Feast of Saint Joseph - March 19, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie

Feast of St. Joseph - March 19, 2022

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16

Romans 4:13-18

Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Your vision will only become clear when you look inside your heart

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.                                 -Carl Jung 1875-1961

Joseph must have known, in his dream of dreams, that Mary carried the Word in her womb.

That Joseph trusted his dream, that Joseph accepted the non-rational unknown, ennobles him in humility, courage, and integrity. That Joseph changes direction overnight in a dark conversion, makes him both a mystical icon, and an icon of hope.

Because Joseph is awakened by his dream, those of us looking on can take heart. I can change direction. I can take risks. I can learn to see in new ways.

How did Joseph know to turn aside from supposed “righteousness” as he knew it, that is, to put Mary away quietly, the less violent alternative according to law, and instead, follow a dark, non-rational,  alternative kind of righteousness? Something in his life – a practice of hope, perhaps - must have prepared him to pay attention to that particular dream that night:  do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

Such a statement can make perfect sense in the context of a dream. Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. AND you will take her to Mediterranean Disneyland in Alexandria and take a ride on a flying elephant called Dumbo.
Then that baby of hers will walk on water and you'll have to go fetch him, but you too, will walk on the water and then you'll help the king of Egypt shell chickpeas.

How do you find the prescient dream within the silly dream? Joseph, like his ancestor Joseph, the beloved son of Jacob, must have trusted his dreams. Okay, maybe Dumbo and the king with chickpeas was too silly.

Dreams make sense while you're in them. But not upon waking. What is more likely, really, that Mary experienced sexual relations (most likely unwelcome) OR that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit? I mean, really.
 
But the Messenger in the dream sweetens the message with a scripture passage pregnant with hope, already deeply familiar to the dreamer: “Look, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."  Isaiah 7:14

But even more than his dreams, in order to embrace Mary's unusual pregnancy Joseph must have trusted not only the voice of God in the prophets, but the “through-line”  tales of reversals of power throughout story narratives from Abraham onward. First, he chose not to blame the victim – Mary, which put himself at risk of being forever an outsider. Second, he chose wild, illogical HOPE. Hope flies to hope. Hope implies action.

Rebecca Solnit, the multifaceted activist and writer says, 

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.  Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
                                                                                    Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Joseph is the embodiment of hope.  He means to pass this hope on to his son. Imagine him cradling the little one, and singing, [first, burp the baby, then play with the baby]

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry.
            The Lord sets the prisoners free;
            the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
            The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
            the Lord loves the righteous.
            The LORD watches over the strangers;
            he upholds the orphan and the widow,
            but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.                                       Psalm 146:5-9

If Joseph could believe and hope in the Lord God's promise to execute justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set prisoners free, open the eyes of the blind, lift up those who are bowed down, love the righteous, watch over strangers, uphold the orphan and widow, then he probably had the potential to believe his espoused girl could be pregnant by the Holy Spirit rather than by a bullying Roman soldier.

See Joseph's nobility in today's passage from Luke. Children are the cruelest of critics. But here is Joseph, the opposite of toxic masculinity, with the opposite of arrogance, Joseph swallows the insult, I must be in my Father's house. For his own son's sake. For his son's own emerging sense of identity. To protect  Jesus' own belief in  that “through-line” of reversals of hubris and hate.

Rebecca Solnit again,

“I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”
                                                                                            ― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

A poor man laboring as an artisan, no doubt working for the Roman oppressors in nearby Sepphoris, Joseph drew hope from the texts of his tradition, and saw in them the opportunity to act within the crack of business-as-usual, this promise, this dream of all dreams.

The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie
The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Like many Biblical authors, Luke leaves out the very things I want to know. What I want to know in this story is what Jesus and the elders in the temple talked about? What held their interest in the young boy's questions and what held Jesus' attention in the discussion that went on for days?

When scripture leaves off important stuff it is an invitation to imagine what took place.

Imagine you are twelve – on the threshold of adulthood. The Temple is deeply rooted within your soul. In infancy you were brought there and met a great prophet, and a saintly woman of deep prayer - so you are told - over and over. ( Eye roll. Mary's voice: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...” “Mom! Don't sing that song again!”)

You can't imagine life without The Temple's majesty, comfort, its orientation as the center of the world and as Gateway to the Holy One.

And, the Temple is a gathering place. You have visceral memories of the journeys there traveling in caravans to festivals all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, a time away from ordinary worries and work - your mother's anxious face looks like a girl's as she walks with old friends. Your stern, silent father laughs with the other men. You are going to where God lives, and the adults give you special sweet dates from En Gedi to eat.

Jerusalem itself is pretty exciting, but inside, the Temple! It's s a wondrous GARDEN - like the Garden of Eden! Olive wood and cedar, the bronze pillars carved with pomegranate shapes, golden palm trees, and flowers full of jewels. The lamp is in the shape of an almond tree.

And lustrous fabrics! Purple, red, and gold! And – the veil – you haven't yet seen it in the Holy of Holies - nevertheless you “see” the veil inside your dreams, for just behind the veil – the Holy One.

And space! The space within seems impossible from looking at the building from the outside. Space that takes your own prayer and draws it upward, expanding to fill the cosmos! The Temple represents the universe in its divine proportions holding secrets within secrets within secrets.

And oh, how you wish you could be a high priest – just for that one time to be in the Holy of Holies. For you are in love in God.

But just now you are brooding on a story about David the King.

The kingdom of Israel is mostly at peace, and King David looks out from his palace roof in the cool of the evening, not, this time, distracted by beautiful women bathing, but contemplating his own love of God and God's own ridiculously smitten love of him.

David says to himself, “Here I live in a palace made of cedar, but the Ark of God is living in a tent.” And negotiations for a glorious Temple begin. But God objects.

“All these years I have been moving around with my people in a tent. Have I ever asked for a house of cedar? Would you build me a house to dwell in?” (2 Samuel 7:1-7)

With this story your parents and teachers taught you, “Beware of putting God in a box.” But maybe when you were eleven years old or so, you summoned up the courage to ask, “If God doesn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?”

And all the adults gasp and say, “Don't ask stupid questions.” And you sulk. And then, brood. You know about Solomon and the whole subsequent history of the Temple. Nevertheless the question doesn't go away.

So now Jesus is at the Temple for the festival. He's twelve. And rarin' to go.

Here's what I think Jesus wanted to talk about with the elders. “If God told David he didn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?” (Because this would be my question. And maybe it would be yours.) Anyway, Jesus hangs around the elders, and, citing David, asks his question.

And they're off! Oh, and I wish I could listen in! Here's what I imagine.

An Elder opens, “The Holy of Holies is the center of world. The Temple is Holy because it surrounds the Holy of Holies. Jerusalem is Holy because it surrounds the Temple. And the country is Holy because it surrounds Jerusalem. And so on. This, my son, is called the Hierarchy of Holiness.”

Another Elder says, “But the Romans keep threatening to destroy the Temple, like Nebuchadnezzar did. Where is our holiness located then?”

Then, an argument about how the Romans control them by such threats, and whether those threats are empty or not. The younger ones tend to think the Romans couldn't do such a thing. The older ones have accumulated more somber memories. “This is why we appease the Romans,” says one. And then, this devolves into another unsolvable argument about politics and morality.

An Elder says, “The holy fellows over in Qumran, they have an idea that this Temple was not built to the specifications of God...”

Another interrupts “And they are constantly building ideal Temples in their heads!” Ha ha ha. Everyone laughs. “Qumran. What a bunch of crackpots.”

“But it is an intriguing idea,” says an Elder. “What if we all carry the Ideal Temple around in us all the time? What if Temple is a form, as Plato says....” but the mention of the philosopher is interrupted by a non-verbal cackle of derision.

Another Elder says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute - many of us carry the Temple in our hearts! The Temple is a TEMPLATE of holiness, a Teacher of how to be holy in the world. The heart IS a temple – and should the Romans destroy it, and scatter us to the corners of earth, in a diaspora like our years in Babylon, we would still have the Temple, in that sense.”

“Yes,” says another. “The Temple here is stone and wood and bricks. A building built by human hands and temporal!”

“That's blasphemy,” says one old but revered and holy crank. “These very stones are holy. Are you saying they are not?”

Okay. So imagine the young Jesus from Galilee - hungry for intellectual stimulation, thirsty for God, watching with a glistening sparks in his eyes as the elders dispute among themselves in these matters.

Those literal minded against those metaphysically minded. The concrete against metaphorical. God, enclosed in the Holy Box. God, everywhere, as if enclosed, enfolded, fluid. They are all having such fun in the most playfully rabbinic way, they lose track of time until the anxious parents came to interrupt them and take Jesus home.

Jesus has twenty years to think about all these things: divine proportion, secrets within secrets, interior gardens, architectural space drawing infinite prayer from the space of your own soul, the veil, the Holy of Holies. All these things he pondered in his heart.

As an adult he loved the Temple enough to risk his life clearing the outer court of the sellers of animals and money-changers with a whip of cords. “You have made this house of prayer into a den of thieves.” (Mt 21:12-13 and citing Isaiah) And once, as his friends are admiring the Temple adornments and precincts, Jesus will say, “Not one stone will stand upon another.” (Mt. 24:1-2, Lk. 21:5-6)

And at his trial, he will be accused of saying, “Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” (Mk 14:58)  John's Gospel adds that he was talking about the Temple of his body.

In a violent world, Jesus died of violence. And the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mk 15:38) as if rending its garments in grief.

The Temple was destroyed by the Romans not long after that. And a world-wide diaspora still moves on, heart by heart in a violent world.

And yet, all over the world, people sing, Joy to the World….
“...let every heart prepare him room.”