Sermon: Fourth Sunday of Advent, Matthew 1:18-25

December 21, 2025 
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
Pastor Jonathan Linman

Family: you can’t live without it; and sometimes it’s awfully difficult to live with it. 

Given who we are as a species, it’s impossible to grow and develop as a human being apart from some kind of family structure. We cannot raise ourselves. Family life is integral to our healthy development. 

And each of us can likely share some wonderful and exalted experiences of family life. Family: we can’t live without it.

But it’s also true that each of us can likely remember and name occasions and circumstances in which family life has been fraught and difficult, a burden, and sometimes full of agonizing suffering. Family: sometimes you can’t live with it…. 

And holidays like Christmas turn up the volume on all the good family stuff and all the bad family stuff simultaneously. Just mentioning this, you probably can quickly call to mind wonderful Christmases past and also at the same time Christmas seasons that were anything but wonderful. That’s the human condition. It’s a mixed bag. Family: you can’t live without it; and sometimes it really tests our patience and endurance to live with it…. Take a moment to reflect on your own experiences of family life, especially during the holidays…...

The gospel reading appointed for today is a family story. It’s a story about Mary and Joseph and Jesus, the three who would become known as the holy family. And given their holiness, it’s hard to imagine that there were any downsides to their family life.

But let’s look more closely at the circumstances that gave rise to Mary, Joseph and Jesus becoming family. Joseph and Mary were engaged to be married. In ancient times, engagement was a big deal. To be engaged was legally binding, as if the marriage ceremony itself simply went public with the real deal of being engaged to each other. 

But here’s the thing: amidst their engagement, Mary was found to be pregnant before she and Joseph had any sexual relations. And Joseph had no idea at first about how Mary became pregnant. According to the strictest of Jewish law recorded in the book of Deuteronomy, Mary could have been put to death for her infidelity. And it was certainly within Joseph’s rights to break the engagement, to divorce Mary, in a very public and humiliating way. In short, Mary being in the family way could have destroyed any possibility of family life for her and for Joseph and for the baby Jesus.

But we know from the story and from history that there was a happy ending. How did the good overcome the bad? What did it take for Joseph and Mary to transcend the scandal and disgrace of apparent infidelity? Indeed, while Joseph had decided against going forward with a nasty public divorce as was his right, he still resolved to end the relationship quietly without spectacle, which still would have left them with broken hearts. 

The point I’m trying to make is this: the circumstances that resulted in Mary, Joseph and Jesus becoming a family were fraught and difficult – not unlike so many of our experiences of family life given our broken, finite human condition. 

And yet, there’s the good news of a happy ending beyond all the agonizing complications! The good news is this: God entered into the messiness of the human family life circumstances of Joseph and Mary. And more than that, God even used that messiness for divine and redemptive purposes. Religious laws of the day would have precluded any holy outcomes to these circumstances. And yet God used these very circumstances to bring about the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, and king of all creation. 

Think about it. It was Joseph, who was descended from the lineage of King David, who made it possible for Jesus, who was not Joseph’s biological child, nonetheless to come to reign in continuity with King David, perpetuating to eternity David’s blessed legacy. And all of this happened via another very human practice: adoption. Rather than divorce Mary, Joseph adopted Jesus as his own, and by adoption Jesus became connected with and continued the legacy of the greatest king in the Hebrew tradition. 

How did God make good on what otherwise might have ended in dissolution and tragedy? How was it that Joseph changed his mind about a quiet divorce to decide instead to take Mary as his wife? As we heard in the story, the answer is that God sent an angel, a messenger, to Joseph in a dream, thereby revealing the divine source of Mary’s pregnancy. For the angel announced: “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.” 

And the angel did not stop there with those few words. Mary, the angel also proclaimed, “will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

So it was. Joseph, according to the story in Matthew, obediently submitted to this whole sacred scheme. And Joseph could do this only through the faith, the trust, that emerged from his encounter with the angel in a dream while he slept. 

We never quite know when God’s messengers might show up in our lives. That was true for Joseph, and it’s true for us as well. 

And sometimes it’s in those night watches when God’s messengers appear. Our dreams and the liminal realities of lying in bed awake can, to be sure, be the devil’s playground when our fears and anxieties and negative thoughts get the better of us.

But those times – asleep, awake, or in between – can also be sacred and holy occasions, moments that bring clarity about the meaning of our lives. Midnight hours can offer epiphanies that reveal the decisions we are called to make and the courses of action we are beckoned to pursue.

I suspect you’ve had such moments of clarity in your life. I know that I have, and they are precious even if they are more rare than we might like. Sometimes it’s as simple as having a realization about something I need to do the next day or someone I should reach out to. Other times, I’ve had epiphanies out of the blue in the midnight hours that help make sense of big life questions I’ve struggled with for a long time. 

But here’s the thing: angelic messengers do in fact continue to visit us. Such visitations may not be as dramatic as when the angel visited Joseph to turn impending tragedy into a course of action that led to the salvation of the whole world in Christ Jesus. But angelic visits do continue.

Yes, God’s messenger visited Joesph, and those messengers visit us, sometimes in our dreams and spiritual reveries. Sometimes through other people well known to us, and always in God’s Holy Word and Sacraments here, Sunday after Sunday.

Today as always, every Sunday, God in Christ visits us in the power of the Holy Spirit as our liturgy blends with the worship of the angels in heaven. God’s word is an angelic messenger, proclaiming to us each week good news. The angels join their voices with us as we sing hymns, and as our choirs offer us their heavenly gifts of sacred sounds. 

The angels join us at this table as we are invited into the family meal of our Trinitarian God in the Eucharist. It is here that we know and experience Emmanuel, God is with us in Christ Jesus, his very bodily presence made known to us in the broken bread and the fruit of the vine poured out for us. 

All of this makes for regular, reliable holy visitations containing angelic, holy messages for us that give us clarity about who we are and what we are called to do in the particular ways as we seek to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.

Through this meal, and other means of grace full of angelic visitations and messages, and even in our visions and dreams at home, we also come to have the faith of Joseph to be obedient to the strange logic and ways of our Trinitarian God, the holy family who sanctifies and makes holy our own families, thus allowing us to live with our families – and not without them – in greater compassion, forgiveness and love!

Here in this place, God gives us angelic messages of grace and mercy, humility and forgiveness, which we then are empowered to offer to others near and dear to us.

And we thereby offer the graces of God’s holy family to our own families in our humble service of our loved ones and in our seeking justice for their well-being. 

And through our generous giving and living, we offer such graces also through the ministries of the wider church to the families of nations and indeed the whole family of our species. 

In these ways, the holy family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus who make known to us the holy family of Father, Son, and Spirit, enters into and sanctifies all the families of the earth.

May our varied angelic visitations in word and sacraments, in our extraordinary ordinary lives, extend to bless your holy family tables in the coming holy days.

And may all of this be for healing and wholeness at home and abroad and all points in between, in families close to us and amidst the families of nations.

Emmanuel, God with us, come to us, make your home with us, that we may dwell with you, our Trinitarian family of God, that the whole human family may know of your healing, merciful love. O come, O come, Emannuel, God with us. Amen.