Christmas Eve, 2006
University Presbyterian Church
The Reverend Anna Pinckney Straight
“Joseph”
"Nativity Poem,” by Louise Glück
It is the evening
of the birth of god
Singing &
with gold instruments
the angels bear down
upon the barn, their wings
neither white
wax nor marble. So
they have been recorded:
burnished,
literal in the composed air,
they raise their harps above
the beasts likewise gathering,
the lambs & all the startled
silken chickens . . . . And Joseph,
off to one side, has touched
his cheek, meaning
he is weeping –
But how small he is, withdrawn
from the hollow of his mother’s life,
the raw flesh bound
in linen as the stars yield
light to delight his sense
for whom there is no ornament.[1]
A friend of mine says, “When setting up our nativity scenes sometimes we put Joseph by the sheep until the process of elimination has us realize that the fourth shepherd over there by the pine cone is actually the father of the baby. Such a thing would NEVER happen to
She’s right. In the story of Jesus told by the gospel writers, Joseph is mainly an accessory.
To Jesus, however, Joseph was anything but. It was Joseph who allowed Jesus to be of the House of David.
It was Joseph that guaranteed that Jesus had a home, an earthly family, that he was not born the child of an unwed mother without means of support.
It was Joseph who would rescue Jesus from the wrath of Herod, taking his family to
It didn’t start out that way. Joseph, as anyone might understand, had cold feet. When the woman he planned to marry showed up pregnant. He didn’t know whose baby it was, only that it wasn’t his. Joseph wasn’t vindictive, but he didn’t want to marry a woman who didn’t feel the same about him as he did about her. And so, as Matthew tells us, he planned to dismiss her quietly.
It was the nicest way to do it, but it still would have increased Mary’s challenges exponentially. Without family. Without support. She could have easily slipped away.
And then an angel appeared in a dream. Not just any angel, the angel of the Lord.
"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.”[3]
Joseph took the angel’s advice, and it earned him a place to the side. A place of caretaking. Protecting and nurturing the life of Jesus so that he, like Mary, could watch the son he raised choose friends, make statements, and perform deeds that would lead directly and unavoidably to a painful death.
From the brief moment in Matthew in which we are told that Joseph considers exiting himself from the story, there is nothing that indicates that he was anything but “all in” from this point on. All just to be there.
J. Barrie Shepherd, poet and preacher,
“The hardest task
The most difficult role of all
That of just being there
And Joseph, dearest Joseph, stands for that.
Don’t you see?
It is important,
crucially important,
that he stand there by that manger,
as he does,
In all his silent misery
Of doubt concern and fear.
If Joseph were not there
There might be no place for us,
For those of us at least-
So many- who recognize and know-
That heartache, for our own,
Who share that helpless sense
Of lostness, of impotence
In our own lives, our families, our jobs
In our fearful threatened world this night.
Yes, in Joseph’s look of anguish
We find our place;
We discover that we too
Belong beside the manger:
This manger in which are met
God’s peace and all our wars and fears.”
Joseph may be an accessory in this story, in the gospel re-telling. But his place reminds us that we, too, have a place in the manger.
We too, have a place there. Being there. Looking for those places where the daily and the divine intersect. They begin with being there.
Looking to do what is right and not what is easy or safe or has a guaranteed positive return or even any return at all.
As Wendell Berry writes,
“Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”[4]
It begins with being there.
Christ, the Word made Flesh, is not only something that happened two thousand, it is something that we anticipate. To which we look forward. With some fear. With great joy.
We don’t know what that will be like. We don’t even know what it will be like. But what we can hope is that we will be there.
“Let us be there,
Simply be there just as Joseph was,
With nothing we can do now,
Nothing we can bring-
It’s far too late for that-
Nothing even to be said
Except, ‘Behold- be blessed,
Be silent, be at peace.’
Joseph, son of David,
‘Do not fear,’ the angel said.
And Jim and Alice, Fred and Sue,
Bob and Tom and Jean and Betty too,
The word to you, to all of us
Here at the manger side,
The word is also, ‘do not fear.’
Our God, the Lord and Sovereign,
Maker of heaven and earth,
Time and eternity,
Of life and death and all that is
And shall be,
Has joined us in this moment…,”[5]
This moment. Not one that happened years ago. This moment. Where the divine and the daily intersect.
This moment, in which the Holy Spirit is hoping to guide us in ordinary and extraordinary ways. So that we can be there.
So that the hungry will be fed. The grieving comforted. That there will be people who speak of the need and the ways of peace, in our homes, in the world, even in the
All of these things begin in the same place. They begin with us being there. Being there, knowing that a God who loves this much will forgive and love even you. Even me. Even us.
Joseph reminds us that we are invited to be there.
God the divine, who wants to be the beginning middle and end of each of our days, hopes that we will be there.
Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.
P.S.
Several people have asked for the poem I read before the Welcome & Announcements:
Hush, by Lucinda Hynett
(from Alive Now, November/December 2004)
Ssh.
Can you hear it?
an expectant silence,
a hushed anticipation,
as if the very galaxy
is holding its breath.
There are some truths
even the stars know,
like darkness,
like loneliness,
and how the night
can be a living thing.
And how once, long ago,
the night waited in wonder
along with the darkness
and the loneliness,
for the sound of a baby’s cry,
for the miraculous
to come down
to the earth mundane.
[1] Curzon, David, ed. The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts.
[2] Preached by the Reverend Kathryn Z. Johnston at
[3] Matthew 1: 20, NRSV
[4] Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems.
[5] Shepherd, J. Barrie. Faces at the Manger.
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