Sunday Praise & Worship 10:00
Christian Education - 10:00 - Casual Dress - Loving Childcare
|
|
|
|
For many followers of Christ, the fact of his miraculous birth of a virgin mother stands as part of a larger backdrop of our faith. Yet some people have a difficult time with this miraculous sign of God’s favor and design. Joseph, who was engaged to be married to Mary, was the first of many who have had trouble believing in this sign of a hidden reality (The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby born to you will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God—Luke 1:35). At the heart of this doubt lies a desire to confirm and know the Truth with a capital T completely separate from dependency on God or our faith in God. Now, of course, experts would demand that Mary submit to DNA testing to track down the “real” father. Joseph knew that he was not the father and had decided to break his engagement with Mary, refusing to believe in her outlandish story about a conception at the hands of God, while still caring enough not to want to disgrace her in public. Don’t overlook this small tidbit of the story of Joseph’s journey of faith. Many men in his situation would have been outraged and hurt — and would not have been open to a vision from heaven because they would have been blinded by fear and shame. In the midst of his inability to understand or even to believe in his fiancée, Joseph refuses to let go of his respect for Mary. And in such a state of mind, he has a dream (look again at the first part of verse 20). Now all of this happened long ago, and it’s easy to believe that no one sees visions from God any more (at least no one worth listening to). Yet each of us faces daily decisions that either open us more fully to God’s self disclosure or prevent us from seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Three years after a Christmas Eve visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 1865, the Rev. Phillips Brooks composed a little poem for the children to sing in their Sunday School Christmas program at the Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. His organist, Lewis Redner, wrote out the tune. The vision of a peaceful little town where the hopes and fears of all the years met one night calls to us in our own time of sleepiness. Take a closer look at the final verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:
O holy Child
of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray; The virgin birth we dare hope to believe is not merely that of a peasant girl ages ago, but the one God longs to accomplish in our lives. Each dawn brings a new possibility that we might hear the Christmas angels’ song and cry out to the Holy Child to be born in us today. Do you hear the ringing of their tune? Will you climb aboard the Bethlehem express and allow God’s dream to come true? Questions for Reflection
For further study: Please read Luke 1:26-38, Acts 2, and Joel 2:28-32
For next week: Read
Matthew 5:17-24.
Why does God not make a distinction between murdering someone and thinking
about murdering them? |
|
