The One About Hiding Elves, Christmas Decorations, and Jesus’ Stepfather
Dear West Family
Today is the 1st of December, which means, among other things, that my house is insanely cluttered with decorations that I couldn’t wait to put away just eleven short months ago; that I have to crawl around that cluttered house late every night setting up imaginative scenarios of merriment for a hateful little plastic-faced elf; that Mariah Carey will get her annual bump in royalties from one of the worst songs ever recorded which will bombard us everywhere we go, and of course that my credit card is already trembling at the trauma that it will need to endure through being over-swiped, tapped and digitally entered with only 23 more shopping days till Christmas.
Bah humbug.
Though it may not sound like it , I actually really like Advent as a season. We have added some truly silly trappings to it, but I love the thought of taking the time once a year to deliberately remember the wonder of the incarnation. That the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. What a thought!
I love how earthy and human and gritty the Christmas story is. It takes the seemingly abstract notion of an eternal creator and injects Him into the dirt of the world that He made.
Into the dirt of a desperate people who had been overrun by an empire too strong to resist.
Into the dirt of four hundred years of Divine silence, where faith had been reduced to nothing more than a distant echo.
Into the dirt of a teenage pregnancy, in the womb of an unmarried young woman.
Into the dirt of a carpenter’s shop, where Joseph sat with the news of betrayal and shame and hurt.
A friend asked me recently to write and speak a bit about Joseph in the Christmas story. I must confess that I had never considered him all that much, but as I did, I was blown away by the grace given to this man tasked with the unenviable mandate of being the step-father of the Son of God. There is much to learn from the very little that we know about his life.
We should learn from the mercy and kindness that he was determined to show to Mary. In an honor and shame based culture, having a pregnant fiance would have been a potential source of deep shame. And yet, Joseph decides to end their relationship quietly and without public shaming for Mary. He is interested in her best even before the angel of the Lord asks him to marry her.
We should learn from his willingness to shoulder responsibility that he could have walked away from.
We should learn from his radical obedience to God. We are told that he is a righteous man, which means that he takes the law of the Lord seriously and does all he can to obey. This is evidenced clearly when the angel instructs him to take Mary as his wife, and later when he is told to flee to Egypt for the sake of Jesus’ life. Joseph leads his family through obedience. What an example.
We should learn from his humility and his apparent willingness to remain fairly anonymous in his faithfulness. We know every little of Joseph except that he faithfully teaches his sons his trade. The last we hear of him is when Jesus is 12 and Jesus reminds Joseph that His ultimate allegiance is to His heavenly father and not His earthly one. Joseph remains humble even in that reminder.
Friends, this Christmas, we will once again be tempted to think that our best chance of encountering the Divine will take place in some form of mystical escape from the dirt and dust and grime of our ordinary lives. The Christmas story does all that it can to remind us that our hope doesn’t rely on escaping our humanity, but rather in the fact that Jesus came to join us in the midst of it, and in so doing, made a way for us to live ordinary, humble lives of radical obedience just like Joseph.
Now I need to return to the very human task of hiding an elf. Perhaps there is the possibility of the presence of Christ even in a task as outrageous as that.
The song this week is a little something to kick off your Advent with proper biblical theology.
Enjoy.
Press on.
Ross
