Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 6-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
He had it all planned out:
- Get established in his chosen field of work.
- Find a wife.
- Get engaged.
- Have a family.
That’s the way things were supposed to work.
Of course, there would be challenges ahead—arguments over money, or the kids, or whether or not to pursue that job opportunity. He didn’t think life would be easy, but he did expect it to follow a certain path. A recognizable path. An ordered one.
How very wrong he was.
They weren’t even married yet. They didn’t even live together. He had never had intimate relations with her—and yet, she showed up pregnant. How could he remain engaged to someone like that, much less marry her?
He would dismiss her quietly. He did, after all, love her, even if she had broken his heart. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. Her shame, and the challenges of being an unwed mother, would be difficult enough without public disgrace. Or his own disgrace, for that matter. The pain he felt at her betrayal would only deepen when his friends and neighbors found out. The shame of having chosen so poorly. Of having trusted wrongly.
Her story was ridiculous. An angel came to her and told her that God had made her pregnant. More likely, he thought, she had been taken advantage of by one of the Roman soldiers in the area and was too afraid to speak the truth—afraid of what might happen to her or to her family. Still, he couldn’t bear the thought of raising another man’s child. It was best just to end things now. Cleanly. Quietly.
But it wasn’t easy.
He really did love her. He had dreamed about what their life together might have been like. He had a plan—and now it was over, never to be realized. His expectations unmet.
Life is like that. We plan. We work hard. We set goals. And then something happens. Our expectations are interrupted by illness, or death, or financial distress. Maybe it’s a job change or a move. Maybe even an unexpected pregnancy. Whatever the circumstances, the ordered life we envisioned gets disrupted, disordered, and we feel like we are losing everything.
Joseph felt this deeply. His well-intentioned, carefully ordered life had come crashing down around him. The woman he was engaged to turns up pregnant, and it was definitely not his—he would know. And this ridiculous story about an angel only added insult to injury. Joseph was a quiet man. A thoughtful man. Instead of causing a scene or turning Mary over to the authorities, he resolved to dismiss her quietly.
And then the divine intervenes.
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream and begins to manage his expectations. “Do not be afraid,” the angel says. Take Mary as your wife. Joseph is reassured that Mary is not lying—that the child she carries is from the Holy Spirit—and that there are big plans for this child. To his credit, when Joseph wakes up, he does exactly what the angel instructed him to do. And we know the rest of that story.
In a way, Joseph’s plan actually did come to fruition—just not in the way he thought it would.
We are like Joseph. We make plans, and as soon as one little thing goes wrong, we scrap the whole thing and bemoan where we went wrong. The hiccup becomes an obstacle we just can’t seem to overcome.
I get that. It’s not just that we want our plans to work out—we want everything to be perfect, or at least as close to perfect as we can make it.
We enter the holiday season with expectations. Maybe all we hope for is joy and harmony—but the family gathering brings tension and arguments. The gift we ordered never arrives, and now we are tracking packages and talking to AI chatbots at L.L. Bean, trying to figure out how to get it here in time. We check the Ring camera every time we get a notification, hoping we aren’t a porch pirate’s latest victim. A family member gets sick, and now we’re coordinating hospital visits on top of everything else. Eventually, we throw up our hands, lament any expectation we had for the season, and pray that we simply get through it.
Sometimes it seems like the grace we were promised two thousand years ago in a little town called Bethlehem gets lost in the shuffle of decorations, gifts, parties, and all the unmet expectations of attempting to celebrate a perfect Christmas. I wonder if that grace isn’t simply a victim of our egos.
That grace was almost lost to Joseph, because his plans and his reputation seemed more important than trusting what God was doing. The truth is, all those expectations we set for ourselves—or place on others—even the plans we make, no matter how thoughtful or well-intentioned, are often ego-centered. They reflect what we want, not necessarily what God wants.
It is hard to release what we want. Hard to let go of what we have come to expect—the patterns and routines of our lives, and especially the desires we hold for ourselves and for others. We put a lot of time and energy into those desires and expectations. They give us a sense of control. They help us feel empowered. Releasing them requires trust. It requires faith.
Joseph bears witness to that. How easy it would have been for him to wake from that dream and immediately begin to doubt—to question its reality, its truth, its implications. After all, the dream disrupted his plans, challenged his expectations, and threatened his sense of control. Instead, Joseph trusted God’s purposes rather than his own certainty. He surrendered to something bigger than himself.
The season of Advent is one of preparation and expectant waiting. But I wonder how our expectations of the season shape our experience of it. I wonder if our expectations might actually limit the joy and wonder of what God desires for us.
Maybe instead of holding tightly to our expectations—for ourselves, for others, even for God—we are invited to trust in God’s purposes. To loosen our grip. To surrender.
Our best-laid plans may fall apart. But if we have prepared our hearts—if we have released our expectations and our egos—we just might discover the truth proclaimed to Joseph: God is with us.
Amen.