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Printer Friendly VersionHis hands are sweaty, and his heart is pounding. “What
in the world am I doing?” he asks himself. “I must be crazy.”
He starts to pace, checks his watch a thousand times. He just wants to get
this over with. Then he tells himself, “how horrible, I sound like I’m
about to go the dentist for five tooth extractions.” “I can do this,”
he tells himself, and rehearses again what he has said in his mind countless
times before. Will he do the knee thing or not? Still hasn’t decided.
Drops of sweat fall down his forehead. He reaches in his pocket obsessively
to make sure it is still there. He has his speech all ready. He has the ring.
She doesn’t suspect. It’s a romantic setting. Then it hits him like
a ton of bricks: what if she says no? Just then, she arrives. He just stands
there like a deer caught in the headlights. He doesn’t say a word, can’t
speak--opens the box and hands it to her, and waits. She smiles. “This
is a good thing, I think. She’s smiling.” Suddenly she throws her
arms around his neck and shouts YES loud enough for everyone for five blocks
to hear. And there he was, engaged. In our culture, that’s about how
it goes. They start planning a wedding, and hope that their relationship lasts
through the ceremony. She has a ring, he has a much higher credit card bill,
and at that, they are engaged.
But it was very different back then. There were negotiations
to be made. And public pronouncements of intention. And legal documents. An
engaged couple was bound significantly to covenant they had entered into.
If they were betrothed, and the man died, she would be considered a widow.
To break the engagement, her fiancé would have to legally divorce her.
Being engaged implied serious, lifelong commitment. Marriage occurred when
a man took the woman home, which implied marital consummation. And if, heaven
forbid, a woman came together with a different man, she would have been an
adulteress, which was punishable by stoning, even to the point of death.
Imagine Joseph. He had made the covenant willingly, for he wanted
Mary to be his wife. He imagined their life together, made preparations as
best as he could afford, and waited the anticipation when it would become
reality.
Imagine the dagger in his heart when he found out she was pregnant.
“Not Mary? Not my sweet Mary?” Joseph, despite her presumed betrayal,
still loves her, and wants to keep her from public disgrace. He would divorce
her quietly, and somehow pick up the pieces of his dreams and plans, and go
on.
Imagine Mary. How could she explain the visitation of the Holy
Spirit? It would sound like the excuse of a woman gone mad! Had God placed
life within only for her to end up stoned to death? There was no possible
solution to this horrible situation. But all things are possible with God.
She held on to her faith, and waited.
The answer comes in the form of an angel, who speaks in a dream.
Matthew steps in to narrate and connects the angelic proclamation
with the prophet Isaiah’s claim that the Messiah of God will be the son
of a virgin. Matthew is also told, that this son of Mary’s is to be named
Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins,” (vs. 21)
and that is to be called him Immanuel, God with us. Joseph has a choice, but
he chooses to obey God and all the instructions in the dream. God will speak
to him in another dream at a future time, where Joseph will save Jesus’
life by fleeing Herod and going to Egypt. But for now, he knows he will marry
her, and bear some of her shame, and take this son as his very own. There
was no earthly reason for him to do so. But against all reason, Joseph trusted
in the message from God, and obeyed.
Joseph trusted. Most significant is that he trusted without
certainty. Not only did he have to trust in the reliability of the message,
he also had to trust in the reality of the One who sent the message. Mary
had no way to prove to her fiancé that she was still a virgin. She
could not provide scientific evidence of her faithfulness to him. Even something
as seemingly substantial as a visitation by an angel in a dream could not
be believed with certainty. The message requires faith, for it is not verifiable.
It is certainly against all human reason.
There seems to be a trend within some Christian circles to provide
historical and scientific evidence that the biblical events are true. It is
said that such evidence “demands a verdict,” for it will lead one
to the truth as being self-evident; the evidence proves the religious claim.
There is a problem though in our search for proof. “Proving” the
reality of the historical Jesus will never prove the Christ of faith—nor
should it. If faith can be proven or verified with certainty, it ceases then
to be faith. If the core beliefs of the Christian creeds, for example, can
be proven, it would simply be common sense to affirm them. Faith, or more
accurately trust, on the other hand, involves courage for it involves risk.
Joseph trusted God. It was courageous and risky.
And there are times when we need to risk and be courageous,
when all certainty fades. There are times of pain and suffering when God remains
silent; there are desert experiences when it seems as though even the presence
of God is removed. Is this the time to go on an archeological dig? Some would
imply yes. But other Christians through the ages have envisioned our need
at this point quite differently.
Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian in the 19th century who lived
a very difficult life. In fact, if physical blessings such as health or gifts
such as loving relationship were the test of God’s approval, Kierkegaard
would have been left out. He lived with physical deformity and constant pain;
he lived with severe depression and found himself in relational desolation.
And yet, he was a great man of faith. And he gave us an image that lingers
on. Faith is a leap, he told us—as if we stand on the edge of a cliff,
seeing nothing but an abyss beneath, where we lunge forward somehow believing
that we will be caught in the arms of God. According to this man, certainty
may even be a detractor to true faith.
This is not to imply that God is not real. On the contrary,
Kierkegaard knew God to be very real. But it is a different kind of knowledge
that one that tries to make Christ verifiable through human means of scientific
and historical investigation. We can support our beliefs, but we cannot cause
trust on the basis of any human evidence. In fact, it is possible to believe
all the right things, without a personal encounter with God; that comes only
through entrusting ourselves to Christ in faith.
And so we stand, like Joseph with dream in hand, on the edge
of a decision of whether or not to believe beyond certainty. Joseph leapt,
at the risk of social humiliation, and later, at the risk of finding himself
in an alien in the land of his forebearers greatest pain, at the risk of his
very life.
But not only did Joseph have to trust that he was to take this
illegitimate son, as his own. He also had to believe that God would come to
earth as an infant; that this child under his care would become the savior
of the world; that he himself was entrusted to be his earthly father. Certainly,
unbelievable! Certainty, beyond grasp! But because Joseph believed God, we
have been saved from our sins by the Savior, who saves us now, and we can
experience him as “God with us,” and God in us. Joseph dared to
trust in the greatest mystery of all: the Incarnation of God.
Do we trust God? I’m not talking here about believing in
God. Do we trust him, courageously at that? True, these are frightening times
in a way, when religious diversity now could imply actual bloodshed, and different
beliefs tear humanity apart. Could it be that in our fear, with an un-stabling
postmodernity pounding at our door, that we have sought certainty of the faith,
instead of displaying personal trust? Have we neglected the ways of the heart?
It is unfortunate that faith has no verb in English. Where the
Bible says “faithing” in the Greek, we can only translate it “believing.”
But belief in English can have a very different connotation. It is possible
to believe any number of truths—to believe there is a God, or in the
divinity of Jesus Christ, or in the holy Trinity--to believe creedal affirmations,
such as the virgin birth or the resurrection from the dead. But it is a very
different thing to affirm a set of propositional statements than it is to
completely entrust yourself to the Person they affirm. Attempts at certainty
may increase our confidence in our own confidence, so to speak, and give support
to what we believe in our heads. But it is only radical risking trust in our
hearts that will us lead to a courageous leap into the arms of God. It is
only radical trust in a Person that will sustain us, against all reason.
Perhaps there are persons here who are seeking after something missing, but haven’t yet heard that salvation does not come from a religion, but from a relationship, and that need to meet Jesus for the first time. Or perhaps there are Christians here who strain under the burden of proof and who think it is their responsibility to convince the world of its sin—those who need to be reminded that Christ needs no defense; that God is quite capable of defending himself; and the Holy Spirit will do what the Holy Spirit was sent to do. Or perhaps there are others here, who suffer quietly, wondering where God has gone and why the loneliness is so suffocating and why they feel without God in the world. Nothing that I can say to any of these persons, seekers, keepers, or hang-on-ers, will give you proof of who stands beneath you. But I do beg you, in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior, leap and be caught by a God who will honor your courage. Amen.