A sermon for Saint Joseph’s Day, preached at Evensong on Wednesday, March 19th at Holy Spirit Anglican Church, San Diego.
From
very early on in the Christian Church, Christians began to remember the lives
of the great saints who had gone before them.
On specific days, which marked the death of a saint, or a special event
in their lives, the church held special services to remind themselves of these
holy men and holy women. Doing so gave
them a sense of continuity with the earliest believes and a conviction that the
faith for which they were struggling, either externally against persecution or
internally against their own sin, was worth it.
Others had trod this path before, they were not alone on the pilgrim way
following the savior, and they could take heart that glory truly did lie
ahead. As one contemporary worship hymn
has put it, “As saints of old still line the way, Retelling triumphs of His
grace, We hear their calls and hunger for the day, When, with Christ, we stand
in glory.” Today, March 19th,
we pause and remember the Saint Joseph, the step-father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and we listen to his tale of God’s grace that we might be encouraged
and hunger for the day of Christ.
What
do we know of Joseph’s past, his background?
Well we hear a bit about that in our Old Testament reading and bits and
pieces from the New Testament.
Surprisingly little is known of Saint Joseph, despite his important role
in Jesus’ life. We know, from the
genealogies of Jesus provided in Matthew and Luke, that Joseph was a descendant
of David. We are reminded in the reading
from 2 Chronicles, that God had promised David that he would never fail to have
a son seated on the throne of Israel, if his children were careful to walk in
God’s ways. As Joseph was in such a
line, we would expect him to have some sort of dream of sitting on a throne,
ruling the land, and ordering servants to do whatever he wished. However, as Joseph knew, David’s descendants
had failed to walk in God’s ways. They
had transgressed God’s law, and eventually they had lead God’s chosen people
into God’s wrath. The nation was lead
into exile and its kings were removed from the throne. After the return from exile, things are bit a
muddy. There were a few people who could
claim to be children of David, but there was certainly no throne to occupy. So David’s descendants were bereft of a
throne on earth, and instead of being a reminder of the glory of the former
days, they were a reminder of the shame of Israel, that these people who had
been given so much wasted it in sin, and led the entire nation into disaster.
Yet
God in his mercy is faithful to his promises, even when we are not. He still chose a descendant of David to sit
upon the throne, and he would use Joseph to bring this about. It is in this situation which we meet Joseph
in our Gospel reading. Joseph was a
workman of some sort, the Greek used to describe him has often been translated
as a carpenter, but it could mean any skilled laborer. We are told in Matthew that Joseph is a
righteous man, faithful to the law of God.
At some point he becomes engaged to a young girl named Mary, but then he
discovers that she is with child, which she claims to have come from the Holy
Spirit. Joseph, like many of us would
be, is quite skeptical of this story, but because he is righteous, he does not
want to bring shame to her, so he decides to divorce Mary quietly. But then he has a dream in which an angel of
the Lord came to him and told him that Mary was telling the truth. To Joseph’s credit, and further evidence of
his faith in God, he believes the dream and continues his engagement to Mary,
despite the fact the Mary’s pregnancy will not remain a secret long. He will have to face some awkward situations,
he will likely be shamed by the community, yet his faith in God gives him
strength to persevere and follow God’s plan for him. So Joseph’s background is one of shame, and
yet God in his grace works in Joseph’s life and gives him the faith to
persevere. And what is the result of
God’s work and Joseph’s faith?
Joseph’s
legacy can be a bit of a letdown to us.
Despite God’s great action in his life, and a faith which must have been
incredibly strong to stand up to the expectations of the community, we don’t
hear very much about Joseph. We hear of
his acceptance of Mary; later we hear about him taking his family down into
Egypt to save them from the massacre order by King Herod; we hear about him
taking Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him when Jesus is twelve. But that’s it. Every other reference to Joseph in the New
Testament is about Jesus’ genealogy; it just says Jesus is the son of
Joseph. We don’t know how Joseph dies,
we don’t know if he believes in Jesus; later on in the Gospel story, Jesus’
mother follows him and eventually puts her faith in him, but we hear nothing of
Joseph. He simply fades from view. In fact, the only legacy that we have of
Joseph is Jesus…and indeed, what better legacy could there be.
In
our lives, we can learn a lot from Saint Joseph. We may have a background of shame. In fact, one of the things which has come to
light in modern psychological and sociological studies is that families are
rarely perfect and many of us limp out of our childhoods into adulthood, into
new relationships where all too often we repeat the mistakes of our
parents. And yet, we see in Joseph’s
life that God can still work with broken people, people who are themselves
ashamed or who carry some sort of mark of shame. Saint Paul likens this work of God to a
potter working with earthen vessels, which are cracked and broken. In 2 Corinthians 4:7, Paul writes that “we
have this treasure [the power of God at work in our lives] in jars of clay, to
show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” Now we often have certain expectations of
what God’s surpassing power at work in us will look like. Many of us, most especially many who enter
the ordained ministry, but I do not think that this is isolate to bishops,
priests, and deacons; many of us expect a legacy of success, of churches built
and packed with people, of many of our family and friends, neighbors and
perfect strangers coming to faith. We
perhaps are looking for God to work great healing miracles through us, or feed
thousands of people, or through our prayers to provide dramatically for
others. Then perhaps our name will be
great, then people might remember us as Saint Brian the Evangelist, or Saint
Brian the Healer. But Joseph teaches us,
through his own legacy, that the greatest thing that could ever be said of us
is that he gave us Jesus. Joseph played
a crucial role in the life of our Lord, but one that is hidden from us. We know almost nothing of Joseph the father,
who taught his son how to read and write, perhaps how to work a tool, perhaps
how to pray, how to treat people, especially his mother. We do not know that, we only know that
Joseph, in some way, brought Jesus to us.
I think that is the legacy of a saint of God, not necessarily number of
converts, not churches named after us, or great monuments built to us. But the quiet example, the gentle prayer, the
one who serves and toils, unnoticed by the world or the history books, except perhaps
by a passing reference in a diary or a journal that Josh, or Sarah, or Sunny,
or Bob, told me about Jesus today.
Today
we remember Saint Joseph, whose life teaches us that God works mightily in the
lives of the broken to leave a legacy of the Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
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