December 21, 2025

Friends, as I mentioned at the beginning of Advent, I am entering my fifth year with you all. And so, inevitably, there are some stories and some illustrations that get repeated. But, frankly, some stories bear repeating. So it is with the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth in, you guessed it, of all places, Nazareth, Israel.

The convent is within minutes of two of the most important Christian sites in the whole of the Holy Land. The first is the grandiose Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation that sits atop the cave home associated with Anna and Joachim, the parents of Mary, and which embraces the tradition that Mary was at home when the angel Gabriel visited her. The other is the Greek Orthodox, or as we would say Eastern Orthodox, Church of St. Gabriel, also often referred to as the Church of the Annunciation, that sits atop the ancient yet still flowing community well in Nazareth, which, not surprisingly, embraces the tradition that Mary was at the well drawing water when Gabriel visited her. You've probably seen images of both of these depictions at one time or another in your life.

But the Sisters of Nazareth convent, nestled among these two points, embedded as it is in the ancient terra sancta of first-century Nazareth, has its own profound story of importance and Indiana Jones level of intrigue. When the sisters bought the property in the 1880s, the property was nothing more than a craggy slope of rocks and pasture land. And they were told by everyone in the community, though, that they were buying the house and tomb of the righteous man. This was very strange because houses and tombs do not go together in Middle Eastern culture. There just wasn't anything there.

But the abbess was intrigued. And the long story short is that in the 140 years since, the sisters, partnering with archaeologists, have in fact discovered an ancient site of veneration that is incredibly a first-century Jewish home with a Jewish rock-cut tomb in the side and lower half of the dwelling. The thing that maximizes the truly incomprehensible reality of this knowledge is that the dig also determined that there had been a Byzantine chapel and then a Crusader-era chapel, but that all of it, everything, had been destroyed by a fire and covered in a rockfall during the 13th century, the 1200s. This means that truly the most likely explanation is that an oral tradition about this location and its significance was preserved by the people of Nazareth for at least 900 years.

And who is this righteous man? The Greek adjective here is dikaios. And it's a word that outside of Luke's gospel appears nowhere else in the gospel tradition except in this passage in Matthew in reference to Joseph. And even accounting for Luke's usage, which refers to Joseph but then also uses the same term to refer to Jesus, the only man anywhere near Nazareth to be described as righteous other than Jesus is Joseph himself.

What is this righteousness about? One way of thinking about it is the context of first-century Nazareth. It was in Galilee, Galilee being this multicultural crossroads of commerce and transit, a place that had influences and people from all around the world. But it was a law-abiding Jewish enclave. The material culture of the place that archaeologists have been able to uncover and determine is that they were rigidly connected to Judea in a time and place in which items of significance came from all over the world. They, in their material artifacts, in their possessions, remained intimately connected to Judea. It would be like only ever buying things explicitly from Maryland in a culture and in a context where we have goods that exist around us from all over the world.

It's so very interesting that we have this complexity of a house and a tomb together, which seems a clear violation of such law-abiding practices. That something more, no matter who we associate this house with, something more is going on than meets the eye. Something more than what was standard in that culture meets the eye. But what do we know of Joseph's righteousness? What can we tell from what the author of St. Matthew's Gospel tells us about Joseph? He was righteous and he was good. And I don't want to say that those two things cannot be the same. But I think there's an important element of his righteousness that is fundamentally his goodness.

As we hear in the narrative, being a good, law-abiding observer of Jewish custom, he is looking for his out—his reasonable, appropriate, correct out in this betrothal to Mary. She has violated the betrothal agreement, and he is looking to dismiss her. But very likely, that wellspring of compassion and love that is within Joseph is compelling him to do it quietly, do it in a way that doesn't maximize her alienation from the community, that minimizes the difficulty that she might face. He's trying to do the right thing on all sides.

And then he has this visitation from God in a dream, who tells him to fear not, to continue the betrothal, to take her as his wife, that all will be made right. You know, I was struck this year in reading this passage and preparing for this Sunday because of the new Bible study that we have inaugurated. We read through Genesis these past two weeks. And the latter quarter of Genesis, the entire last 10 to 12 chapters, is just about the story of the Old Testament Joseph. And there are so many parallels between these two Josephs.

Joseph of the patriarchal age, Joseph the son of Jacob, is the only one of the patriarchs in the whole of the Genesis text who is not clearly, at some level, problematic. He hasn't done something kind of underhanded or a little bit sketchy. Now, as a couple of people in the Bible study pointed out, he does seem maybe to not have the best of tact. Being the younger brother telling his brothers, "Hey, guess what? I had this dream that I'm going to lord over you at one point"—not exactly the best thing to tell your older siblings. But he never does anything explicitly immoral or underhanded. He's a man of righteousness, but a righteousness that exudes compassion and love.

We hear later on in the story, and Joseph too, in the patriarchal age, has three dreams. Just like Joseph, Jesus' father, has three dreams. Joseph has his dream. He then interprets the dreams for the baker and the cupbearer. And then he finally interprets the dream for Pharaoh. Hallmarks, moments of impact in his life. But even after he interprets this dream for the cupbearer, the cupbearer forgets him, leaves him languishing in prison. And we're never given any indication that Joseph is angry or resentful about that, that he seeks retribution for having been left behind. He trusts and abides in God's time, and God's time restores him, and not only restores him, but puts him in a place of great influence and power. And when his brothers then come to him, he, in the long arc of the story, receives them in love, supports them as they transition from Canaan into Egypt.

But he's a man. He's a man through his righteousness, through his goodness, through his love and compassion, who does the work of the kingdom in the world around him. And does it unassumingly. Does it without arrogance. Does it without pomp and circumstance. And yet, too, at the end of the day, what is the account of Joseph, but that he goes on to his ancestors? Because if we look just previously in the section of Matthew chapter 1 from our gospel today, the line to Jesus runs through Judah. Joseph is not the progenitor of the generations. Joseph just lives his life, cares for his brothers, is the man who shows up when the need is greatest, and then goes on to his eternal reward.

And Joseph, the father of Jesus, the earthly father of Jesus, similarly, on three occasions, hears the voice of God in dreams. And unlike Zechariah, who laughs at the birth of his son John, who can't believe the work that God is doing in his life, Joseph accepts it. He accepts this commitment to Mary. He accepts the call into Egypt. And he accepts the return when things are safe. And then he disappears. He is the man of righteousness who in that righteous goodness leads a life of service, of love, of compassion.

And friends, today as we enter into these final moments of our Advent journey, so many of us in the great course of our lives will likely experience similar fates. We will be those people loved and beloved by this community, remembered in our own families. As the great Orthodox liturgy talks about having a memory eternal. But in the larger arc of our human story, many of us will journey our specific lives, our specific paths, our specific walks with God in ways that won't have these cosmic impacts. But our lives of quiet commitment, quiet and loving service, careful and conscientious righteousness.

We hear our invitation today in our collect to be those people of committed and quiet service: "Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son, Jesus Christ, at his coming may find in us a mansion prepared for himself, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever." That our lives are not shaped by removal, not shaped by simply being people of goodwill without any other impact in the world around us. We are called to act always in the proclamation and the living out—the embodiment—of the good news. But in that, we are not called to be obsessed with that impact. Not called to be people of great and grandiose visions for ourselves, but often those people of quiet, compassionate, loving righteousness.

In our best, we are people humbly and mercifully committed to the work that God is calling us to do. So today, as we encounter the story of Joseph, as we prepare to enter this time of welcoming God's incarnate into the world anew, may we work on that purity of conscience so that we can be the humble servants of God like our great forebearer, St. Joseph, and be those people of righteousness—a righteousness that is a good and loving righteousness. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

December 14, 2025

On what I remember to be a quite sunny and somewhat cool October day just over eight years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas, I stood before Bishop Larry Benfield, at the time the diocesan bishop of Arkansas, as he said to me, my brother, every Christian is called to follow Jesus Christ, serving God the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And later on, as a deacon, you are to assist the bishop and priests in public worship and in the administration of God's Word and sacraments, and you are to carry out other duties assigned to you from time to time.

And as I've mentioned before in our tradition, you do not lose orders as you become differently ordered in your ministry of the church. And so today I am as much a deacon as I am a priest. And it was in such a capacity about an hour and a half ago, those other duties as assigned included being outside with a shovel in hand, clearing off our sidewalk, preparing for you all to be here with us this morning. And I appreciate your efforts to get here.

But I was thinking about that because my experience of journeying towards ordination, the years of discernment that came into play in that process, were brought to mind for me as I read through our readings for this week. You see, I've mentioned this briefly before, but I haven't really shared with you all the fullness of my journey. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church with a fairly significant dose of Roman Catholic influence as well. But as a high school student in St. Louis, going on a mission journey my sophomore year, I began to have some inkling of a call to ordained ministry, a call that I expressed later on in my high school career, one that was affirmed and lifted up by the congregation I was raised in. I was what they call licensed to preach before I went off to college. And I thought at the time that this was going to be a very clear and easy journey. I would go to college, study religion, go on to seminary. I had it all worked out in my mind.

But very quickly, things went sideways. And I very quickly felt myself disoriented by the tradition I was raised in and the sense that that's not where I belonged. That's not where I was meant to be. And it took about six years before I landed in the Episcopal Church, before I felt that renewed sense of call in the tradition in which I now reside and preside.

But it was in those years of longing, those years of discernment and struggle that I really in a very deep sense began to understand the depth of this sense of waiting that we are invited into in today's scriptures. I was very powerfully captured by John's message to Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

This waiting is not, in a sense, a temporal waiting. Are we to wait next week, next month, next year? Things seem like they're moving. Things seem to be right around the corner. Is it really truly you? But in a greater, more significant sense, this was a cosmic waiting. This was the longing of the people of Israel. This was centuries, millennia old. This deep, deep desire for the Messiah to come, for the world to be set anew again.

John's question is one that I think is very prescient for us today. Not that we have a Messiah in our midst that we are discerning, but this question of when, Christ, are you coming? How long do we have to wait? Where is your presence in this present age?

And it's in that that we have this beautiful reflection from our epistle from St. James. This admonition to be patient. This patience that is not again the kind of short, often truncated patience that we experience in our lives today. But this elongated, deeper, more lived experience of patience. You know, this imagery, this agricultural imagery that St. James uses is one that I think for many of us we've become kind of disconnected from, even though there are some in our own communities who still experience this. This patience for the harvest. This patience for both the early and late rains is often a months long waiting. It's a cultivating. It's a gentle working of the land. A keeping things going. But it's a waiting. A waiting for the right time. The right opportunity.

Years after I had left my Baptist church, worked through the many complexities of my experience of waiting, a lot of fitful starts in different directions that I thought were the right ones and ended up not being so, I finally got to this place of belonging in the Episcopal church that Julie and I joined in Arkansas. And then even after initiating that process of discernment, I was sat down by the bishop and said, look, I'm very proud and happy of you, happy for you to discern this call, and I want to support you. But it's going to be another three years. You've got X, Y, Z things before you, before you can even think about seminary.

And we went through all of those hoops, went through all of those movements, got to the end of that road, got permission from the bishop to go to seminary. And then we sat, Julie and I, with him in his office, and he said, I hate to tell you this, but I've already committed as many people as I can this next class of students going in. So I need you to wait an additional year.

And it all ended up working out well. But it gave me this deep, elongated sense of patience that so often the time of God's choosing is not the time of our own construction, our own desires, our own wishes and whims.

We have this dichotomy in this season of Advent of the alertness that we are called into and the waiting that is so often a part of that process too. That it is to be alert and to wait simultaneously. That's a very... very narrow road to walk. Often one with a lot of frustrations and difficulties. But it's precisely the call that we have in these times and in this season of life.

And I think for many of us, we can find ourselves falling to one side or the other of that. In our desire to be alert, we find ourselves activated, wanting to do constantly, to find places and outlets for that sense of call to action and to alertness. And then for others of us, we are comfortable in that space of waiting, but maybe sometimes complacent waiting. We like the stability of what we have. We like the ease of our lives where they are. We're not quite ready to move. And if God could just hold off on doing anything big for a little while, that would be just fine with us.

But this season, this season calls us out of both of those extremes. Calls us to be alert and patient simultaneously. To frustrate both of those places of default orientation. And that's a challenging road to walk. But it's the road that we are invited into today.

And I want to leave you with one final observation about how these things kind of play out in a practical sense. As I've talked about for pretty much every week for the last several weeks, we are doing this forum hour discussion of Benedictine spirituality and how it shapes and forms us as a Christian community and as individual Christians. And today, we heard an extended quote in the Forum Hour from the great lay Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow. And I invite you, if you have a chance, to go and listen to the recording of that sometime later this week.

But I want to highlight just two elements of what he said that are specifically prescient for us. He said the church is the embassy of the eschaton, which is that fancy word for the end of all things, the coming of the kingdom. That we, as a church, are the embassy of the new kingdom of God. We are the ambassadors of that new kingdom. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. That the ideal God has for the world is lived out most authentically when the church is being most authentically what it is meant to be.

To the world as it is then, William Stringfellow goes on to write, the church of Christ is always as it were saying yes and no simultaneously. So very often, so very often we get trapped in the material dichotomies, the political and cultural dichotomies that the world voices upon us. We as the church can so very easily fall short of our call when we slip into those roles, placating one side or the other. But when we are most authentically that ambassadorial presence of the world to come, we frustrate and break down that dichotomy. We simultaneously say yes and no. That we hold together the tension, for example, in this season and in this Sunday, of a call to action and a call to patience, a call to further stay alert and responsive to what Christ is doing even in this moment, yet as we wait for the fullness of the coming of the kingdom, which remains ever on the horizon.

And so, friends, this morning, this morning as we wrestle with these various dichotomies, as we find ourselves precariously balanced in this call of the both-and-ness, of being alert and being patient, I invite us to hear again the call from our author of the epistle of St. James: Be patient, therefore, beloved. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Strengthen your hearts even in this time of waiting, this time of alertness, this time of struggling and finding that balance of doing both of those things.

May our hearts be strengthened. And in that strengthening, may we find the patience and the alertness to ever be the people of God that God calls us to be. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.