Advent 4 Year A
Sunday 21 December 2025 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.
+ + + +
If we listen between the lines to Matthew’s gospel, we can hear that Joseph’s situation was desperately painful. Betrothed by their families as teenagers, as was their custom, he and Mary still lived with their own parents but were legally bound to each other as if already married.
As a righteous man, someone whose way of life was profoundly shaped according to God’s law, Joseph was conflicted. He knew he should at least divorce Mary because of her pregnancy and her seeming unfaithfulness… and perhaps he should even allow her to be stoned to death because of the shame her pregnancy brought to her father’s house.
But Joseph was kind and gentle. He wanted to avoid public shame for Mary, as well as do the right thing according to the law. He would divorce her quietly. He fell asleep with the arguments still running around in his head. How would God want him to act? What was the right thing to do? He thought he knew.
But that night Joseph dreamed. In the ancient world, dreaming was a time and a place for unveiling possible futures; it was a place of risk, and vulnerability, and holy possibility. In Joseph’s dream, as had happened before in Israel’s history, a messenger from God came to him and the message changed his whole reality.
Overnight, he went from being certain of his intention to divorce Mary to being certain of marrying her and adopting her son as his own. The angel of God, who came to Joseph in his dreaming in the dark of night, made known to him Jesus’ birth, his name, and his identity.
Matthew’s gospel tells us the story of Jesus’ beginnings and identity from Joseph’s perspective, not Mary’s – which is the better-known story told in Luke’s gospel. This is the story of Joseph, and the story of Jesus’ naming, which was the holy task given to Joseph in his dream.
In the story, the verb for naming or calling is used three times, and because the act of naming belongs to the father in their time, with this act, Joseph is assuming paternity. So, in naming Jesus, Joseph is formally adopting Jesus as his own son and conferring on him the status of a descendant of Abraham and David – his own family line. Jesus’ identity and mission are marked in him by God through Joseph’s obedience, as much as through Mary’s.
The names given to Jesus are verbs for God’s action: Jesus, Emmanuel: God saves, God is with us. Jesus’ names are also his calling, his task. In his naming, Jesus is commissioned for the work ahead of him.
There’s a link here I think with baptism, in which we are sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever. In baptism, while we are given a personal name, we are also named – called – for Christ.
When we’re ‘sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever’ in our baptism, we carry a life-long calling or identity into the world, that we can choose to respond to and live out, or not. Baptism (not ordination) is the beginning of all our ministries and all our vocations (ordained ministry is just one shape that the ministry of all the baptized can take).
As I’ve pondered Joseph’s naming of Jesus, I have been reminded of one of my favourite pieces of writing on vocation by Rowan Williams – I first read this over 20 years ago when I was reflecting on my vocation. Williams reminds us that in the Hebrew bible, calling and creation are closely associated. Think of that passage in Isaiah where God creates the stars and calls them by name… remember also the many stories of God calling people by naming or re-naming them.
So, Williams writes,
“As the Greek fathers liked to say [he’s talking about some of the earliest theologians of the church], God creates by uttering a multitude of logoi, designating words, names: creation springs into being in order to answer God’s speech, God’s call, so that his Word does not return to him empty (Isa 55:11).
…in the most basic sense of all, God’s call is the call to be: the vocation of creatures is to exist. And, second, the vocation of creatures is to exist as themselves, to be bearers of their names, answering the Word that gives each its distinctive identity…. [so at each moment it is God’s desire for you to be, and to be the person you are. God is calling you by your name, at each and every moment, wanting you to be you].”
As we each live our lives in God and grow into whatever identity Christ calls into being within us, we will all express that in a different way.
This sense of being named and called is not something we hold only within the walls of a church. It lives in the real world — including the painful, anxious moments we have carried this week.
The shooting in Bondi has shaken many, and our prayers have been with the Jewish community who were directly targeted, and also with our neighbours of all faith traditions who again find themselves vulnerable to suspicion and backlash.
When we say Jesus is “God-with-us,” Emmanuel, we are naming the One who stands with all who are afraid, all who are grieving, all who long for peace. And we, who bear Christ’s name in our baptism, are called to stand there too: as people of compassion, hospitality, courage, and care.
A few years ago, I was fortunate to be able to go to Wellington for a seminar day with the American preacher and Episcopalian priest, Barbara Brown Taylor. She told a story about a student who wandered into her class one day – as the student brushed past Barbara she noticed she had a tattoo on her shoulder.
The tattoo was simply the word ‘and’, in 12 point Roman font. After class, Barbara asked the student about this curious tattoo. And she explained that she was a volunteer in a project for a novelist. The novelist was recruiting volunteers all around the world and each was being given one word from his novel, to have tattooed on them.
One day, when there are enough of them to complete the novel, they might get together, somewhere with a lot of space, and get in order – to tell the story. But in the mean time, the novelist liked to think of his words living their lives out there in the world, doing all sorts of things: painting a house, cooking, reading, making love, teaching.
So, we the baptized, sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever… we who live and pray in the name of Jesus, the name once given to Joseph in a dream: what word do we bear into a room, like a tattoo, that stands for the gospel? What word marks each of us always, indelibly, so that together as the body of Christ, we tell the story of Jesus as we go about our lives?
It is a good question to ponder in our hearts in these last days of Advent, as we prepare to celebrate again the coming of Christ into our world and into our lives at Christmas.
Amen.