Vulnerable and Messy and Real and Lovely Lives — December 21, 2025, Fourth Sunday of Advent

Vulnerable and Messy and Real and Lovely Lives

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Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.

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Caroline Van Hemert is an ornithologist in Alaska. One summer, to escape the sterile environment of a grad school lab, Van Hemert and her husband trekked 4,000 miles through the wilderness in Eastern Canada and Alaska. They hiked, paddled, and skied from Seattle to the Arctic Sea and then out to the northwestern coast. She describes so much beauty, but also so much vulnerability—hers as she hiked, but also the planet’s and the creatures with whom we share it. She, notes, though, that this isn’t just a fact of the wilderness. She writes, “In life, we’re always closer to the edge than we like to admit, never guaranteed our next breath, never sure of what will follow this moment. We’re human. We’re vulnerable. With love comes the risk of loss. There are a million accidents waiting to happen, future illnesses too terrible to imagine, the potential for the ordinary to turn tragic.” In life, we’re vulnerable. The story of Jesus’s birth is about the vulnerability and the messiness, the teetering-on-the-edge of tragedy that is true for every life, including the Son of God. And the story of Jesus’s birth is about how God does not draw away when things get too real, too terrifying, too messy, but enters into our lives to stay.

In the Bible, the story of Jesus’s birth is recorded just twice – Mark has no Christmas story. He starts with grown-man-John baptizing grown-man-Jesus. And John’s gospel starts with poetry, or, I guess, considers the beginning a little bit further back than Jesus’ birth, but by the time Jesus is on the scene, he’s, once again, all grown up. Then we have Luke, whose Christmas story is basically Jesus Christ: Superstar—the Prequel, full cast version. And then, there’s Matthew. 

Matthew’s text is stark, bleak, and, quite frankly, terrifying. Matthew exposes each character—Mary, Joseph, Jesus, neighboring toddlers—as completely vulnerable, at the mercy of systems beyond their control. To that end, Matthew seems to almost gloss over the mother of Jesus, who, at least in today’s text is, perhaps, the most at risk. 

So, Matthew says that Joseph was…a “just” man, a “righteous” man, oh!…a “fair” man. When he finds out about Mary’s pregnancy—most likely by her own admission—he decides to “dismiss her quietly.” In this time, a marriage was negotiated between the families of the bride and groom, and then there would be two ceremonies. First, the groom and his family would come to the bride’s father and pay a bride tax. Then, the groom would return home—it could be for some time. Then, the second ceremony would occur when she moved into his home—his father’s home. Between these two ceremonies, they’re considered husband and wife, but they’re also not quite married, and nothing has been, um, consummated. So, Joseph and Mary have done the first ceremony, but not the second.

Scripture has something to say about what to do if something goes awry in this engagement period. In Deuteronomy 22 it says, “If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death.” Had the meeting occurred in the countryside, scripture advises that only the man be stoned, because it seems safer to assume, then, that the woman called for help and no one heard. I’m not sure how to redeem that passage in its context, to be honest. I’ve never quite been able to get a God’s-eye-view on these texts about sexual purity enforced by violence. But this is the option that is available to Joseph. 

The other option the rabbis give is that he can go to her father, sign a document before witnesses and call off the engagement, and he gets to keep the bride tax. Why should he pay the price, the rabbis ask? But Mary would still be at the mercy of her father or her brother or uncle. Joseph wouldn’t have to throw a stone, but Mary could—would—still be unsafe. Even if they, too, opted not to stone her, they could still evict her from the family home, and, even if they allowed her to stay, she would be forever unmarriable, forever dependent on their kindness.

This is a text of extreme vulnerability. And not just for Mary. Even with a quiet divorce, Joseph himself would be shamed—everyone would know that something had happened, they’d either know about the cheating, or they’d wonder if there was something off about him. 

But I think there’s more here. There is a complicated tradition that suggests Joseph was much older than Mary, a widower with children to raise. And that could be, though I wonder, then, why he would be so concerned about his pride. If he just needed someone to do the mothering thing, the woman-y things, in his household, what difference would it make that she was pregnant? But he could, actually, be quite young himself. The rabbis set the marriageable age for women at 12 and men at just 13. While life expectancy was different then, and adolescence was very different then, families raised their children to be prepared for marriage by these ages. The reality is that this is very likely a story about a very, very young woman and a very. very young man thrust into the world of adult decision making in the most heart-breaking of ways. 

I heard a sermon once by the homiletics scholar Anna Carter Florence, it was about Moses’s sister, Miriam, and the daughter of Pharaoh, as they fished Moses out of the Nile. And, Anna Carter Florence points out that this is a story about what happens when the parents aren’t around. Because Pharaoh’s daughter knew what she was supposed to do to a Hebrew baby, and Miriam knew what an Egyptian princess was supposed to do a Hebrew baby, and they are so vulnerable, but, with their parents not around, the two hatch a plan to save this one life. In Matthew’s gospel, Matthew draws a picture of Jesus that looks a lot like Moses—like Moses but better, more. So, then—a baby, and two very young people figuring out how to save this one life, when their parents aren’t around. And here, again, in the gospel, here is Mary, terrified, because she knows what’s supposed to happen to wives who are found pregnant out of wedlock, and here is Jospeh knowing what husbands are supposed to do to unfaithful wives. They are so vulnerable: here are two very, very young people who aren’t parents yet figuring out how to save this one tiny baby-to-be. 

And of course, any story involving marriage, pregnancy, babies, the uncertain future is story of extreme vulnerability. There are miscommunications and misunderstandings. And the sure-fire way to really mess it up is to be sure you have the perfect solution. (I mean, Maybe I’m just preaching to myself at this point.) 

It’s just that I don’t think Christmas is about God finally deciding on the perfect plan. That’s what Joseph thought he did. Christmas, as Matthew describes it, isn’t about the perfect plan that ignores the messy present in order to make an uncomplicated future. Christmas is God drawing in close. Close to us. Close enough to get messy, to get hurt—really hurt—and knowing that and doing it anyway, as God has always done, and always will do.

When we lost our daughter Evelyn, one of my colleagues pulled me aside to give me one piece of advice, which I have long treasured. Years before, he’d written his doctorate of ministry thesis on parents, grief, and marriage. He told me about a study he’d read about marriages that survive the death of a child. They had pretty much just one thing in common: touch. Hugs, an arm around the shoulder—that kind of thing. The offer of physical comfort when you are sad without the requirement that I be sad, too; without the requirement that you explain your sadness. It is simply the drawing near to one another in spite of, because of, the messiness of life.

That, I think, it the incarnation. That’s Christmas. It is God sharing our vulnerability, our grief, our frustration, and our pain. It is God in the mess. It is God in the mistakes. It is God in the miscommunications and the heartbreak. It is God, too, in the joy of family, of going along to get along, of forgiveness, of reconciliation.

Look, Beloved, this isn’t just about the messiness of stressed-out-December. The crumpled wrapping and the screwed up plans and dinner burnt in the oven. It is about that. But it is also about your vulnerable and messy and real and lovely lives. It is about all the vulnerable and messy and real and lovely lives, because Christmas is that evergreen promise that God has drawn in close to be with us through it all, in the midst of all, always.

Amen.