Let’s try to hold back the final gush of Christmas in all of its various aspects by taking time to reflect on the theme of the last days of the season of Advent: Emmanuel, which is translated God is with us. In fact, St. Matthew brackets his gospel (which we will be reading during the coming year) with the idea of Emmanuel, God is with us. We hear the word in the first chapter read today and then in the last chapter of the gospel Jesus says right before ascending into heaven “I will be with you always.” The entire gospel illustrates what it means to say that God is with us. Joseph and Mary found Emmanuel, God is with us, when they were homeless, seeking shelter, as they made their way to Bethlehem. They also found Emmanuel, God is with us, when they became refugees, immigrants in Africa, seeking political asylum from an oppressive government. They found Emmanuel, God is with, us when their pre-teen-age son caused some family dysfunction by acting out without parental permission. Not just the infancy narratives but the entire of St. Matthew’s Gospel demonstrated that God is with us. God is with us in the miracles and the preaching and the table fellowship of Jesus, certainly. But God is with us in the scourging and the crowning with thorns, in carrying the cross up Calvary’s hill, and in the slow, agonizing death of crucifixion. We have to dig deep to understand what it means to say God is with us.
I was on a retreat a few years ago and the retreat master asked us to reflect when we felt that God was with us. Inevitably the stories shared were about blessings received. I remember one young man talking about some kind of accident with his dog. He concluded, “I know God is with me because my dog lived.” I remember thinking at the time: what if you dog had died? Would that have meant God was not with you? We so breezily trust that God is with us when we win the lottery, when the doctor says we are in remission, when the children get straight “A”s in school. However, St. Matthew tells the story of Jesus as he does to remind us that God is with us in the all stuff of humanity, even the messy stuff: at Bethlehem and at Calvary, in the good times and the bad, in the laughing and the weeping, in the ups and the downs. We look at the story of St. Joseph in St. Matthew’s gospel to see how we can obtain the eyes to recognize that God is with us no matter how things are going.
First thing to notice is that Joseph had to surrender his idea of how things should go in order to find how God was with him. Surely Joseph expected to find God by living a nice, normal life as a working man in Nazareth. He would have his wife and children around the supper table, work at this carpenter’s bench, worship at the local synagogue and probably have a glass of wine or two at the local pub talking trash about the Romans on weekends. He discovered that God was going to be with him in unexpected ways. People could add up to nine as easily in that time as in ours. He knew that tongues would be clucking that either he had fooled around or he had been fooled. His dream of a normal life fitting into his neighborhood was gone. Similarly, we too must learn to discover God with us in unexpected ways. We might suppose that God is with us after we find our soul mate and grow old together having his and her matching cups for our false teeth in the old age home. We could believe that God is with us when we have a brilliant career which is personally satisfying, financially lucrative, and provides lots of time for leisure activities. (Good luck with that.) We expect God to be with us by keeping us vigorous and healthy well past the Biblical three score and ten. Now God might be with us in those kinds of things but as Joseph experienced God is with us in unexpected ways as well. God is with us even when it involves being alone, having a tedious job, becoming sick. We must be able to find God in all things, not just the good things.
Which leads to the second realization that Joseph came to in finding that God is with us – the way that God has chosen to be with us is better than what we had imagined for ourselves. After all, Joseph was able to share his life with the Jesus who was the incarnation of God’s love in the world and Mary who blessed among women and was full of grace. Not the life he would have chosen but one that proved to be full of blessings for him. St. Joseph is the patron of a happy death since it is supposed that Jesus and Mary were at his side when he died. However God with us in our lives can be a blessing as well. In my family we have found God is with us in my niece, Jennifer. Jenny is mentally handicapped but she lives as pure love. Her brothers and sisters are very kind and generous people because from their childhood they have learned to think about Jenny and not only about themselves. It was not what we had hoped when Jenny was born but God has definitely been with my sister’s family in having a handicapped child.
Finally, God is with us when we trust in the dream. Joseph had to do that – he believed in the dream and “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.” God is with us when we trust in the dream that God has for this world, a dream of peace full of “tidings of comfort and joy.” Many things can make us doubt the dream of God – ongoing violence, corrupt politics, endemic racism, economic injustice. When we place our hope in the dream God has for us no matter how things seem to be going then we truly experience Emmanuel, that God is with us, then we are ready to welcome the Christ child into our hearts.
