A Matter of Control

Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25

December 23, 2007

by Dr. Charles Parker

I. Introduction

I had an experience the week before last that a number of you have probably had over the past month. My daughter Julia was unwrapping figures from a crèche we have from El Salvador; and she unwrapped a character and held it up to me asking, “Daddy is this Joseph or one of the shepherds?” It’s a little hard to tell sometimes. Usually, you have to get them all unwrapped and see who is carrying a shepherd’s crook or a lamb. And even then it’s not always possible.

That’s kind of Joseph’s curse, he’s always the shadowy figure in the background of the Christmas story. In a lot of paintings of Jesus’ birth, he doesn’t show up at all. Which is really too bad, because Joseph has gifts to offer us as we prepare to let the Christ child enter our lives again this Christmas. So I thought that we could spend a few moments reflecting on Joseph this morning.

II. A Life Well-Planned

The Scriptures don’t tell us too much about Joseph. There are a couple of apocryphal gospels that are attributed to or about Joseph, but their stories about Joseph’s early life are pretty sketchy and contradictory. We can assume that he learned his trade as a carpenter from his father, just as he taught it to Jesus. And we can assume that he had plans. He had a career and was betrothed to a young woman named Mary.

In ancient Israel , there were essentially two stages to a marriage. The first was a betrothal, which was a formal, binding contract between two families and could happen as early as age 12 for a girl and 13 for a boy. The husband-to-be or the husband’s father would pay a “bride’s price” to the father of the young girl, and she was committed to be married, even while she continued to live in her father’s house, until she was old enough to be a married woman, which was anywhere from her mid-teens to twenty.

So Joseph, living in his family’s town of Nazareth, had his life pretty well mapped out. And then his wife-to-be comes to have this very awkward conversation with him, and his world gets turned on its head. Now, it was within Joseph’s rights when he found Mary pregnant to have had her stoned, but Scripture tells us that he was a good man and did not want to punish her or even embarrass her publicly; so he starts a quiet procedure to annul the contract with her family. And then he has this dream, in which an angel of the Lord speaks to him and tells him that Mary’s crazy story really is the truth and she is pregnant by the power of God and will bear the Messiah.

And, as we have the story in Matthew, Joseph doesn’t argue, he doesn’t question, he accepts the call that God has placed on his life, takes Mary as his wife, bears all the social stigma – when the people in the small community of Nazareth mentally count back the months, as they see Mary’s belly begin to grow – and takes on the role of raising the Messiah.

Now our lectionary reading from Isaiah this morning was obviously chosen because it contains the famous passage that Matthew quotes in our Gospel text about a young woman bearing a child. But, as it happens, the character of King Ahaz in this story provides a dramatic and enlightening contrast to Joseph. This story takes place about 734 B.C.E. when Ahaz has been king of Judah for eight years. He was the grandson of a powerful and successful King of Judah named Uzziah. And Uzziah had been a dynamic military leader and expanded the borders of the country. But for Ahaz, things weren’t going so well.

Judah’s two northern neighbors, Israel (remember, David and Solomon’s kingdom at this point was divided, with Israel being in the north and Judah in the south) and Aram (which was the area of modern Syria), were trying to force Judah to join them in a revolt against the powerful Assyrian empire. Ahaz didn’t want to join the revolt, because he knew that it didn’t stand a chance, but the kings of Israel and Aram were besieging Jerusalem to force him to join their “coalition of the unwilling.” Well, Ahaz, thought that the only way out of this dilemma was to form an alliance with Assyria and ask for their help, a decision that would end up leaving Judah a greatly-weakened vassal state.

Into this situation comes the prophet Isaiah, who tells Ahaz to hang tough and not make the alliance with Assyria, because God is going to rescue God’s people. Well, Ahaz can look out his window and see the armies of Aram and Israel surrounding his city, and all he’s got on the other hand is this crazy prophet saying that God is going to save him, which doesn’t give him a lot of confidence.

So Isaiah says to him, “Fine, ask for a sign to prove that I’m speaking for God.” And then Ahaz engages in this clever dodge: he pretends to be pious, quoting Deuteronomy about “not putting the Lord your God to the test,” but what’s really going on is that he knows that if God gives him a sign, he’s going to have to trust that God’s going to take care of the situation, and he doesn’t want to do that. He’s got a plan and he doesn’t want to let go of control.

But, this clever answer evokes a devastating oracle from Isaiah, who tells the king that God’s will is going to get worked out whether or not Ahaz chooses to be part of it. “My God,” says Isaiah (meaning that the Lord is no longer the God of Ahaz) is going to raise up a new king who will do what God wants him to do and bring the people out of this crisis. But it isn’t going to be Ahaz.

III. A Study in Contrasts

Both Ahaz and Joseph were faced with having their neatly constructed worlds start to unravel. And when that happened, both developed their plans to deal with it: Joseph decided to quietly “put away” Mary and rebuild his life; Ahaz decided to offer an alliance with the Assyrians to save his country. Not ideal solutions, but both were reasonable, logical decisions. But then, both men are confronted by a promise from God: Ahaz hears his promise through the prophet Isaiah, Joseph hears his through a dream.

But then, their paths diverge. Ahaz doesn’t want to trust what he hears, and won’t let go of his plan, because it’s the only way that he can see his way out of this crisis. It’s the only logical solution.

Joseph also sees only one solution to his dilemma. But he hears God’s promise that maybe there are possibilities that he can’t see or understand, and he trusts that. Joseph is a model, then, of the same kind receptivity and openness to God's will that we also see in his wife-to-be. He accepts God's interruption of the story that he had planned out for his life and lets God’s story take over his own.

We live in a culture that worships control. And there seems to be something innate in our genetic make-up that needs to be in control: every parent in this sanctuary has heard that universal cry, “I want to do it MY way!” And even as we get older, there is nothing that is scarier for most of us than feeling like our handle on our own lives is becoming unstable. I think that our biggest struggle around stewardship and giving doesn’t have anything to do with all the things that our money can buy; it’s because money is our best way of exerting our control over our lives. If we just have enough money, or power, or status, we’ll be insulated when the crisis comes.

Joseph teaches us a different way, the way of surrendering control. Theologian and mystic Howard Thurman, who spent many years down the road here at Howard University, wrote that:

In Christianity there is ever the central, inescapable demand of surrender. The assumption is that this is well within the power of the individual. If the power is lacking, every effort must be put forth to find out what the hindrance is. No exception is permissible. … Whatever stands in the way of the complete and full surrender, we must search it out and remove it. If a bad relationship is a hindrance, one must clean it up. In other words, whatever roadblocks appear, the individual must remove them. …the demand is direct and simple: Surrender your inner consent to God…this is your birthright privilege.

Where are the places in your lives that you’re not letting go and surrendering to a call of God – a call to simplify your lifestyle, to heal a relationship, pursue a different vocation. Many of you know that I served on our Annual Conference’s Board of Ordained Ministry for a number of years. And I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I have heard people say, “I felt God calling me into the ordained ministry at a very young age, but I fought that call until finally I couldn’t fight it any more.” Some of these are folks who spent decades in careers that didn’t feed them, but they couldn’t see how God’s plan for them was going to work. How sad, to spend years and years doing something that you’re not supposed to be doing, just because we can’t trust.

Joseph didn’t know what to do with a young, pregnant fiancée. I suspect that he thought that God’s plan wasn’t really much of a plan at all. But he lets himself embrace the infinite possibilities of the situation, and he embraces the new life that God offers him. His willingness to yield to God's plans makes him a true father to Jesus, as does Mary's willingness to participate in the scheme of salvation.

IV. Conclusion

The call to relinquish control is not a call to not plan or to not take responsibility for your life. But it is to a call to recognize that God’s plan for us may not be our plan, and we need to surrender our plans and embrace the greater vision that God has for our lives. And I say this acknowledging that God’s call may not make a lot of sense to us when we hear it. But like Joseph, when we begin to follow, we may find some hidden possibilities.

Amen.