Righteousness Redefined

Transcript

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[0:00] All right. Our reading is from Matthew 1, verses 18 through 25. And again, we're in Advent, which means the time of preparation for the coming of Christ. Here's a bit of a recap of where we've been. Week one was about the coming of Jesus at the end of time. Week two was about John the Baptist as the one who was preparing the way for Jesus by asking people to come to repentance so that they could make room for the Savior. And then week three was an interesting one. It was John's question. Are you the one we were looking for, or should we look for somebody else? And I remember in that this idea that sometimes we prepare and hope for what isn't actually promised.

[0:41] And so part of our preparation, I think, in Advent is actually correctly understanding what Jesus means to do when He arrives. So that's part of our preparation is to actually get the record straight and say, no, this is what Jesus came to do. Not what we maybe hoped He would do, but what He actually says He will do. And what He does do. And then week four is today, and this is the arrival of Jesus according to Matthew's gospel. It's shorter than Luke's account, and it's different in all sorts of interesting ways. But the emphasis today is on the state of our souls before Jesus arrives, where Joseph has to make a difficult decision and change how he thinks about something. And so I think that's that transformation of changing how we think about things is part of our preparation for Advent. So let's go to our reading. It's Matthew 1, and I'll start in verse 18.

[1:29] It reads this way. This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, to whom she was engaged, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly. So he decided to break the engagement quietly.

[1:55] Has he considered this? An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. Joseph, son of David, the angel said, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

[2:22] All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through his prophet. Look. The virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us. When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus. Well, let's pray.

[2:51] Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word, and we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, we don't hear too much about Joseph in the Bible. He's kind of this sort of overlooked character, and I even thought that as a kid. I was like, what is, what's Joseph's deal? Like, is he, you know, what does he do? And the part that we have here gives us the most insight into his personality of any part of scripture we have. Other places is really just, he's only mentioned in passing, and then he actually falls out of the biblical narrative entirely. We're not sure why. So in Luke's birth story, he's kind of a traveling companion. He's just there with the donkey, you know, there they are. He's helping her look for a place to stay. There's not much else, not a lot of dialogue.

[3:38] And then at some point, he just vanishes. When Jesus is about 12 years old, the family goes and takes him to the temple. Then if you remember, he stays behind because he's just so engrossed talking to some of the religious scholars there. They figure out that he's missing, and so they go back for him. That's the last we hear about Joseph. And the scriptures, he's not present at the death of Jesus like Mary is, so we don't know. Some scholars think he died in that time. I think that's the most likely explanation. Otherwise, he'd probably still be with Mary. But we don't know. We just don't know. So this is what we have, but we have something good. This is something that we can work with, and this is something we can learn from. And the takeaway from here, from our reading, is that Joseph was a pretty good guy. He was a pretty good guy, like better than the average person of his time.

[4:27] Some of the background would be about this engagement that Mary and Joseph have is that at some point, most likely, Joseph's family arranged with Mary's family that the two would get engaged and then eventually married. And that's how marriages happened back then. It wasn't like a modern love story where a boy meets a girl and they fall in love. It wasn't like that. These were all arranged marriages back then. So the thing that's interesting to ask ourselves, was there any affection before them, between them, before this? Did they even know each other? It's possible they were distant relatives. We don't know.

[5:14] But I think that they were both able to see in each other those qualities that come out in the scriptures. And so maybe they both felt like the match would be a good one. I think Mary could see from afar. Joseph was a pretty good guy. Good catch. You know? And I think Joseph could see from afar that Mary and her willingness, he didn't know this at the time, but just her demeanor and her life, her willingness to work with God, to bring Jesus into the world, was also probably coming out. You know, it's just kind of, people's personalities, they come out. You know? So what you see isn't always what you get, but often it is. Right? And so I feel like these two were looking forward. They were looking forward to this. They both saw in each other, hopefully, somebody good, that it was going to be a good foundation. Was there love? Was there affection? They knew that that might come in time. But in the meantime, it was just, this is what the two families wanted, and they were going to do what they needed to do to be part of it.

[6:14] So marriage was less of a romance, and it was more of an arrangement by families, and it was designed for stability and for protecting family wealth. Right? And so, you know, it was a very important protecting family honor. Honor was very important in that society. We've talked about it many times. It's almost as powerful a currency as actual currency, like actual money. Having, if you didn't have honor, if you had money, you were okay. But without honor, it was going to be a really hard time. And so honor was doing things the right way, was having an arranged marriage like this, not running off and eloping. Right?

[6:53] So in that atmosphere, it would have been really scanty. It would have been really scandalous to hear that the woman you're engaged to already had a child on the way. That would be the opposite of honor. That would be shame. And you would not want to go into a marriage like that if you were the man, because that would bring all sorts of dishonor to your family. And in an honor-shame society, sometimes to have more honor, you have to shame other people. That's just how it works, because you can't be on the same level of them if they're doing shameful things.

[7:23] So Joseph knew. I mean, he knew. He knew that he was not the father. He knew that. And he had all sorts of, so we could call recourse, to end it and shame both Mary and her family because this unplanned and unforeseen pregnancy that she had. And I think the more, maybe the more he shamed them, the better he would look, the more his honor might go up because people would say, oh, you want nothing. You got tricked. You don't want anything to do with it. You're extricating yourself from that situation and you're sort of heaping shame on that other family. They've done something wrong, clearly.

[8:01] But some people might even thought that he had a responsibility to do it that way, like to preserve as much of his own honor. He needed to actually publicly sort of distance himself from Mary. But here we get the reading that Joseph is a righteous man. And what does a righteous man do? He says, I can't go through with this marriage, but at least I'm going to do that part of getting out of this marriage in a quiet way. So that as little shame as possible comes to Mary and her family. And that's exactly what the Scripture says. He didn't want to disgrace her is how it's put in our Scriptures. But really it means he didn't want to expose her to the shame that often came towards people in situations like that. So what he did was he took the least sort of the least dangerous option for the other family and he decided to quietly end the arrangement. And he would have to look elsewhere for a wife. Mary's family would have to deal with it. They would have to deal with the fallout of this apparent unplanned pregnancy themselves. What they would do, it's hard to say. Maybe she would raise the child by herself. Maybe the family would take him in. We don't know.

[9:08] But the only way for Joseph to spare them from that shame was to swallow his pride and compromise his own honor and marry her anyway. These were the choices that he had that he had and let know, let people know indirectly that he was actually the father. That would be the only way to salvage this for them. But it would kind of take away something from him. So you can see the dilemma that Joseph had. On one hand, he didn't want to raise a child that wasn't his. That's normal, very normal how people act even today.

[9:43] But on the other hand, if he were to do so, he would save Mary and her family from a lot of shame. On the other hand, he could just extricate himself as quietly as possible from this and hope for the best.

[9:56] Right? Right? Right? Right? It's good to hold on a little loosely to those decisions because God may step in somehow and go, let's reframe all this in a different way. You may make a different decision once you're done listening to what I have to say. And so that's what happens. The angel, thank goodness, explains some of the story behind it, and we understand it, right? The angel comes, and again, exactly like Victoria says, angels were scary. So the first thing angels always say is do not be afraid in some form or another. In this case, the angel says to Joseph, don't be afraid to marry Mary. So I guess he's not worried about Joseph being frightened of his appearance, but that word do not be afraid almost always accompanies the appearance of an angel. And the angel explains it. This child is not another man's child. This child was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. It's entirely different. And then there's sort of a conversation. There's a command. In fact, the word command appears at the end of this passage that we have, kind of a command. You're going to go through with this, Joseph. You're going to marry her. You're going to raise this child. You're going to name him Jesus because he's going to rescue the world from sin.

[11:33] He's going to rescue his people from sin, but I would say the whole world. So here we have a hint, if we don't know Greek and Hebrew, what Jesus' name means. You're going to name him. You're going to name him Jesus because he's going to save his people from sin. So in the Greek manuscript, whenever you see the word Jesus, it's spelled sort of, if I were to transliterate each letter, it'd be spelled I-E-S-O-U-S, Iesus. That sounds a bit like Jesus, right? But that was sort of the Hellenized version of an Old Testament named Joshua. So that's a very common name, right? We know Joshua from the Old Testament. Joshua means God is God. God is salvation or God is deliverance, which now we're getting a little closer here. So you're really that they might have called him Yeshua or they might have called him Joshua or they might have called him Iesus, depending on what language was spoken in the family, probably Aramaic, so they probably called him Yeshua when he was a little boy.

[12:36] So his name means God is deliverance. He's going to deliver or rescue his people from their sin. And that was a very common name then. Interestingly enough, after about the second century A.D., this name dropped in popularity in Jewish families, probably because the Christian church was growing. And if you named your son Jesus, it might seem like you were joining them. And if you didn't want to join them, you didn't want to name your son that way.

[13:07] Well, Joseph does as the angel commands him. And I just want to draw an interesting distinction here. And I'm not sure what it means. Joseph more or less gets a command. But when Mary is told by an angel what the whole plan is for bringing Jesus into the world, she says, may it be with me as you have said. And you get the sense that nowhere does the word command show up in Luke's gospel. So you get the sense that Mary consented to this. Mary had some sort of freedom in this. But Joseph didn't. So I don't know what to think of that. That's just how it is, you know. Because I think maybe she had more hard work to do. And actually, if there was any shame in the village after this, she was going to get more of it than he was. But I think they just came to Joseph and they said, here's what you're going to do. Hold on loosely to all your decisions. We have new plans for you. I mean, it's possible Joseph could have said, I'm still going to make my own plan. I just don't know how you would say that to an angel right in the moment. And, you know, he was on the fence. He was a righteous man. He was on the fence about this. He was still thinking it over. So I think this probably solved a lot of problems for him. But in honesty, I think it created a lot of problems for this couple.

[14:23] We'll get into that in just a second. One question I think we want to ask is why wait to tell Joseph the plan? Because Mary already knew before Jesus was even on the way, Mary was told in advance. Why not tell Joseph in advance?

[14:36] Why tell Mary but not Joseph? I keep asking questions. Do you think I'm going to give you any answers? I'm sorry. No, I will. Why wait until he had a tough decision to make? Why put him through that, right? Was it a test to see how righteous he really was? Well, we don't know. To me, it seems important that Joseph would have to go through all that, right? And then to redefine for him what it actually means to be righteous. He was righteous because he was willing to minimize the shame that was going to come Mary's way. But God is redefining righteous for Joseph. And for him, righteous means. It means cooperating with God's plan to save the world through Jesus. So this is a redefinition of what is expected of him. Yes, you were always expected to be a righteous man and follow the laws and your society's rules about honor and shame. That's all very important. But when this comes into the picture, all that goes out the window and something new and more important has shown up and we're asking you to choose based on this. And so he becomes righteous again in a way by making the right choice, I think. Right? and by having righteousness be redefined for him. And so, righteousness is something that's more than just navigating his culture in an honorable way, but it's joining with God in his plan to

[15:54] rescue the world through Jesus. I repeated that because I think that's worth kind of repeating, and I think that's where we're going to go with this as well. That's where we want to end up. So, Jesus comes into the world, as you've noticed, to turn all things upside down. And Joseph is a good example of a faithful and righteous man who's living under the covenant. He understands the covenant. He understands how to live in a social society that has honor and shame, and he understands how engagements and marriages work. He's about to make sort of the best possible choice given the worst possible circumstances for a marriage that would probably need to end some way or an engagement that would need to end in some way or another.

[16:40] But what maybe he learned is all of that was as good as it was, following the law, understanding how honor and shame worked. That was all good, but they can be used destructively. Honor and shame could be used destructively to destroy other people, even vindictively. And you can't live in that society without this connection to the God who wants us to live in an honorable way. So, I think his own openness to God, his openness to the angel, kind of brings this full sort of description of Joseph's personality. Really, the only place we get it, we kind of get a better understanding for who Joseph is as a person. So, I think there's something good there that we're seeing. And so, there's something here that's more important than honor, and that's the chance to be a part of what God is doing in the world. And I think people, even after all this, we're going to whisper, you know, he's the Righteous Righteous Righteous Righteous And I think sometimes there's cost for following God. There's cost. There was a social cost probably to Mary and Joseph for just being obedient to this plan and maybe not being able to really tell everybody that they actually were on the up and up, but that's okay.

[18:22] I think in a way God maybe was telling them, don't let that bother you. They don't know. Someday they will know and they'll understand. Or not. Some of them won't want to understand, so they won't know. So I would ask us if we could maybe put ourselves in the shoes of Joseph a little bit and we might have some sense of how we're interacting with the world and how we've structured our lives in the world where we feel pretty good about that, where we feel a little bit righteous. And that's okay. That's good. You don't speed. I try not to speed. You pay all your taxes, good. Who here doesn't pay all their taxes?

[19:03] I mean, I do use the software that figures out how to get me to pay the least amount of taxes, but I think that's okay because I'm still following the law. In fact, I had to refile my taxes because I forgot something. And it was more than $100 of difference. I was like, I'm just going to, that's worth a few stamps. So I refiled my taxes. I made a mistake. You know, we do these things that we've structured our lives in ways that we think are righteous and good and we're good citizens and good civically.

[19:36] And I think we should ask ourselves what those things are. Not honor and shame as much, although we still have that. Maybe we have a little bit of honor and shame structuring our lives. Maybe wealth structures our lives. Maybe the approval of our neighbors or some other version of whatever our village is or our tribe is, the approval of our tribe really structures our lives. It kind of motivates us one way or the other. But what if an angel were to come and say to us, you need to let go of that?

[20:02] I don't know. I'm not sure the angel would say, you don't have to pay your taxes anymore. But if he did, I'd be all right. I'm with it. You know, this sounds good. If the angel said you can speed as fast as you would, I'd be like, I'm not sure about that. That sounds dangerous. Not a good idea. But what if an angel came to us today and said, you need to let go of however you've structured the world that you find your righteousness in because you've been chosen to cooperate with God's plan to rescue the world. And some of that has to go out the window. Jesus comes and he turns things upside down. And you need to let go of whatever. It is that you're building your identity on and have it built by God and have it built in God and find yourself in the work of cooperating with God to rescue the world through Jesus Christ.

[20:47] What if the angel came to you? And then what would you do? And so some of us would, you know, like Martin, like Martin Luther. He was going to go to law school. Instead, he went to the monastery. His father was furious. Some of. Your kids may go to Urbana and instead of pursuing a career as an engineer, they're going to come back and say, now we're going on the mission field and we're going to be poor all our lives. You're going to be like, awesome.

[21:12] You know, then we'll I guess we're going to carry you along. No, that's fine. I've given up some wealth becoming a pastor. Not a huge amount. Well, I've actually calculated it. I'm not going to tell you what the number is, but some I used to be an engineer. So you can do the math, I guess, yourself. The last 20 years. I could have been earning engineer wages instead of pastor wages. It's okay. It's worth it. I don't want this. I don't want a different life. I want to be part of what God is doing to rescue the world through Jesus. I want to be part of it. I think I'm doing that. And I think you can too. And I think you are. And I think your children will.

[21:48] But we have to prepare our hearts for that. That's something we can prepare for an advent for the angel to come to us and say, let's turn everything upside down. Whatever you're doing to structure your life that can go out the window if cooperating with the Lord. Right?

[22:06] Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? full of coins in the temple yard. You know, he wants to do that. Anything that gets in the way of his work through you and the world will need to be set aside. And the question is, are you ready for that? And the other question is, have you noticed that all these sermons sound the same after a while? This is the same sermon. This is the same sermon I preach every week. Have you noticed that? And it's not because I'm unoriginal. I'm trying to make them different. I really am. But this is what the scriptures tell us.

[22:52] Take up your cross and follow him. Give up your life. Submit yourself to the will of God. Be part of God's plan to rescue the world. And the world needs rescuing. I can say, I'm going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm sorry. If you're tired of it, you have to find another church.

[23:08] Well, I'll say other things too. We preach other things, but this is the sermon. This is the message. God wants all of you and he wants to rescue the world through you and through this church and all the other things. And I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going to say it like a hundred more times. I'm not going