Christmas Eve, 2025

There was a church much like our own: vibrant, with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm around the Christmas holiday. Just like we did this past Saturday, they decided to organize and stage a Christmas pageant in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. The pageant script the directors chose told the classic rendering we often hear of the nativity story, with Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem without anywhere to stay. There, right at the climactic moment in the search for an inn—after repeated refusals—they are told again that there is no room. Without missing a beat, a young voice from the back of the audience yells out, "You should have booked online before coming!"

That is so indicative of our journey this time of year, isn't it? In a secular sense, so much of what we do this season requires an incredible amount of planning and waiting. The weeks and months we put into coordinating schedules, making travel arrangements, buying presents, cleaning houses, preparing meals, and choosing outfits—it's all about the forethought. And then we wait. We wait for this night and this time. I think, too, of the incredible work that Rachel and Tom have put into selecting and preparing the wonderful music you hear tonight; the weeks and months the vocal and bell choirs have put into practicing their pieces; the weeks that we as the altar team have put into cleaning and setting the space, practicing our readings, and preparing ourselves for this service. To all of us, we wait. We wait with anticipation for this very hour.

I also think about the longer arcs of waiting. I recently read a story about a man who very well may have the most interesting job in the whole country. His name is Eric Posey, and he is the head gardener of the Rockefeller Center in New York City. In that role, he is responsible for selecting each year's Christmas tree for the world-famous display in Rockefeller Plaza. This is not just about planning each year's season, but in a sense, it's a lifespan pursuit. Eric spends years cataloging and tracking potential evergreen candidates up and down the eastern seaboard. Every year, he waits. He waits until just that right moment for just that right tree to be selected. It is a beautiful example of this interplay between planning and waiting, anticipation and arrival.

And yet, sometimes in our lives—many times in the course of human history—we land in a place of ambiguity. We may plan everything to a T only for things to go awry. We may look forward with great anticipation for moments or experiences that never come to fruition. We may have our whole lives planned out, only for a wrench to be thrown into the system that throws us into a state of despair and desperation. For 2,000 years now, from our ancestors in the faith down to our very own lives today, we have heard the repeated admonition of Jesus in our context in Advent to stay awake and be prepared for his return. And yet in all those centuries, in all that planning, in all that alertness, we still wait.

But that is not so very new. That was the experience of those in Jesus' time, too. For millennia, they had been planning for and anticipating the arrival of the Messiah. Centuries upon centuries of faithful Israelites had planned and longed for the arrival of that moment—the arrival of the moment that we re-experience this very night. And like so much of life, no amount of planning and longing quite prepared the people of Bethlehem for what happened within their midst. Sometimes our plans just don't go the way we think they will, and we are faced with the question of what to do when that happens.

This provides a final wrinkle in the story: the very nature of the manger scene itself. As Western Christians, with our centuries of images of A-framed mangers and stories of rejection and desperation, we often miss the fact that none of that is actually in the text. If you go back and you read the narrative again, St. Luke simply says that Jesus was born in the manger because there was no room in the inn. As the incredible New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey has noted, in first-century Judea, the "inn" was the community space where out-of-town travelers would stay, whereas the manger was actually a part of individual people's homes.

The Judean hill country is a semi-arid desert land, and it gets very cold at night, especially in the winter months. So, homes were built in such a way as to maximize the benefit of the residual body heat that the family’s livestock would produce. This meant that mangers were unfinished entryways or lower parts of private residences, and very often the warmest part of the home.

For Jesus to have been born in a manger means that a family had taken Mary and Joseph in as an act of hospitality and care. It makes all the sense in the world that a newborn baby would be nestled among the livestock for warmth and comfort. The response the people of Bethlehem had to an unplanned development was not frustration or despair, but hospitality and generosity.

So tonight, friends, as we come into this night of Christ's birth and in our own cultural context wrestle with the complexities of the unplanned, the chaotic, and the uncertain—those unexpected wrenches thrown into our neatly planned out systems—may we find in our faith our own wellsprings of welcome and hospitality. May we, even when things don't go exactly as we thought they would, find the charity and strength to be a people of generosity, of embrace, and of hope. And ultimately, wherever we are in our journey, however difficult the uncertainties of the age prove to be, may we in welcoming the Christ child this night experience the hospitality of a God who welcomes us into his house and into his kingdom of new and everlasting light. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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.