by Lauren F. Winner
Gospel Reading: Matthew 1:18-25
For Sunday, December 22, 2013: Year A—Advent 4
My colleague Stanley Hauerwas is always saying something like “if you want to learn how to welcome the stranger, have a kid; a kid is a stranger you have to welcome for at least 18 years”; “If you want to practice hospitality, have a child,” et cetera, et cetera. Having recently married a man with two daughters, I have been thinking a lot about Stanley’s quip, and how it is true in a tweaked and weird way for stepparents.
Nothing on Joseph
But I’ve got nothing on Joseph, who welcomes a child who he initially believes was conceived when Mary slept with another man. What, might one ask, is the greater stretch—for a person to think that his betrothed got pregnant while catting around with another, or for a person to accept a child who was conceived when his betrothed was impregnated by the Holy Spirit? At any rate, Joseph has a dream, is persuaded of the child’s divine paternity, marries Mary, and raises her son as his own.
It is probably the lamest kind of anachronism to speak of Joseph “parenting” Mary’s son. (When did “parent” become a verb, anyway?) The idiom suggests that he was throwing catch with little Jesus, and taking him fishing, and having manly heart-to-hearts. But for the first century, Joseph was parenting Mary’s boy—taking him into his household, raising him as his own, giving him bed, board, name, family identity, a trade.
We do not hear much more of Joseph—in the Christmas story, in the rest of Scriptures, or in the history of Christian art and interpretations. It is Mary we learn more about: Mary in maternal paintings holding an infant and Mary in pietas, Mary at the wedding in Cana; Mary, in the book of Acts, praying with the disciples after Jesus has risen and ascended. Most all of what we know about Joseph is implied: he decided to embrace a child across a great, great gulf.
Far From the Tree
Andrew Solomon recently published a book called Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. The somewhat anodyne title does not adequately hint at the wild and very moving stories contained within. Solomon chronicles parents who are crucially different from their children—children who have Down syndrome, children who were conceived in rape, children who committed a crime. Transgender children. Dwarfs. Solomon writes, pace Tolstoy, that “the unhappy families who reject their variant children have much in common, while the happy ones who strive to accept them are happy in a multitude of ways.” Jesus was not (as far as we know) a dwarf. But he was different from both his parents, but perhaps most especially from Joseph. One can only speculate about the particular ways Joseph was happy in his familial acceptance of his son.
Something in the actions of the families Solomon chronicles—those families who accept children who are, by the measure of the parents’ own identities, strange and alien—partakes of the actions of Mary and Joseph. And indeed something in the actions of stepparents, or of those parents who accept into their households children conceived in adultery (Mad Men was did not just dream that up; it happens; it has always happened), and indeed perhaps of all parents, speaks of the actions of Mary and Joseph. I heard Solomon interviewed on Fresh Air. While not minifying the extreme differences in the families described in his book, he also acknowledged that, in a way, all children are radically different from their parents. To embrace a child is always to embrace across a gap.
That parents can raise children who are strange to them perhaps has something to do with the logic of the Incarnation and Cross: we can do things that are strange and alien, we can love strangers and aliens, because the Incarnation assures us that nothing is strange to God. We can suffer in that loving because the Cross assures us that no suffering is strange or alien to God.
Across the Divide
When people parent—even if they are not in the kind of radical strangeness Solomon chronicles—they are reaching across a great gulf, and they have Joseph as a model in that.
But the point here has to do with more than just parenting. It has to do with more than how we must reach across the inevitable divide that separates a parent from a child. The gap between parent and child—indeed, the gap between any two people who love one another—may remind us of the gap that separates us from God. There is strangeness between us and God. It is a strangeness, that, paradoxically, persists, even as it is bridged in the Incarnation. If you want to welcome the stranger, have a child. That is what we prepare to do here at the end of Advent, we welcome a strange God as a child. And it is what God is doing unto us—precisely in the act of becoming a human child, it is in fact God who is doing the welcoming, God who is welcoming us, the stranger.
The Hardest Question
How, at the end of Advent, can we prepare ourselves to welcome this child who is so Other from us, but who in becoming like us makes it possible for us to be welcomed by God?
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
