was calling him to. 

Back in Nazareth of Galilee, where “the angel of the Lord” directed Joseph to settle down, his parents continued to protect Jesus, until the ministry of John the Baptist called him out.  They didn’t want to let him go, and certainly didn’t guess that Jesus would became an itinerant wandering preacher!  They had brought him back from a life of being the refugee, and hoped he would take up the family business of carpentry.  But like Moses who led his people out of bondage and through a desert wandering, Jesus’ beginnings in Egypt were part of the rescuing of his people Israel, and just the start of his travels.  He will continue to visit all of Israel, and cross its borders, from north to south, guided by the spirit of God, his “angel of the Lord,” confronting the authorities of his people, and avoiding arrest, until the right moment, to lead us all out of bondage into freedom.  Jesus speaks up for the holy innocents of every time, and finally dies for us, before his final surprise to the Herod’s, his resurrection and conquering of death once and for all.  Jesus, born in Bethlehem, the house of bread, becomes the bread of life, which feeds the world. 

We all need “an angel of the Lord,” sometimes, and for us, it is Jesus, our host at the table, our food, our king.  His kingdom is the realm of peace and justice.  Like the Magi who announced the world was turning, and disrupted the lives of Mary and Joseph, Jesus has delivered the good news that the realm of God has come near in him.  God has other plans for us than just the status quo and staying home.  We have found favor, and good news of a great joy, that salvation has arrived, the world has turned, and Jesus is calling us out to follow him on a journey to bring the message ‘from north to south.’  We awake from deep sleep energized to “get up” and do God’s work, sacrificing for ‘the kingdom of peace,’ standing up to Herod, who wants nothing more than to zap our energy, our resources, our lives.  We awake clear eyed, ready to go, remembering vividly the dream God has given us, the vision to “engage our neighbors” and join “a caring community,” that we may join the realm of peace.  The bread of life has come, taste and see that the Lord is good. 

      

We all need “an angel of the Lord,” sometimes.  And just so, Jesus has been born to us!  

What’s in a name?  And why didn’t Joseph get to name his son, Joseph Jr? 

 

Names can define us, for better or worse!  When names fit us, they can enhance our status, take for example, John F. Kennedy.  He not only had the unofficial American royal Kennedy name, but it just seemed to roll off the tongue, John F Kennedy, JFK.  And sometimes, we even called him “Jack,” like he was our very own personal friend. 

 

When names fit us awkwardly however, they can undermine us.  Take for example Pee Wee Herman, not his real name, but an unfortunate choice for a stage name as it turned out, especially for such a talented and caring person.  So, what’s in a name?  A lot!

 

Today we sing the old, old song, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”  In this Advent standard are 7 of the names, or titles, used for Jesus, that all derive from the Hebrew scriptures: O Wisdom, O Lord of Israel, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Rising Sun, O King of the nations, and O Emmanuel.  Together they are called the Great O Antiphons, and date back to at least the 9th C.  Taken from the prophecies of Isaiah, they were first used in daily prayer on the 7 days leading up to Christmas, a kind of Advent devotional practice.  What’s in a name?  Plenty!

 

And so, the naming of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel is a defining moment.  It falls to Joseph, a “righteous man,” to name him Jesus.  But other names are hinted at for the Christ-child, even in this short passage: the Messiah, one from the Holy Spirit, Son of David, and Emmanuel.  Truth is, it’s hard to fit Jesus with only one name.  He’s all these things and more. 

 

But, why didn’t Joseph name Mary’s child after himself, when it was customary that the first born son took the fathers name.  Jesus could have been, Son of Joseph.  It’s not just that the father of Jesus is God, “from the Holy Spirit.”  But God knows, apparently, that Joseph just won’t fit!  Jesus is not a mere dreamer as the 2 Joseph’s in the bible were.  Joseph, 12th and last son of the patriarch Jacob, had that crazy dream while still quite young, that all his older brothers would bow down to him one day, and that they would look up to him in the hour of their neediness.  If only young Joseph, in his beautiful coat, would have kept that dream to himself instead of exuberantly running out to tell his older brothers!  It so enraged them, they tried to kill him, but then ended up just selling him into slavery in Egypt. 

 

The Joseph in our story was a dreamer too.  He keep having dreams that God was talking to him, and indeed directing him at all the important turning points in his life, starting here, at the birth of Jesus the Messiah.  jAnd next, when the wrath of Herod burned hot against Jesus, that a rival king was being born in his territory, the angel of the Lord warned Joseph in a dream to flee to Egypt.  Joseph, Egypt, dreamer – I’m starting to see a pattern here! 

 

But God had other plans for the son of Mary.  Jesus was not a dreamer – Jesus was a man with a dream, that he lived out and fulfilled here on earth, with God’s blessing.  Jesus was not a dreamer, Jesus came to proclaim the dream come true! 

 

What’s in a name?  Jesus’ name, Yeshua, means, God saves.  And that’s why the angel of the Lord has specific instructions for Joseph.  “You are to name him Jesus, for he – on God’s behalf, as the Son of God – will save his people from their sins.”  That’s another title for Jesus in this short little text, I suppose, Savior.  Jesus saves. 

 

If we know the story, the whole story of the gospel, we know already what this saving in chapter one refers to.  Jesus will save us at the end of the story, on the cross, and in the resurrection.  It could have been different.  We the people, could have pardoned Jesus. 

 

On trial on Good Friday, Pilate asks the crowd an astonishing question, “Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?"  There were two named Jesus that day, you decide!  The people, us, decide Jesus is more threatening, he knows us inside out, he tells the truth, and its consequences may ask us to change.  We the People, stick with Jesus Barabbas, because, well, he’s a lot like us.  And if we were in his place, we’d like to be set free from our sins too.  And ironically, we sentence Jesus to his fate, and the anointed one of God, dies for us, and saves us from our selves.

 

At our new member gathering yesterday, when we talked about baptism, Jim I think it was, noted the tradition sometimes used where, adult candidates are able to chose a new name for themselves.  Candidates who have heard the good news, made confession for 40 days, and accepted the gift of grace and renewal in baptism, take on a new name of their own choosing.  They know in a first hand way, ‘what’s in a name,’ and they enter the waters of baptism to die to their old life and rise again to a new life in Christ, with a new name, and a new identity as, a child of God. 

 

Joseph, unable to name his own son, must have felt like a real loser, at times.  He offered to dismiss Mary quietly, but the truth was, marriages were arranged back in those days, in that culture, and the engagement itself was a legally binding contract, that could only be ended through a divorce, which put the woman at risk for shaming, possibly worse.  Joseph was caught in an impossible situation.  He couldn’t claim Mary’s child as his own, and, if he listened to the angel of the Lord, he couldn’t quietly dismiss her.  You can almost hear the taunts and bullying he must have endured, the names that were hurled in his direction, “you whimp,” and worse.  

 

Yet we should all be as righteous and full of the Lord as Joseph.  How many of us do as God commands?  How many of us are attuned to what our dreams are telling us?  How many of us are true to our visions? 

 

What’s in a name?  Joseph named Mary’s child Jesus, to ‘quietly fulfill’ what God had in mind for the world, that he would save us from our sins.  This became the good news, and in our freedom and joy we haven’t stopped finding names for him: Emmanuel, Key of David, Messiah, and many more.  And so in our baptisms, we get a new name too, child of God.  And by this covenant, we all become brothers and sisters to one another, taking on a new family name, Christian.  That’s what’s in a name! 

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,” sings Mary.  And, what else would you do but sing?  How would you respond, if an angel appeared at your doorstep to inform you that you are pregnant by the most high God?  When the divine breaks through, get ready for the unexpected! 

 

Breaking through to the next level often requires unorthodox thinking, and praxis.  The new thing rarely comes while you continually do the same thing over and over again, that failed in the past. 

 

Take the 1977 case of neurologist Dr. Sachs, who after exhausting every AMA approved remedy for his patient Mary Ann, decided to go totally outside the box!  His ultimate prescription: read a short story, by H. G. Wells!  You see, Mary Ann, had an unusual problem.  At the ripe old age of 88, she began to hear things.  Not just voices, but songs!  It came on suddenly.  Mary Ann woke up in the middle of the night, the first time.  She asked others in the Nursing Home why they weren’t disturbed by the music?  Can’t you hear her beautiful clear voice?!  But they just gave her a funny look, with raised eye-brows.  So Mary Ann went to the doctor, expecting to be told that she was going crazy.  But the doctor said, ‘let me run some tests.’  And the results were astounding!  Dr. Sachs was able to assure her that the Irish ballads, sung by the female voice she described, were not the same as a psychotic episode, she wasn’t going crazy, but that a small stroke had caused what’s called a “musical-epileptic” episode. 

 

Yet for Mary Ann, it still didn’t explain the woman’s voice, which seemed somehow vaguely familiar.  What was that song, she kept wondering?  And who was it that was singing?  This was not something Dr. Sachs could determine scientifically.  It could be a repressed memory coming to the fore.  Then again, it could just be some annoying Christmas song that you can’t get out of your head! 

 

But stepping outside the box, Dr. Sachs had “an idea”.  Mary Ann had told him about her childhood.  He knew that Mary Ann was orphaned by the time she was 5 years old, and that she came here from Ireland to live with her Aunt.  And as an adult, Mary Ann had no memories of those first 5 years in Ireland.  It reminded him of the short story by H. G. Wells, and the plot about a man who could magically open the door to his, pre-conscious, infant past, and hear what is denied to the rest of us: the sounds of earliest childhood. Perhaps Mary Ann’s disease had opened that door in her, and the voice she was hearing, the beautiful ballads and lullaby’s, belonged to her mother.

 

After reading the story, she told Dr. Sachs, that’s it!  It fits!  I can feel bits of my childhood again; I feel my mother’s arms around me; it’s her singing!  33 years later there is no new scientific break through.  Yet, those were the songs that mothers in Ireland sang back then. 

 

It seems that, all through this testing time, Mary Ann’s brain had kept healing her stroke, slow but sure.  That should have been a good thing, but it also meant that the song was fading.  She told Dr. Sachs that she ‘missed her disease very much,’ for it had revealed something much more real to her than the darkness she felt from the growing silence of it’s healing over. 

 

Our world, entering the darkness we know in Advent, needs healing and release.  We need thinkers, outside the box.  Doctors who can connect traditional healing with new and innovative healing, to release us from this darkness. 

 

Jesus said, ‘Tell that one down in the deep dark’ dungeon ‘what you see and hear’, that “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  Jesus comes to break through to the next level, and to lift up the lowly.  “Tell John what you see”!  Everything is new again, in the coming realm of God.  Was that ‘hope enough’ for John down in the darkness of Herod’s dungeon?  Does it give us delight and hope too? 

 

The mark of courageous faithfulness, of hope in the midst of darkness, is nowhere more evident than in Mary’s song, the Magnificat.  Mary is carrying a deep dark secret within her.  She is to give birth to the Son of God, by the Holy Spirit.  It would have been normal to wonder if she was going crazy.  Mary was too poor to have a doctor, much less a neurologist.  But she does have a relative Elizabeth who is also pregnant, one that she trusts.  Carrying the secret with her to Judea, she seeks her cousin’s counsel.  ‘No, you’re not crazy’, Elizabeth tells Mary.  You are blessed!  ‘What do you hear in your heart’, she asks Mary?  ‘I’m hearing a song’, she says. ‘I see things differently now.  I want to share my secret with the world, that all I have, all I am, wants to praise God.  For God is a God who is with, even the lowliest.  Then Mary sings the song to Elizabeth, “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly”, sings Mary; “he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”. 

 

In these days of deepest darkness we wait with expectation and hopefulness.  We wait for our LORD to break through to a whole new level; to act outside the box.  Already a song is breaking forth.  We are not crazy to believe that the darkness, our sadness and losses, and all our fears, will be restored to wholeness.  Jesus burst forth, not only from the womb of Mary, but also from the darkness of the cold stone tomb, to reveal the light which no darkness can overcome; ‘My soul proclaims your greatness, O Lord”, sang Mary, completely sane, as she broke through to the next level, and let out her deep dark secret. 

 

Jesus leads us out of our darkness.  What else can we do, but break out in song!  It’s a song we can’t get out of our heads, and don’t want to.  It’s the song that breaks us through to the next level.  A song that is our hope and our joy!        Amen.