Matthew 1:18-25 “Emmanuel”

During Covid lockdown, my uncle in Germany was struggling with the effects of prostate cancer and was really quite stricken. He was not quite bedridden yet; however, he was more or less confined to home with the exception of doctor visits and the like. In those days, it was almost impossible for any European to come to the US. You had to have very good reason and permissions from both governments. However, there really was no problem leaving the US, and the German constitution guarantees the right of return to all Germans. So, I was able to get on a plane and go visit my ailing uncle in Germany. The question was always whether I could get back to the US! America does not guarantee the right of entry to its citizens, by the way. You can have your US passport in hand, but the NSA personnel do not have to let you through.

In order to get back to the US, I had to have the Covid test cleared 24-48 hours before the flight. This rapid testing was quite expensive and only done at limited sites in Germany. If the test came back positive for Covid, then one would have to be quarantined for two weeks in Germany before testing again. So, there was a huge risk of my not getting back to the US as I had planned. Just a false positive on the test would be devastating. Despite all the trouble, it was doable. And, I did it. It would not have been at all possible for my Uncle to have traveled to me in Hawaii, even though he really wanted to. It had been possible for me to visit him. To make matters even more fun, I had to leave a day in transit to take another rapid test at my transfer airport on the mainland because the State of Hawaii had its own testing regime as well. I could have been stuck in Los Angeles for a while too!

All of this story is to answer a unique question that comes up again and again when sharing faith with others. Why did God have to come down to us as a child in the form of Jesus Christ? The simple answer relates back to the story I just told. We cannot visit God. God has to visit us. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just go visit with God and then thereafter come back here to this existence and be completely affirmed in our faith!

The reason we cannot just go visit God is our own fault–or weakness. You will remember in the Garden of Eden that God could be visited with all the time. Adam and God were just having great conversations. God even gave Adam the job of naming all the animals, so they must have had some jokes going on between them: “So, Adam, you want that to be called a duck-billed platypus?!” (Ha, ha, ha) But then, we sinned. And sin means really to fall away from God–to create a distance between God and yourself. Sin is the chasm between us and God. If you try to cross that chasm back to God, generally speaking you end up falling deeper into it. We need God to cross down to us because we are all too deep into sin already. No way to reach God on our own!

A few years ago I was just talking story with the lifeguard at the Waimea Pool, in fact he was the head lifeguard for the County of Kauai. I asked him the simple question: “What makes for a good lifeguard?” His response surprised me. He said, “The lifeguard that never has to jump in the pool to save a life is the best. A dry lifeguard!” He went on to explain that if you have to jump in the water to save a life, then you were probably not being attentive to the abilities, or lack thereof, of the simmers under your care. You were not ready to throw a flotation device with a rope to save the person before they started panicking and drowning. You did not warn them to stay in the shallow end, realizing they really could not swim.

I was thinking about this in regards to the name that the Prophet Isaiah calls Jesus. You see, the name Jesus, “Yeshuah” in Hebrew, means “God saves us.” What if God has been watching us on the side of the pool? God knows what we can and cannot do. All of the sudden we are in the deep end when we should not be. God sends his angels and prophets to warn us. We do not listen. Finally, God has no choice but to jump in and get wet to save us. That is the “God With US” in the name “Immanuel.” We have already sunk so deep that the warnings and lifelines are useless. God has got to jump in to save us.

That is not God’s fault, by the way. We had the Word of God to warn us. That is like the big pool sign that outlines all the safety precautions. We had the angels and the prophets to warn us. Those are the other swimmers who tried to teach us how to swim before we got in too deep. We had God watching with flotation device and rope, the miracles of salvation we see everyday. All of that was not enough. The only that could save us from being dragged under forever was the lifeguard jumping in to pull us back to the surface. Immanuel, God is with us in Jesus Christ who saves us not from the pool’s edge but at the bottom of the pool.

We see a great metaphysical twist in this story when we read that Joseph, looking at his betrothed now pregnant but not with his child, wants to undo the betrothal. Joseph wants to divorce Mary because he believes that she has sinned. Mary is already pregnant with Jesus! His divorcing her in those days, which he had the right to do, would mean that Mary was with child out of wedlock. She would be branded an adultress and most likely stoned. In the process, Jesus would be killed along with her.

Mary is absolutely innocent. In fact she is not only innocent, she is the most pure woman that God could choose to bear God’s Son into the world.

Have you ever been accused of something that you never did? Have you ever been named in a lie? That is a ridiculous question. We all have at one time or another been accused of something that we never did. We have all had people call us guilty when we have been innocent.

I recall once in French class in high school being accused of cheating on an exam. I had made a book cover for my French book out of an old brown paper bag turned inside out and wrapped around the covers of the textbook. I decorated the cover with a bunch of sayings in French. The teacher of the class noticed that I had had the book on my desk while I was taking the exam. He came over and noticed all of the French writing on the book and assumed that I was getting the answers to the exam from the book cover. He snatched up my exam paper and wrote a big “F” on it in front of the class.

Of course, I had not cheated on the exam at all. Nothing on the book cover even related to the exam. I tried to make that point with the teacher, but alas to no avail. The teacher would not reverse the “F.” I asked if I could take the exam over at that very moment to prove that I knew the material and would not need to cheat. No luck.

To this day when I think about the French language this whole incident comes up in my mind again. After forty-plus years I still harbor resentment for having been falsely accused of cheating on an exam. “Je suis innocent!”

In contrast to the horror of being accused of cheating on French, Mary was about to be accused of adultery (punishable by public stoning) when she was perfectly innocent. Joseph had the power in making his false accusation against Mary to truly destroy her life and the life of Jesus as well. There would be no Christmas story, no redemption of humankind, if Joseph had held to his false beliefs. What sin Joseph would have brought upon himself if he had taken that course! Indeed, I wonder if Mary ever forgave him, or Jesus for that matter. Oh yes, Jesus came to save even his Father Joseph from sin! He must have been forgiven! Don’t you just love these plot complications?

The angel tells Joseph in a dream, Mary is absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. In fact, she is carrying out a great mission of God to relieve humankind of all sin. The angel tells Joseph that the child in Mary’s womb is the one who will save us all from sin. His name is to be Jesus, because he is sent by God to save the world from sin.

Do you catch the irony in this story then? Joseph is about to dismiss Mary because he does not want to be involved in sin when his own salvation from sin is in Mary waiting to be born!

Okay, when you are faced with the tough decisions, look for the angels that God will send–maybe in a dream just like Joseph. They are the ones that can save you from making the big mistakes. And know, that the reason for the season of Christmas is that we should be saved from our sins through the redemptive power of grace through Christ. We could not reach God on our own. We missed the warnings, the flotation device and the rope being thrown to us. He came jumping into the deep end to save us when we were about be lost forever. He is Immanuel, God with us. He is Jesus, the one who saves.

Amen.