Advent 4

Sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

It is often said that the night is darkest in the hour before the dawn. I think the same is true of the Advent season, and this year more than ever. For this year Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, which means that the Advent season is the longest it can be. Today, on the 4th Sunday of Advent, we still have a whole week to go. And this week is the darkest week of Advent. On Tuesday we arrive at the Winter Solstice and the shortest, and darkest, day. And, as we draw near to the dawning festival, the disconnect between our Advent journey in church and the Christmas cheer of the surrounding world becomes ever more marked. In some ways too, our hearts are at their darkest. In contrast to the jollity around us, our preparations for Christmas may well fill us with anxiety, about the right way to celebrate when so many are suffering, about how much money to spend when so many are impoverished, about how to keep focussed on the real meaning of the festival. So, for many of us, our thoughts today are centred around darkness, anxiety and doubt.

Our Gospel reading appropriately invites us to meditate on Joseph, and his part in the Christmas story. I say “appropriately” because if there is any person in the story who was in darkness, it was Joseph. Today we hear about Joseph’s strange dream, when in the darkness of the night an angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid.’  Today we see how Joseph is an unmistakeably Advent figure, watching and waiting in the dark.

Joseph had, it must be admitted, an ambiguous part in the Christmas story. Where did he really fit in? For St Matthew, who loved to see how the birth of Jesus the Messiah fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, Joseph’s most important role was as “a son of David”. His place in the story was to guarantee Jesus’s connection with David’s line, and so to link him with the genealogy with which his gospel account begins: fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen generations from David to the exile in Babylon; fourteen generations from the exile to the Messiah.

But in what respect is Joseph the father of Jesus the Messiah? This is the darkness of the problem, expressed in the words “When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child…” This is a profoundly human experience – when a man finds his girlfriend is pregnant, and not by him. He is betrayed, emasculated, cuckolded, and his future relationship with his girl is to be cancelled. Joseph must have felt all these things.

St Matthew tries to put it in as good a light as he can. He puts it this way “Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose Mary to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” What on earth does this mean? What kind of patriarchal subterfuge had Joseph in mind? And how could it be that by distancing himself from Mary, he could save her from exposure to public disgrace? All we can think is that Joseph was desperate, for the public disgrace would not just be Mary’s. It would be his as well. This must have been darkness indeed.

This desperate situation is saved by an annunciation. Not the annunciation we read of in St Luke’s gospel and which we mostly think about at Christmas, when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her of her call to be the mother of Jesus. This is the annunciation to Joseph, when an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people form, their sins.’ Just as the annunciation to Mary was a converting experience for her, so the annunciation to Joseph turned his life around. The dawning of the light arrived. When he awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took her as his wife.

In our Advent darkness, let us pray for such an annunciation in our own lives: a dream perhaps, through which God speaks to us and reassures us; an encounter of love with a fellow human person, perhaps someone we have never spoken to before; perhaps an experience of forgiveness here at church; or perhaps a text in our in-box, from someone else in as much darkness as we are; or a message in a Christmas card perhaps.

The poet Ursula Fanthorpe used to send out a poem to her friends each year with her Christmas card, and one year she sent out this one, titled “I am Joseph”:

I am Joseph, Carpenter,

   Of David’s Kingly line,

I wanted an heir; discovered

   My wife’s son wasn’t mine.

I am an obstinate lover,

   Loved Mary for better or worse,

Wouldn’t stop loving when I found

   Someone else came first.

Mine was the likeness I hoped for

   When the first-born male-child came.

But nothing of him was me. I couldn’t

   Even choose his name.

I am Joseph, who wanted

   To teach my own boy how to live.

My lesson for my foster Son:

   Endure. Love. Give.

I like the last line of this poem, Endure, Love, Give. In fact, this line was my annunciation. The first word, Endure, takes us to the darkest part of our Advent journey; the second word, Love, takes us to the precious beauty of the Nativity to come; the third word, Give, describes the heart of the Christmas festival itself as we uncover the richness of the gift of God.