Every Christmastide and Eastertide, we (in the Church) make something like a Gospel casserole out of the four different stories that form the basis for our principal feast days as Christians. This year it’s two parts from Mark, two parts from Luke, two parts from John, and one part from Matthew that we stir together and serve ourselves in an effort to prepare for and celebrate Christmas. And each time I find myself feeling like a finicky child wanting my meal in a divided plate with a section for each part – not wanting any of the parts to touch each other. I want each of the Gospel stories to be tasted on their own -- I want to recognize and appreciate the unique flavors of the four Gospels and I want to teach others to do that too. (It’s a big project of mine.)

Matthew, like Luke, has a story about Jesus’ birth, but it is very different from Luke’s. (And perhaps you remember that Mark and John don’t tell anything about the birth or youth of Jesus.) To begin his Gospel account, Matthew first establishes Jesus’ genealogy, starting with Abraham. Fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen generations from David to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen generations from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah. Fourteen is the sum of the numerical value of the three letters in the name David in Hebrew. Matthew is very tidy.

Joseph has the starring role in Matthew’s birth narrative, albeit without a speaking part. (Really Joseph has the only role except for the wise ones from the east and King Herod.) It is Joseph who decided to take Mary as his wife even though she’d been found to be pregnant before they lived together. It is Joseph who named the baby Jesus, meaning “he saves” or “he will save.” It is Joseph who got Jesus and Mary safely to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of all of the children of Bethlehem younger than the age of two. And it is Joseph who relocated the family to Nazareth to avoid Herod’s son Archelaus. In Matthew’s version, Mary and Joseph were from Bethlehem, not originally from Nazareth. Some scholars speculate that they went to Nazareth when they decided not to go back to Bethlehem because there was plenty of building work in nearby Sephoris. Matthew says that it was so that Jesus could be called a Nazorean according to the prophets, but there’s no known reference in prophetic scripture to anyone being called a Nazorean. And that’s it in Matthew until Jesus goes to the Judean wilderness as an adult to be baptized by John the Baptist.

If you read through the first two chapters of Matthew – they’re very short (about 50 verses in all). I bet you would notice that Joseph is a dreamer. It is because of a dream that Joseph changed his mind about his plan to dismiss Mary quietly and instead to marry her. Joseph dreams that this child is going to save his people – save them from political and economic oppression – save them from military occupation – save them from their own sins. Joseph dreams that people will call this child Emmanuel – God with us. Joseph dreams that fleeing to Egypt will keep his child safe. Joseph dreams of returning to Israel. And then Joseph dreams that Galilee is the place to settle down.

What strikes me is how rich this brief story is with allusion and irony. Maybe you remember another dreamer named Joseph – Joseph, the favored son of Jacob whose dream-telling made his brothers hate him enough to sell him into slavery. It was that Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams that made him a powerful man in Egypt, powerful enough to save his family from famine. But Egypt, is the traditional place of enslavement, the place from which God’s people were freed. Remember the slaughter of Hebrew children that causes Moses’ mother to hide him in the bulrushes with his sister to save his life. How ironic that dozens of generations later, Joseph’s namesake returns to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter of children in the promised land. Perhaps a “do-over” is what was needed. Israel would be called out of Egypt again (and again and again).

This Jesus, “he who saves,” and who will be called God With Us – Emmanuel, lived his life as a refugee in Matthew’s Gospel, first in Egypt and then in a strategically obscure Galilean village cave. Think of that for a moment. Here is the unlikeliest God With Us – a most unusual divine manifestation – born from an extra-legal pregnancy (sounds a little better than illegal or illegitimate, but that’s what it means) and threatened by the fear or the rage or the cynacism of tyrants and nearly insurmountable challenges. The divine manifestation, Jesus the Messiah, was unable to return home to Bethlehem – a town just outside of Jerusalem – without grave risk. And Matthew wants to persuade us that this God (that is Love), found in the kind of person Jesus grew to be, is stronger than military might or political and economic oppression. Love like this is so strong that it can save, according to the Gospel of Matthew.

Theologian William Loader writes, “To the sensitive imagination the threatened ruler absurdly massacring the helpless has allusions to events in our own age….We have our stories of infants stolen from their families.” And I would add that we have our own captivities, our own oppressive situations and narrow escapes, our own need for asylum, our own dreams for better lives. As a nation, we seem to be reclaiming a higher calling, a renewed sense of dignity and reinvigorated purpose and great promise. We’ve elected a visionary for a president. I’ve been reading President-elect Obama’s book Dreams from My Father – and if you haven’t read it, I recommend that you put it on your reading list. It’s been making me wonder about what dreams we inherit, what dreams we take on. What dreams will we remember and heed as we move through this time of great national transition? What fear or rage or cynicism will threaten to annihilate the new hope recently born in our country? What will we do in the face of nearly insurmountable economic challenges? What actions will we take to live into our dreams?

And what about this Emmanuel “God With Us” Church? Who among us is dreaming dreams of a future? What dreams will we remember and heed? What threatens to annihilate new hope recently born? Fear or rage or cynicism or you fill in the blank.
What will we do in the face of nearly insurmountable economic challenges? What actions will we take to live into our dreams? Emmanuel Church, also, is poised to reclaim a higher calling, a sense of renewed dignity and purpose and great promise. Can you feel that in the air around here? This is much much bigger and much more important than simply figuring out how to survive. In fact, I believe that we were never meant to survive, to borrow a wonderful phrase from the poet Audre Lorde. As a parish we are in a moment that is ripe, pregnant with possibilities. We are in a moment of new birth and growth – of promise and hope. We are meant to do much more than survive.

I hope by now that you’ve registered to participate in our all parish “All In” Conference this coming Friday evening and Saturday, January 9th and 10th. If you haven’t, please do that today after the service. Our conference is designed to bring as many people as possible to the table – to lots of tables actually – to share our dreams of possible futures together and then to articulate a common vision and plan our course of action for the next ten years or so. We need your presence and your voice whether you are relatively new or relatively old, tall or short, funny or very very serious. There’s a group of people who have been working since last summer as a steering committee to plan for a successful all-parish conference. They are: Gail Abbey, Mary Blocher, Charlie Felsenthal, Matt Griffing, Jim Olesen, Nancy Peabody, Barbara Rose. I’d like you to stand so that the rest of the congregation can see you. The Rev. Dr. Lawrence Peers will facilitate and lead our all parish conference. Larry’s expertise is in organizational development and growth that comes from fulfilling our potential, deepening our relationship with God (or with Love, capital L, if you prefer), and offering bolder prophetic witness and externally focused service. You might like him. You might not. Either way, it’s okay because by his very presence he will help us to articulate and clarify possibilities and choices we have as a parish so that we can steer rather than drift into the second decade of the 21st century. And he will help us to establish goals and take actions that will guide us toward becoming God With Us -- Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston more than ever.