Written for St. Andrew Lutheran Church, Franklin, TN | 1st Sunday in Advent | November 29, 2020
You can watch this sermon online here.
Well, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving – which means that the radio stations and the stores and the TV shows are starting to fill up with Christmas carols. Maybe your own home is, too.
But through a combination of my nerdy personality and my job, I am pretty much disconnected from what’s going on in the normal-people world and super plugged-in to the Church calendar. So in my brain what is important is that today is the first Sunday in Advent – and I am starting to listen to one of my favorite musicals on repeat.
It’s a little gem of a Christian musical called The Unusual Tale of Mary and Joseph’s Baby,1 which tells the story of Jesus’ birth from the point of view of his parents. I love listening to it during Advent, because it’s all about expecting God to show up in the world – in the form of a baby named Jesus and also in our everyday lives.
Joseph starts off the musical by talking about his daily life as a builder in first-century Israel (click here to listen to the song):
It’s the second time this month I’ve had to buy this tool. Second time this month it was stolen by some Roman fool. And I can kick the ground and curse his name, but what good will that do? If he’s a Roman, and me? I’m just a Jew.
Second time this year they’ve cut my wages back. Of course they say not to call it a pay cut – it’s a way to help the Jews get what we lack. So we make the curbstones for “our” roads with our limestone axes, and to lower “our” costs, they raise our taxes.
And Mary’s gonna see this shiner and say, “What are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna get him back?” she’ll ask, and I’ll say, “I doubt it.” If I explain this one more time, sweetheart, maybe I can get it through to you. You see, that guy, he’s a Roman. But me? I’m just a Jew.2
Did you notice the way that song fills in the characters of Mary and Joseph?
Joseph the builder comes home with a black eye and missing a tool he needs to earn a living, and he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Can’t do anything about it. He’s a Roman; I’m just a Jew. Now, what’s for dinner?”
Meanwhile, Mary is fuming. “What do you mean, you’re ‘just a Jew’? You’re one of God’s chosen people! And this isn’t right, and this isn’t fair – so what are you going to do about this?”
Who’s right? Who do you think should win this premarital argument?
If we take a look at the way things worked in Israel around the time Jesus was born, it seems like Joseph has the winning point. The Romans were the agents of the empire; they were the ones with power. In Star Wars terms, they were the Storm Troopers and the guys in uniform. The Jews were the people the Romans had conquered; they were the ones with no power. In Star Wars terms, they were the stable hands on Canto Bight – and if you have no idea who they are, that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. To the Romans, the Jews were mostly just dusty nobodies with a weird religion.
Romans soldiers could do things like stop someone on the road and make them carry the soldier gear for a mile (see Matt. 5:41).3 So Joseph has a point – he’s just a Jew in that system. He can’t stand up to Romans! There’s no point in even trying. Joseph is coming from a place of practicality, of dealing with the way things are.
And then there’s Mary, with the total opposite view. She is coming from a place of faith. Faith in God’s promises of deliverance and justice and love. As she sings in her own song:
I want to be delivered, I want to be set free. I want to get across those waters; that’s what was promised to me. Wandering the desert, a wilderness of shame, drunk on the worries of everyday life, we’ve almost forgotten our name.4
For Mary, Joseph saying “I’m just a Jew” is like he’s forgetting their name and it’s meaning. To be a Jew is to be part of the chosen people of God. And Mary believes down to her bones that God’s promises will come true: that one day they will be set free from the people who rule over them. And trusting in those promises fills her with boldness, and with righteous anger when things aren’t right.
Mary also has a point. But her point is based in faith and hope, rather than in the way things are. So, it feels a little harder to hold on to, right? If Mary had her way, they could end up in really hot water.
And yet, we know how the story of Mary and Joseph goes. Mary is proved right when God breaks in to the world like never before, through Mary and Joseph’s family, to fulfil God’s promises to the whole world.
And that’s a lot for us to think about today, as we work out our own lives in-between the practical reasoning of the world and “the way things are” and the hope-and-justice-filled reasoning of faith.
I wonder which character you find yourself relating to as we enter the season of Advent. Joseph: practical, resigned to the way things are, trying to build his moments of joy and peace in the midst of it all. Or Mary: filled with a faith that makes her restless for things to change.
I wonder, in other words, whether in the midst of the worries of everyday life and all the collective trauma of 2020 and all the practical realities we have to navigate – do we still remember our name? Do we remember that we have been named children of God, and what that means?
Today’s scripture readings carry us to those very questions.
The reading from Isaiah sounds like something the character of Mary in that musical would say. Isaiah cries out to God for deliverance, for God to remember God’s promises to God’s people: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence…to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!…Now consider [Lord], we are all your people.
These prayers remind us that boldly calling on God to remember and fulfil promises – that is an act of faith and faithfulness to God.
In the kinda creepy and mysterious reading from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciple that things will be getting worse, more dangerous. And indeed, just a few decades later, there was a Jewish uprising, and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. In this passage, Jesus is telling his disciples that when those terrible things happen – they can still trust that God is with them; that God’s promises have not been broken. The point is to hold on through it all, and to keep the faith, to keep trusting God, and to live out of that faith and trust which gives hope for the future even in the midst of destructive times.
These readings help us to start of this Advent season by recognizing how many of us are probably feeling – this year more than ever. I saw a post going around Facebook recently that suggested that after all this we start using the word “2020” as a swear word. “Holy 2020! This is really 2020’d up!”
And in the midst of everything that’s going on in the world and in our personal lives, we gather around the glow of little screens to try and draw close to God. To hear God’s Word, to be reminded of God’s promises and God’s faithfulness, and to try and hold on to our faith and our hope. Maybe feeling a little more like Joseph than Mary.
But over the next four weeks, we will listen together to more stories of God’s faithfulness. We’ll hear God say, “Comfort, O comfort my people.” We’ll see God send John the Baptist to prepare the way for the messiah. We will remember that we have been called children of God.
And together, we’ll work our way to the day where we can hear Mary singing:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name…He has remembered his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever. (Luke 1:46-55)
And we will remember that God has come to earth.
And maybe we will be able to sing along with the faith of Mary, knowing that God has done great things for us all.
Amen.
1Written by Don Chaffer and Chris Cragin Day. To listen to the music or read the lyrics, check out https://www.waterdeep.com/waterdeep-presents-songs-from-the-unusual-tale-of-mary-josephs-baby
2Chaffer and Cragin Day, “Just a Jew.”
3That forcing someone to carry their pack was a practice of Roman soldiers is explained in many Bible commentaries on Matthew 5, including in Aaron M. Gale’s notes on the Gospel of Matthew in The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 12.
4Chaffer and Cragin Day, “I Want to Be Delivered.”
Katherine Museus Dabay 