The Promise of Emmanuel; a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Matthew 1:18-25

18 This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 Joseph her husband was a righteous man. Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly. 20 As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:

23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son,
        And they will call him, Emmanuel.

(Emmanuel means “God with us.”)

24 When Joseph woke up, he did just as an angel from God commanded and took Mary as his wife. 25 But he didn’t have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son. Joseph called him Jesus.

Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Some of us take dreams seriously. We recognize them as the opportunity our subconscious takes to calm and be quiet and let other influences shape our minds. We assume, I suppose, that those other influences would be divine and not devilish.

Some of us don’t take dreams seriously. We recognize them as our brain’s way of organizing our daily experiences and processing them into some useful form. We assume, I suppose, that our subconscious mind is going to be better suited to that activity than our conscious mind.

Me? I don’t remember my dreams.

So it’s a moot point.

I suppose there are some that haunt me. I think that if I were to have a dream like Joseph’s, that might be the case.

Joseph’s dream is memorable for probably a few reasons, any number of which may or may not apply to you, but I think that any one of them alone would make the dream one that sticks with a person:

The angel. Who has an angel appear in a dream? A relative who has passed, maybe. Not usually an angel. The unusualness of the angel makes the dream memorable.

It’s a dream in first person. Again, this may not be unusual for you, but I don’t seem to have a lot of dreams in first person. Not as myself, anyway. When I am myself, present, seeing and experiencing everything in the dream as myself, the dream has a better chance of standing out and being memorable.

What’s going on in the dream is something that’s actually, factually happening in Joseph’s life. There’s no misplacing one person for another. There’s no hyperbole. It’s very real and completely in touch with exactly what he’s experiencing.

The angel makes this crazy detailed prediction. It’s going to be a boy: That’s something we can only know now because of modern medical developments. You’re going to call him Jesus. Well, that might be self-fulfilling, but it’s a detail that not every dream gets. It’s one last step making this a uniquely memorable dream.

Now, would one of those characteristics stick with you? Is one of them, at least, something unusual about your own dream life? Wouldn’t it haunt you?

But put all that together: Who’s going to forget this dream?

Not Joseph; that’s for sure.

He seems to have remembered it well enough that it got passed down through however many storytellers to get to Matthew, a quarter of a century after the birth itself. And it was a memorable enough dream, and important enough, that whoever heard it from Joseph remembered it, and whoever heard it from that person remembered it, and so on.

And maybe for Matthew, there’s something important about recognizing a new Joseph, having dreams that mean something important, just like Joseph of old telling the court of Pharaoh all the exciting dreams that he was having, bringing the tribe of Israel into a transformative new era. Maybe Matthew is pointing to Jesus as a new era for Israel as well, pointing to the dream and the covenant of David as it is passed beyond the borders of Jerusalem, which is flattened and evacuated by the time he’s writing.

Yup. That’s our context.

Not complicated at all.

Maybe there’s a statement Matthew is trying to make, but perhaps the most important thing for us to focus on today is who the proclamation is about. It’s not Joseph, and it’s not Mary, and it’s not the angel. It’s Jesus. It’s Emmanuel, as Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah:

Listen, house of David! Isn’t it enough for you to be tiresome for people that you are also tiresome before my God? Therefore, the Lord will give you a sign. The young woman is pregnant and is about to give birth to a son, and she will name him Immanuel. He will eat butter and honey, and learn to reject evil and choose good. Before the boy learns to reject evil and choose good, the land of the two kings you dread will be abandoned.

But perhaps Matthew is onto something. After all, our Gospel writers don’t pick their quotes willy-nilly. Folk who are literate in the first century aren’t typically just a little literate. Putting yourself to learning the art of writing is hard work, and ostracizing work when everyone around you is illiterate.

You think maybe Matthew had in mind Isaiah’s context? Because we don’t tend to.

Before the boy learns to reject evil and choose good, the land of the two kings you dread will be abandoned.

Is that the promise of Emmanuel? That when God Is with Us, everything around us falls apart?

That would be a dark reading of both of these stories, and of the original Joseph story, too: as Joseph receives the dreams, the world falls into famine and his family enters into an eventually enslaved and oppressive situation.

But that’s not the promise of Emmanuel.

The promise of Emmanuel is that, even when things fall apart, God Is with Us.

And frankly, folks, that’s all we need.

When the day has gone from bad to worse, God Is with Us.

When every conversation has been an argument, God Is with Us.

When you just want to give in, God Is with Us.

When the world is falling apart, God Is with Us.

Who else do we need but our Rock, our Stronghold, our Comforter, our Salvation, our Redeemer. Our God who is everything for us, and better and more than we could ever ask. And differently than we could ever hope.

Jesus, the one who saves, but not in the way the people hope. Not the one who will save our political structures, or even our ecclesial structures. Not the one who will save the nation, the church, the environment, the budget, or the status quo. But the One who will save the world, who came not to condemn it, but to bring life.

The promise of Emmanuel isn’t simple. It’s hope, it’s justice, it’s mercy, it’s joy, it’s comfort, it’s salvation, it’s all that.

The promise of Emmanuel is a God Who Is with Us, in all the many meanings that may take on. A God Who Is with Us no matter what we’re going through, and sometimes in spite of our failure to recognize God present in this wretched situation. But a God Who Is with Us powerfully and unfailingly, everything we need even when, and often when, that God isn’t exactly what we want our Savior to be.

But God Is with Us.

And in every situation, whether the nation is falling into exile, the family is in famine, or the baby isn’t ours, whatever the situation, God Is with Us, and God is exactly what we need.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Emmanuel, Three in One, God Always with Us. Amen.