Grace Lindvall
(Matthew 1: 18-25)

Will you pray with me? God of advent waiting, of hope, and expectation. Sit with us in this time of waiting and preparing, open our hearts to hear your word and open our hearts to receive your presence with us. Move your spirit through our hearts that we would be encouraged to hear your word fresh and new to us this morning. Amen.

Christmas pageants are always lovely. Who doesn’t love watching the children of the church acting out the birth of Jesus in wonderful homemade costumes? Lydia Mobley shared with Steve and I though a good point, she said she always loves when the Christmas pageant goes wrong. When the perfection of the Christmas pageant isn’t quite because it was mishap free. Take last year’s Christmas pageant at Trinity. My favorite and most memorable moment was watching one lone young sheep slowly sway out from his pasture into the middle of the stage where his stage directions said he should not be. One of the older shepherds recognizing the lost sheep and his responsibility as shepherd took action, using his arm as a shepherd’s crook slowly and gently he pulled the wandering sheep back into the fold.

I love the story my Dad wrote about a Christmas pageant that had a few mishaps itself. Alvina Johnston is the character in the book who is rigid and set in her ways, they call her the “iron butterfly.” She has directed the perfect, mistake free, Christmas pageant at Second Presbyterian Church for “47 years – through ten pastors, 9 US Presidents, and countless Christian Ed committees.” One year, the Christian Ed committee, determined to include more children than the 9 scripted parts called for, overturned Alvina’s Christmas pageant. The one that has been perfectly scripted, that has chosen the most well behaved 9 children to be the actors in the pageant each year. The new Christmas pageant includes 50 plus children in varying degrees of organization and costumes and many sheep grazing across the stage with donuts in hand. And Joseph, Joseph is played this year by the child who has been rejected from Alvina’s Christmas pageant the most times. When the time comes for the narrator to tell about Mary’s situation, the narrator says instead of the old line that no one understood, “Mary was great with child” rather, the narrator says “and Mary was pregnant.” To which Joseph shouts out, “pregnant?!? What do you mean she is PREGNANT?!?”

My Dad closes the story saying, “And so it was perfect, not in the way Alvina’s pageants tried to make things perfect, but perfect in the way God makes things perfect.”

Matthew birth narrative tells us the story of Jesus’ birth through a perhaps unlikely perspective, Jospeh’s. Joseph’s perspective gives us a unique look at the raw and real drama of the story. Like the young Joseph in the Christmas pageant, I imagine that the real Joseph’s reaction was similarly shocked, “pregnant? What do you mean she is PREGNANT?”

A few historical notes to make about the passage Jodi just read for us from Matthew. First, when the text says that Mary was engaged, in 1^st century Israel that was a legally binding agreement. Unlike the term’s meaning today which is just a social ag