Father Rick Bolte's Homily

A: Fourth Sunday in Advent                                            2007-12-23

If you’ve done much reading of scripture, you’ve experienced the frustration that today’s interests are not the same as the biblical author’s.  The stories of Jesus’ birth are a case in point.  Among the Gospels, only Luke and Matthew have an account of Jesus’ birth and they are in fact two different stories.  Since the scripture readings we hear at church jump back and forth between these two stories, we are often left with the impression that our crib sets we put up for Christmas accurately reflect what is in the bible.  But it is really a combination of the various elements of both stories that have only a few, key similarities.  They are the names; Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, the virgin birth, and that it takes place in the city of Bethlehem.

Luke’s Gospel focuses on Mary and her role while Matthew focuses on Joseph.  Mathew is a Gospel written for a Jewish-Christian community and one of the elements that it wishes to demonstrate is that Jesus is indeed a son of David.  Mary is not, as far as we know, of the line of David.  But for Jewish genealogists, heritage was passed on not by biological processes but by the acceptance by the father of a child as his.  Our story today is of Joseph choosing not to divorce Mary but rather to accept her as his wife and Jesus as his son.

This is the role Joseph is given by God, to care for the innocent and defenseless mother and child.  He is the one to nurture and care for this helpless child just entering the world.  In some very real ways, we are all called to be as Joseph.  First of all, within each of us there is an innocent, small, and seemingly weak child that needs care and protection.  Each of us, made in the image and likeness of God, has God’s goodness at our center.  We may get lost with all that we try to do, accomplish, and control on the outside and even wander far from the core of who we are, but regardless, that core goodness remains in each of us.  We need to protect and nurture it.  It seems fragile in the face of our other concerns.  Like Joseph, our responsibility is not to create this goodness but only to enable it to grow.  We need to believe in our core goodness as Joseph had to believe the angel in his dream telling him of the goodness of the child to be born.  The goodness is not of our making but only ours to recognize and care for.

At the same time as we strive to see it in ourselves, we also can recognize it in others, especially our children.  It is also left to our care to help children and other to see their own core goodness.  We have to coach them through a world that values external performance and pressures people to conform.  They need our strength to know their goodness and the fact that they are loved in the face of social judgment that can be cruel and controlling.

Joseph’s role is to care for a child, not of his making, but that is indeed God’s presence in the world.  He is to nurture and protect without controlling.  He is to be a man who trusts in God’s action where it is not easily seen.  We, like Joseph, have the fragile, childlike goodness at our center and in the centers of those we care for that needs care and protection.  It is God’s presence in us and others that we can not control but only appreciate and encourage.  And like Joseph, we are to help bring God’s presence to maturity in a world that does not know him.