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God spoke to Joseph.
Joseph listened, and responded.
And maybe that is why we know so little about Joseph. We know more about people to whom God spoke but they did not listen, or they responded in complicated ways. Moses resists God’s voice, pushes back on God’s plan, and so we have a chapter and a half in Exodus about Moses angering God while the thornbush rages in flames. And then we get just two little sentences about the call of Aaron, the brother of Moses: “The LORD said to Aaron, ‘Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.’ So [Aaron] went, and he met [Moses] at the mountain of God and kissed him.” (In a Bible full of sibling rivalry, Aaron immediately embraces his younger brother!) And so we know considerably less about Aaron than we do about Moses.
We know very little about Silas, Paul’s companion, whom we meet in the Acts of the Apostles. But we know so very much about Paul and Peter, our two major Christian apostles, maybe because both of them, in their own ways, put up a lot of resistance to God. Peter betrayed Jesus in his darkest hour, only to be confronted by the risen Lord in an awkward, painful repair of their friendship, after breakfast, by the sea. Paul had to be knocked off his horse and blinded before he understood who Jesus really is, and who Paul himself is, and what he must do. Silas? I don’t know. He was there. He did his business. He was in prison with Paul, and was there for the breakout. He has a Wikipedia entry. Perhaps God spoke to Silas, and Silas simply listened, and responded. And maybe that is why we know very little about him.
Do we know what type of fish swallowed up Jonah? No. Illustrators often imagine it as a blue whale, but iconographic tradition depicts it as a great sea monster, like the one that appears in Psalm 104, a giant sea beast that God made just for the fun of it. We don’t know much, because the fish says nothing, unlike Jonah, who can’t stop complaining about his problems, and literally runs away from God. The fish, for its part, hears God and responds. “Swallow up Jonah,” God says, and the fish does it. “Spew Jonah out,” God says, and the fish does it. It saves Jonah’s life! But like Aaron, like Silas, like Joseph of Nazareth, the fish is the strong, silent type. So we know very little about this creature that did what God said.
Maybe you are one of these quiet servants of God. Or maybe you know one. You are a nurse working the graveyard shift, and you do a thousand things for your slumbering patients and your tired, overworked co-workers. You do them silently, elegantly, carefully. Often they do not know that anyone did anything at all. Or they only notice your work in your absence, on the night you’re not there, and things are a little less lovely.
Or you are a copy editor. A lover of fonts and the sharp smell of a freshly-printed journal, you quietly carry misplaced modifiers back to the place in the sentence where they belong; you remove incorrect apostrophes; you know when ‘capital’ is spelled with an A or an O; you know the strengths and weaknesses of the Oxford comma. Perhaps the original writer notices (with embarrassed irritation) that her work has been carefully cleansed of several small errors, but the reader knows nothing of you, and doesn’t even think of you, some anonymous staffer who never has a byline.
Or you are a landscape worker, and your task is removing leaves and aerating the lawns on the campus of a graduate school. If you are this person, I have walked past you many, many times over the past couple of years. I can hear your machines from half a mile a way, the screaming drone of a leaf-blower, the low buzz of the aerator, the happy hum of the mower you’re riding up and down, up and down, until the lawn gleams. Your work appears in dazzling photographs the school uses to appeal to donors; it quietly shines behind proud graduates on a fine spring day; it is known most intimately not by faculty or students, but by the foxes and squirrels who call your workplace home. My dog explores these lawns, alert to their manifold fragrances, but never once wonders who gives him this great gift.
A nurse, a copy editor, a landscape worker: do they hear God speaking to them, and respond? Of these three random examples (for there are thousands more), only one, the nurse, seems to have a sermon-ready career. She tends the sick, after all. That’s one of the things we ask God to do: “Tend the sick, Lord Christ,” we pray at Evening Prayer. “Tend the sick, Lord Christ; bless the dying, correct the grammar of the careless, blow away the leaves under the pedestrian’s feet…” Really? This is God’s work?
It is. All of it. You are a copy editor, a landscape worker. You are a database administrator, a parish administrator. You are behind the scenes at a daycare, or you answer phones and fix the copier and do a thousand other things at your job, or in your home. You are on the crew of a ship’s tender, the smaller boat that carries supplies back and forth. You fly a desk in an overseas deployment, in all kinds of danger and called upon to do all kinds of difficult, essential things, but you are rarely the person someone imagines when they think about words like “hero” or “warrior.” Whoever you are, you hear God’s call, and you respond. You may be remembered beyond your time here, but perhaps not much more profoundly than we remember Silas, that great but quiet companion of Paul.
This year, Alice, an old friend of mine, died, at the age of 93. She was the wife of a Lutheran pastor. He preached sermons week by week and was known by many hundreds of people; she worked behind the scenes as they went about their lives and raised two children. More than twenty years ago now, I lived in their home for a month after moving to the Pacific Northwest from my home state of Minnesota. Their small home was a beautiful jewel, spotlessly clean, warm and inviting, little palm fronds from Palm Sunday carefully hung behind the artwork on the living-room wall. And in the bathroom, the trash can was always almost empty. Alice would quietly empty that little wastebasket, but when she put it back in its place, she would toss a Kleenex into it. I asked her son why she did this. He told me, “She doesn’t want a guest to be embarrassed if they use a Kleenex and become the first person to put something in the empty wastebasket. She is protecting their feelings.”
In this, my friend Alice is a daughter of Joseph of Nazareth, today’s saint, a great Advent saint. He is an afterthought in our crèches, a stand-in, just a guy from Central Casting who has no lines because the studio would have to pay him more if he said anything. God tells him what to do, and Joseph does it. At great cost. Like the poor fish who has to eat (but not digest!) a human being; like poor Silas who likely suffered a martyr’s death but did not make waves or mount any kind of colorful resistance to God; like Aaron the priest who quietly, competently cares for God’s people like a mother; Joseph does what God says, even though it would be far, far easier for him not to. Mary is in trouble; Joseph doesn’t need to be. Mary has a potentially life-ending problem; Joseph has a promising future. But God speaks, and Joseph listens.
As we once again celebrate the growing light of Christ that dawns upon us in this time of great darkness and anxiety, hear this Good News: when you listen, and respond; when you get quiet and begin to notice what you must do; when you get up day by day and go about your business, quietly lifting up others, supporting others, tending to the needs and concerns of ordinary people here and everywhere; when you simply do the work that is set before you, even if that work is not much more than placing a Kleenex in a wastebasket, you are a son or a daughter of Joseph of Nazareth, a saint whose majesty and grandeur is found in the everyday decision to pay attention, and to do as God says.
It is you, day in and day out, whom God loves so dearly. Maybe you know this, in the quiet depths of your heart. You know how deeply God treasures you, and delights in your work. You are a quiet light on the edge of our Advent wreath, a light that shines on our path as we move, together, to see this thing that has taken place, in Bethlehem, where a new father is carefully tending to the needs of his beloved spouse, and their son.
This quiet, prudent father, always pointing beyond himself, gave his son a name that means, “God saves.”
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Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, December 22, 2019.
Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25
Art: Joseph of Nazareth, by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660).