Christmas Means Peace

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and happy Christmas week. It’s good to see you all here with us in person and watching online.

It seems today is a day if welcoming back. Brenda, so good to see you here with us today. You’re the church’s Christmas present this year.

(Welcome back Sue. We’re glad to have you with us, and John, you as well. They’re both feeling better. They no longer have Covid, they’re not contagious, so don’t be afraid of John today, and don’t be more afraid of Sue than you normally are.)

I have just a few announcements as we begin this morning.

Thank you to everyone who came out for our Polar Express movie night on Friday. Jesyka says we had about 20 families here all spread out in the sanctuary, and everyone had a great time.

There won’t be any youth activities until the first of the year, so please keep that in mind.

Our Christmas cookie caper will be held on this coming Wednesday, the 22nd. Everyone is invited to take part in that and bake cookies that will be taken to Stuarts Draft Retirement Community.

I’ll remind you of our Lottie Moon offering that is still going on. Please consider giving to that.

And I’ll remind you as well of our Christmas Eve service on Friday at 7:00. Please come and worship with us in song and in word.

If you remember back some weeks ago, our church held a shoebox packing party for Operation Christmas Child. We have a few slides of pictures that were taken that day, and Harvey is going to put that on the screen.

Thanks to everyone who took part in packing a shoebox.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Heavenly Father, we come to you this day to ask that You help us remember the birth of Jesus,

that we may share in the song of the angels,

the gladness of the shepherds,

and the worship of the wise men.

We pray this season that kindness comes with every gift and peace with every greeting. Deliver us from evil by the blessing which Christ brings, and teach us to be merry with clear hearts.

May this Christmas make us happy to be Your children, and fill us all with grateful thoughts, forgiving and forgiven, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Advent Candle

Today we light the last of our smaller candles around the Advent wreath, which is the often called the angel candle. It represents the messengers who announced the birth of the Messiah.

I’ll be talking more about those angels on Friday evening, but they are most definitely not those chubby little babies with curly hair and stubby wings that you see on posters. They’re not Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life. They’re not friends or loved ones who have passed on.

Instead, they carry out God’s divine judgment. They help us in times of trouble. And they are messengers of the king. They are fearsome creatures, frightening in appearance, and this fourth candle reminds us that these messengers from heaven brought good news.

In Luke 2:8-14, we read,

In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. But the angel said to them,

“Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.

And this is God’s word.

(LIGHT)

Sermon

It’s hard to believe we’re already at the fourth and last Sunday of Advent. Christmas is this coming week, and like just about everything else that’s happened this year, it all seems like it’s happening in a blur.

So today I’d like to slow you down a little and get you to really start thinking about what Christmas means. That’s what Advent is all about, really — taking a moment to think about the things that Christmas provides not only during December, but every month.

They build, you know — these Sundays of Advent. They build upon each other. We first have hope in this child born in a manger, and that hope comes from the love of God Himself. Because of that love, we can rejoice.

And with our rejoicing comes the last candle of the Advent wreath, and maybe the most important and most needed for us this year — peace.

Peace. Don’t we all need a measure of that right about now? Such a hard year on all of us. All the worries, the stresses, the fears. So much that we have to keep getting used to. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to face all of that with the sort of confidence that only peace can provide?

But what is that peace? And where do we find it written in the Christmas story?

It’s in a single verse tucked inside the first chapter of Matthew, but today I want to talk about the wider story around that verse. That wider story is found in Matthew 1, verses 18-25. Turn with me there:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.

When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”(which means, God with us).

When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

And this is God’s holy word.

I was going to do this whole sermon on Joseph. I love Joseph, and one of the reasons I love Joseph is that nobody ever really talks about him.

It’s all Jesus and Mary at Christmas. And I get that — it’s the Messiah and the virgin birth, after all.

But Joseph gets the short end of the stick all through the New Testament. That has always bugged me, because this single man had maybe the biggest and most important purpose of any other man in history. Joseph’s job was no big deal — just raise God. Just provide for the child Messiah. His purpose, literally, was to keep and protect the peace.

We are introduced to him during what’s supposed to be one of the best moments of his life — just before his marriage to Mary. Joseph and Mary are the equivalent of what we would call engaged, though at that time and in the Jewish culture, it was much more than that.

Among the Jews, the engagement took place a year before the marriage, and in the meantime the woman who was engaged still lived with her own family. But the pair were still considered man and wife even though a formal ceremony hadn’t yet taken place.

There’s a problem here with Joseph, though, because the woman he’s supposed to wed is pregnant. That alone was a huge deal in those times. Major scandal. But what makes this situation even worse is that the baby Mary is carrying isn’t Joseph’s at all.

Now. Take a minute and think about how that conversation must have gone — Mary telling Joseph that she’s pregnant.

Poor Joseph, right? He doesn’t understand how this could have happened. He thought Mary loved him, but now she’s broken his heart. He’s crushed, and he has to be angry. And you know what has to be in his mind, the one thing he wants to know — Whose baby is it?

Now imagine what Joseph thinks next, when Mary says, “Well, that’s a little complicated. You see, the baby is God’s.”

We see that right at the end of verse 18 — “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” That’s what the angel had told Mary just before she became pregnant.

Now there’s little doubt that Mary had shared this information with some of her closest friends, certainly with her cousin Elizabeth, who would give birth to John the Baptist.

But it looks like she didn’t say a word of this to Joseph until she had no other choice.

Because Mary was afraid. Afraid of the shame she would bring on her family. Afraid of what this news would to do the man she loved. Afraid of what Joseph would be forced to do according to the law. And most of all, afraid for the child growing inside her.

We get precious few hints in the gospels of the sort of man Joseph was, but we do get the picture of a man who loves God and loves his future wife.

One of those hints comes in verse 19. Matthew writes that Joseph was a just man, and unwilling to put Mary to shame.

The brief pictures we get of Jesus’s earthly father is of a man whose personality is defined by love. But that love had to be tested in Joseph when Mary confesses that she’s with child, and that child isn’t his.

And then it has to be tested again when Mary says the baby inside of her is the Messiah.

What does Joseph think of this? He knows the prophecy, of course. Every Jew does. And he knows that according to the prophecy, the Messiah will come from the line of David. As it so happens, Joseph is a descendant of David.

But he’s struggling to believe this can possibly be true.

He’s thinking, “Who am I that the Messiah would be carried by the woman I love? Sure, I can trace my ancestors all the way back to David, the greatest king in Israel’s history.

“But I’m just a carpenter. More than that, I’m a poor carpenter. I don’t have two nickels to rub together. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. So that means Mary can’t be telling me the truth, no matter how much I want to believe it.”

He’s poor, yes. All the glory and splendor of the house of David is gone at this point. David still has descendants, but those descendants are pretty much like everyone else, living in obscurity and barely scraping by.

But verse 19 says that Joseph is also just. That’s another word for righteous, and as a righteous man, Joseph knows it’s morally wrong to keep Mary as his intended wife. He just can’t do it.

In Deuteronomy 22, we find the penalty for what happens when a virgin who is engaged with one man sleeps with another man.

The punishment is stoning. If Joseph does what is right, if he does what the law says, then Mary will be put to death.

Joseph can’t let this happen. Again, he loves Mary, and the sort of love he has for her doesn’t depend on anything Mary could ever do.

Joseph is just, so he can’t marry her. But he’s also a loving man, so he can’t allow Mary to be stoned. But he’s also a good man, so he can’t make this divorce public and so ruin Mary’s reputation. So what’s he going to do?

There is a third option. Joseph could get what was called a writ of divorcement, which was a piece of paper that didn’t have to state the reason for a divorce, it just said the two people involved couldn’t get along.

It was a private kind of divorce, and under the law neither the husband or wife was at fault. Joseph would simply walk away, and Mary could continue on with life as best she could under the circumstances she now found herself in.

This had to have been a terrible time for the both of them. Joseph loved her, but he wasn’t entirely convinced that the story Mary told him was true.

Mary could have very easily been shamed, and in that culture being shamed was the second worse thing that could happen to you after being stoned.

She was at the mercy of Joseph here. If Joseph was any other sort of man, if he would have been cruel and violent, Mary would have died in disgrace and Jesus would have never been born.

But God knew exactly what he was doing when he brought this man and this woman together. He knew that for Mary and her baby to survive, they would both need a true man. A real man. They would need a tender man, who loved.

Still, it was a tough decision for Joseph. Verse 20 starts out by saying, “But as he considered these things...”

Joseph, being a thoughtful man, did not act in haste. He didn’t allow his emotions to get the better of him. He was angry, yes. He was hurt, absolutely. But he refused to lash out in all of his anger and hurt.

He didn’t take the path that the law permitted, even though that was entirely within his rights. Especially when what had happened to Mary affected both Josseph’s own character and character and that of the woman he loved.

So he wrestled with this decision. Joseph struggled with it. In the Greek, the words “as he considered these things” paint a picture of an inner conflict. Joseph is torn. He’s at war with himself over what to do.

When we struggle with our own hard issues, when we’re trying to find the right path but can’t really see it, that’s when God will always step in.

God will always guide the thoughtful, and that’s exactly what happens to Joseph. Because just as he’s struggling with what to do, an angel appears to him in a dream.

To the Jews, dreams were one of the best and most reliable ways to receive a communication from God. Remember the Joseph of the Old Testament’s dream. And Jacob’s dream of the ladder. God appeared to Solomon in a dream and said he would grant Solomon anything he wished.

There are dreams that are just the mind playing, and there are dreams that serve as God’s way of reaching down from heaven to deliver his will. That’s exactly what Joseph’s dream here was, and God sent an angel to do it.

Notice not only what the angel says, but how he says it.

First, he addresses Joseph in a very specific way — “Joseph,” he says, “son of David.”

What’s the first thing the angel reminds Joseph? That he’s a descendant of David. That’s exactly what the prophesy said — the Messiah would come from the line of David.

This is so great. Don’t miss this. Why is it so important that the angel begins things by saying this?

Because the angel addresses Joseph’s doubts first — not his doubts about Mary, but his doubts about himself. About his own worth.

Doesn’t matter that he’s just a carpenter. Doesn’t matter that he’s poor. All that matters is that God called him. That’s the only thing that matters. God can and will use any of us, regardless of the limitations we put on ourselves.

Then, the angel addresses the other major issue — the fact that Mary is pregnant. But he does this very carefully.

He makes it plain to Joseph that Mary was already entitled to be his wife, and then the angel says that Mary hasn’t done anything to give up that title. Because what happened is exactly as Mary said — her baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

And notice something really great here in verse 20 as well. Every time an angel shows up anywhere in the Bible, what does he say? “Fear not,” right?

The angel that comes to Joseph says that too. But in this case, the fear the angel is trying to take away from Joseph isn’t his fear of seeing the angel, it’s a fear of taking Mary as his wife.

It’s a fear that because of Mary’s condition, she would be unworthy of Joseph because she would be a disgrace to him.

The angel tells Joseph that it’s just the opposite — this is an honor reserved for no other man in history. Mary’s going to bear a son, it says in verse 21, “and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

The name “Jesus” was filled with meaning, but at that point it wasn’t a very sacred name. It meant “Jehovah is salvation,” but that name had never been associated with the Messiah until this moment.

The angel giving this name to Joseph is very important for two reasons.

One is that it brought the Messiah’s true mission into a new light. Remember, the Jews were convinced the Messiah would be a military leader that would free them from foreign oppressors.

But no. His name would be Jesus, and his mission would be salvation. His conquest would be over sin instead of the Romans, and his deliverance would be from the chains around our hearts instead of chains around our feet.

Second, and this is every bit as important and had to be really hard for Joseph to understand. It was Jewish custom to give names to their children that either expressed the mercy God had shown them, or the duty their children would owe to the Lord. No problem there. The name Jesus covers all of that.

But in the Jewish culture, the naming of a child belonged to one person only — the child’s father. No one else could name a baby. And with the angel saying this, that meant Mary’s child was being named not by Joseph, but by God.

What the angel is saying is that Joseph will raise this child. Joseph will provide for this child. Joseph will teach this child and be his protector. But this child is not Joseph’s. This child is God’s.

But don’t be afraid, the angel says. Fear not.

Verse 24 covers a lot of ground very quickly. Joseph wakes from his dream, and the verse says “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him...”

He took Mary as his wife, and Matthew implies here that Joseph did this immediately. He’s now convinced that everything she told him is true.

His way is clear. He knows exactly what God wants him to do, and so he does it. Mary is completely innocent, and to delay the marriage even a day more would risk her thinking that she didn’t have Joseph’s complete trust and confidence.

But there’s something else here too, and this speaks even more to the sort of man that Joseph was.

We have to ask how he could so easily trust this dream to such a great extent.

Sure, this was an angel coming to speak to him, and most scholars believe this angel was Gabriel, the same one who had first visited Mary to tell her she would give birth to the Christ.

And there’s no doubt that when an angel visits you in a dream, you’re going to pay attention to that dream.

But again, there’s more here. These verses don’t lay it out in detail, but it’s pretty easy to think that everything the angel revealed about Mary’s child was what Joseph not only knew to be true, but he wanted to be true in his own heart.

It had to be, didn’t it? Joseph understood the angel must have come from God, because the angel addressed everything that was in Joseph’s heart, and God alone knows the thoughts of the heart.

So they get married. And it’s a lot to do to get married in those days. There was the formal ceremony in front of witnesses. There was benediction by a priest. The marriage-feast. Moving Mary out of her childhood home and into Joseph’s home. All done as quickly as possible.

It’s a complete change in Joseph’s thinking, one that shows his complete faith and obedience in God. Done with utter joy, and with total peace.

Verse 25 says that Joseph didn’t know Mary until she gave birth to the son she carried. It is so very important to believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth as it’s laid out in scripture, but the Bible doesn’t say that Mary had no children after Jesus was born.

In fact, there are quite a few places in the New Testament that lead us to think Mary did have other children afterwards.

The important thing to remember in verse 25 is the last sentence — He, meaning Joseph, called the baby Jesus. He didn’t name the baby Jesus — God did that. But he called the baby Jesus, just as the angel had commanded.

Joseph’s child to raise. To hold. To protect. To nurture. His child to love. But not his child. And Joseph, as a good man, knew the blessing and the responsibility in that. Keeper of the peace — that was Joseph’s job. That was his life’s purpose.

We celebrate peace on this fourth Sunday of Advent, but what is that peace?

We haven’t covered two verses of today’s scripture yet, but that’s how we’re going to end today’s service.

Matthew is recording this story of Joseph and his struggle, of the angel visiting him in a dream to offer a clear path forward. But in verses 22 and 23, Matthew breaks away from the story to offer his own commentary. The angel isn’t talking in verses 22 and 23, it’s Matthew himself. And this is what he says:

“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us).”

Immanuel. God with us. We tend to gloss over that as Christians sometimes. We treat it as just another thing in scripture because we’re so used to hearing that word.

But that word means everything. That word is the greatest word ever spoken. As the great evangelist John Wesley lay dying, he said, “The best of all is God with us.” Did you get that? The best of all.

If you want to know the peace not just of Christmas but of the Christian life, it’s right there in that name. Immanuel.

Why?

Because that name doesn’t just mean God with us. It means GOD with us. It means God WITH us. And it means God with US.

Very quickly, let’s take these one at a time.

First, Immanuel means GOD with us.

This is the essence of Christmas, isn’t it? This is the heart of the entire season. God came down. Everything else that we celebrate and honor this time of year — the peace on earth, the goodwill toward men — takes second stage to the fact that this child born in Bethlehem was God himself coming into the world in human form.

The Bible tells us this is true everywhere. All the way through the New Testament, we’re told in every possible way that Jesus is God. Nothing about Christianity makes sense at all without us knowing this.

John begins his gospel saying of Jesus that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Peter preached in Acts that God had purchased the church with his own blood, speaking of Christ.

Time and again through the Gospels, we see Jesus forgiving the sins of people. But how can that ever be possible if Jesus was only a man?

Have you ever thought about that? It would be like Cathy stealing my iPad after the service because she really wants an iPad, and I see her sneaking it to her car and I run after her and say, “Hey, you stole my iPad,” but then Rick comes up and says, “Hey, Cathy, I forgive you.”

What sense does that make? Rick can’t forgive Cathy of anything. Rick’s just a guy. Cathy didn’t steal from him. She stole from me.

But if every sin we commit is at its heart not a sin against someone else but a sin against God, and if Rick is God, then Rick has every right to go up to Cathy and say, “I forgive your sins.”

You see? That’s what Jesus did. The only possible way for Jesus to forgive sins is if he’s God.

Or take this, speaking of angels. Over and over in the Bible, when people are confronted by angels their first reaction is fear, but they’re second reaction is usually to bow in adoration. And the angels always say no, don’t bow. You can’t worship me because we’re both created by God.

And yet when we see people bowing before Christ in scripture, what’s the one thing he never does?

He never says, “Get up.” Never says, “Don’t worship me.” He accepts and receives anyone who bows to him because Jesus isn’t a creature. He was not created. He has no beginning and no end.

It’s God in that manger. It’s GOD with us.

But it’s more than that, because Immanuel also means God WITH us. That’s the beautiful part, the glorious part. That’s that part that means everything.

There’s a huge difference between knowing about God and being with God. It’s one thing to experience God and quite another to meet him personally.

Whenever God had come near before, he always looked like something terrifying. Look through the Old Testament. Think of the whirlwind that appeared to Job. The smoking furnace that appeared to Abraham. The pillar of fire that appeared to the Israelites as they left Egypt.

Even when God came down, He remained unapproachable.

But remember what John said in the first chapter of his gospel — “the word became flesh.”

In Christ, we find all the glory and majesty and power of God with none of the terror and all of the love and peace. There is no barrier of guilt anymore, because he took away the sins.

He came to earth to live among us, to walk with us, to understand exactly what it meant and felt to be human.

He’s not the great unknowable God way up there in heaven. He’s the God who understands the human heart better than humans do, and who knows how hard it is to live this life, and who loves you so much that he stripped himself of all his holy glory to wear skin and bones so he could die for you.

That is Immanuel. He’s GOD with us. He’s God WITH us. And finally, he’s also God with US.

But now wait, that’s a limited term, isn’t it? Us. It’s not God with all, it’s God with US. So who is the “us” that Matthew is talking about here?

Does he mean people who have earned the right for God to dwell with them? No, it can’t be that. We can’t earn that right. There’s no power we have and nothing we can do to earn that right.

So who is it, then? Who is the “us”?

The “us” is always the people who are invited. The people who are humble. The poor in spirit, the meek, the broken of heart. The lost. It’s the shepherds, the outcasts, the people society doesn’t want.

The “us” in this verse are always the people who receive the gift of Christ knowing that can’t pay for it. A gift that’s free but costs everything, both to us and to Him.

Christmas is all about getting near to the God who came near to us. And so often that means getting rid of the limitations we put on ourselves.

We have to take seriously the fact that Jesus is God, and doing that means getting rid of the judgments you make of what you think God can and can’t do in your life.

Joseph’s problem, deep down, wasn’t that he couldn’t believe what Mary told him. We know the sort of man Joseph was, but Mary was just as trustworthy and every bit as righteous, even more so. As amazing as it was, some part of Joseph had to know she was telling the truth. All the angel did was confirm it.

No, Joseph’s problem was really that he didn’t think God could do something so wonderful in the life of a poor carpenter.

And that’s something we all struggle with, don’t we? God can do anything — we know that, we get that, we believe that. But we also know and get and believe that God, as powerful as He is, can’t do anything with us, because we’re just not that special.

Christmas reminds us just how wrong we are about that. It’s a time of joy. Of hope. Of love. But most of all, it’s a time of peace. Peace between you and the God who made you. Peace between your sins and His forgiveness. Peace between who you know you are and who God knows you can be.

So I’ll ask all of you in this coming week to take a moment to look at all God did just to be with you. Then ask yourself what you’re doing to be with him.

Let’s pray:

Father we pray that during this challenging Christmas season the light of Your love shines upon us even brighter. We pray that the glory of your son overflows our hearts, and that we find the true and meaningful and endless peace of knowing that because of Christmas, YOU are with us. That because of Christmas, You are WITH us. And that because of Christmas, you are with US. So let our hearts be glad. Let our spirits be lifted. Let our souls rejoice in the knowledge that You entered this world by love to offer us hope, and let that knowledge carry us through every dark moment. For we ask this in Your son’s precious name, Amen.