Publishing Joseph's journal

Back in seminary, we used to host this annual variety show -- maybe kind of like Saturday Night Live -- where seminarians and faculty and groups would put on different skits and do bits and sing songs, it was all very fun, and I was the emcee every year. Maybe because they thought I was the funniest or maybe I was the most jester shaped? Who knows. But one of my favorite bits to do would be to pull out a journal from behind the lectern, and say "oh my gosh you guys, I found so-and-so's journal, should I read a little bit of it?" and then I would write and read this fake journal entry for somebody, playful, exaggerated, a little flattened, but always got a big laugh.

But I've gotta be honest, reading this Gospel passage aloud, kind of felt like that old seminary bit again, like "ohhhhh my gosh you guys, I found Joseph's Journal-- should I read just a little bit of it? Nooo, I shouldn't,,,, okay just one page." This reads a little like something that I am not supposed to be reading aloud into a microphone, like this is something private.

Now granted, the bible is a collection of books and each of those books makes some conscious literary choices about how it tells the story that it has to tell, and one of the choices we get in the Gospels is the omniscient narrator. We are in the room with Mary for the annunciation. We are in Joseph's head for the angel's appearance to him in a dream. We are with the women early in the morning at the tomb. We are in the locked upper room with the apostles. We are privy to a lot of information in this story that I can't really imagine having access to unless I was a truly, truly close friend of the character. We are in Joseph's head for this gospel passage today, and I wonder who Joseph relayed this too that we ended up hearing about it. With whom did he share this dream, with whom did he share his resolve? And how did it make it from that confession, that disclosure all the way into the biblical canon, into our lectionary, into this church, today?

I say all this to say that my first and gut reaction to this passage is to somehow hold this against Joseph, in the way that I didn't really want to know that it was his plan to quietly dismiss Mary, or that it took an Angel's intervention to convince him otherwise, or that somehow this is all still framed as righteousness. That is my gut reaction and I feel like I just need to say it so I can get it out of the way, because sometimes behind our negative gut reactions to a bible story, is a whole lot more to the story that matters if we can get past the first reaction we have.

I do quite imagine that this is not how Joseph had imagined the story of his first born was to have gone, and I feel awfully sure that he and Mary have that in common. The beginning of the Gospel tells the story of 42 generations of Joseph's lineage from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob down to Boaz to Jesse to David allllll the way down to Joseph and in between generations 42 and 43, there is this little Asterisk named The Angel Gabriel. I do not imagine that this is how Joseph expected his life to go- his engagement, his ancestry, the birth of his son-- and it makes a lot of sense to me that he would struggle internally with his sense of how things were going for him, or even with the desire to wrest back a little control into his life, even if I do not think that he meant to share it with us.

This is really quite a relatable feeling and I bet you and I and all of us probably have felt it one way or another, this feeling of: This is not how I thought this would go, this is not what I thought would happen to me, or to us, what do I do about it now?

I've been there! I'm sure I will be there again sometime, and I bet you all have been there too. I find it really quite heartening that the story of the Gospel begins with Disrupted Expectations. This is not how Joseph and Mary thought their lives would go, and yet it was the beginning of the most important story in all of scripture. Nor do I think that this is how Zechariah and Elizabeth thought their lives would go, or Abraham and Sarah, or Moses and Miriam, or you name em. Pretty much every bible story starts with the feeling of "Ohhh this is not I thought this was going to go" and that frames the whole rest of the story, stories that are big and important and surprising and that matter.

So I guess I say all this to say that if you have ever found yourself in the circumstance of saying" "Oh,,, this is not how I thought this was going to go..." you have in your company, Every biblical protagonist, every human being, Jesus Mary and Joseph, and God, and Me! This is not an Everything Happens For a Reason story, but rather, with or without a reason, when the unexpected happens, and it does happen, and it will happen, God will still be able to use you, you will still have a purpose, and the disappointment or disruption or sudden left turn is not the only or last thing that will ever happen to you. It might even be the first chapter of a story somebody else, really really needs to hear one day.

I just promise that we won't publish your journal along with it. LOL. Amen.