A Fourth Church Sermon by John A. Cairns

December 25, 2003 | Christmas Day

Claiming the Scandal

John A. Cairns
Dean, Academy for Faith and Life,
Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 11:1–9
Matthew 1:18–25

Once an event or celebration gets on to the calendar, we know it’s really coming, it takes on an air of predictability. And no holiday does that with more focused energy than Christmas. For months, the merchants have been helping us count down the days. In worship, we have lighted our way around the Advent wreath. Privately, we’ve opened the windows on our Advent calendars, or perhaps just sighed over how much there was to do and how little time there was to do it. But now it’s here—Christmas Day. Right on schedule, just as we knew it would be.

As part of the predictability of the twenty-fifth day of December, there have been the familiar routines of music and story and celebration, in many cases following a pattern of long standing. And yet the story of Jesus’ birth is anything but ordinary—which leaves us with the dilemma of how to find, and focus on, the surprising in an occasion that is so strongly marked by predictability.

A couple of weeks ago, as I contemplated how to break us out of our predictable patterns, I was reminded of a line from Alice in Wonderland. The White Queen tells Alice that she is far too deeply caught up with the ordinary and predictable to understand what is really going on, and so she should “practice believing six impossible things before breakfast each day.”

That was, it seemed to me, a novel way to bridge into the Christmas story. Little did I know that by the time this day arrived, the news would be requiring us to believe six impossible things before our second cup of coffee. An outbreak of mad cow disease in Washington state, the indictment of former Governor Ryan, the possibility of the Bears having a .500 season, the cancellation of six Air France flights due to a terrorist alert, the almost total absence of snow so far this year, the Dow over 10,000 and climbing—that’s six and we didn’t even have to stop and ponder. With a little effort, we could probably have listed ten or twelve impossible things before breakfast.

We want to ask what has produced all this clutter on our Christmas radar screen. What perverse turn of fate has brought us to the birth of the King of kings at a time when our stable of political leaders seems to be filled with moral midgets? How is it that we are to celebrate the arrival of the Prince of Peace at a time when everywhere we look people are engaged in mean-spirited, partisan battles? “Oh, how much we need Christmas,” we say. We need it every year, but particularly this year, particularly at this time when there seem to be at least six impossible things happening before breakfast!

But here is the rub: one particular “impossible thing that happened before breakfast” is the reason why we are here today. And it is as unsettling as anything you may see splashed across the front page of the paper. In between its familiar phrases, this story is filled to overflowing with warnings not to be afraid and with happenings that test our credulity. When we take a minute to actually probe the Christmas story, we begin to wonder if perhaps we have simply replaced one set of impossible things with another. Perhaps we have ventured through the looking glass into a world where nothing can be believed, where nothing is real.

Well, that’s not quite true. In our gospel lesson from Matthew, the one thing that is real is Joseph. He becomes the focal point in the story, but it is an awkward place to be. Barbara Brown Taylor asks, “Is Joseph a father or a stepfather? A husband or a chaste roommate? Is he the head of the family unit or the appointed guardian for God’s own wife and child? Christian tradition has never known quite what to do with Joseph” (Gospel Medicine, p. 154). And now, here he is at center stage. Adding a touch of reality to what could otherwise be an impossible tale.

Matthew has taken particular pains to give Joseph a significant place. He has detailed the genealogy that ties Joseph to the lineage of David. This man who so rarely shows up in stained-glass windows or Christmas carols is now brought front and center as an upstanding individual with a goodly family heritage. He wants to do the right things but finds himself in the middle of a mess. The woman to whom he is engaged is pregnant, and he is not the father! He could, of course, create a scandal—subject Mary to public criticism and shame. But Joseph decides to take care of the matter quietly, privately. In order to avoid any scandal, he is going to simply end the relationship with Mary without putting her on trial or casting blame. He is just going to go away.

Joseph was on the verge of doing just that when something impossible happened before breakfast. In a dream, an angel told him that the child Mary was carrying was God’s child. How does he process that information?! And what about the divine request that followed—that Joseph not end his relationship with Mary but instead take her as his wife and give his name to the child?

My hunch is that Joseph is the one in this story who is most like us. He is the one who seems to be presented day after day with circumstances beyond his control—even as we often are. Events swirl around us and upset us so that we too long to find a dignified departure route. Just when we thought things were pretty normal, we wake up and find ourselves living lives that we have never chosen for ourselves—lives of ethical and moral compromise, lives of strained relationships, lives of work without satisfaction and routines without joy, lives of continual turmoil. If we could find a way to divorce ourselves from even some of this—to just walk away—we would certainly be tempted to do that, just as Joseph was.

But the angel says to Joseph—and to us—“Do not fear. God is here. It may not be the life you had planned (or the world you had hoped for), but God may be born here too, if you will permit it.” That is the astounding piece of this story, that God’s coming into the world requires willing human partners: Joseph, Mary, you and me; partners “willing to believe in the impossible, willing to claim the scandal, to adopt it and give it our names, accepting the whole sticky mess and rocking it in our arms” (Gospel Medicine, p. 157).

This is what Frederick Buechner calls “the dark side of Christmas” (The Hungering Dark, p. 14)—that God comes to us in such a way that we can always turn him down. God comes to us as the hungry woman we do not have to feed or the lonely man we do not have to comfort or the scandalous baby that we do not have to name. To Joseph—to you and me, to people who have too many impossible things on their plates—God comes . . . and waits for a response.

In this swirl of dreams and circumstances, Joseph has to make his decision. He is sorting out matters of personal integrity and measuring the bounds of commitment. He is thinking about how much one person can handle, about what he should be expected to absorb in order to make the situation better for someone else. He is looking for that exit that will take him away from this swirl of events, events that have come upon him too quickly and caused his moral compass to spin out of control. And he is so preoccupied that he barely hears the unbelievable question: “Will you permit God to be born? Will you stay in the midst of this mess and give your untarnished—your precious and essential—name to this scandalous child?”

We do not want to think about this dark side of Christmas: that God comes to us in such a way that we can always turn him down. We want Christmas to be ordinary, predictable. Oh, we do know we have a lot on our plates, our minds are full, we are dealing with more than we can say grace over. But then there is yet one more thing, one more question, one more request: “Will you give your name to God’s latest idea? Will you permit God to be born, because that is still God’s intention: to be born, to be with us—Emmanuel?”

Friends, we pick up the morning paper and read six or eight impossible things and the angel says for our benefit, “Do not be afraid. A holy child is waiting to be born if you will permit it. Impossible as it sounds, he is waiting to change this world if you will welcome him and give him a place in your family. But you need to decide, because all the candles on the wreath have been lit, and there are no more shopping days left.”

“When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus,” son of Joseph, of the house and lineage of David. Amen.