Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
One of my running app coaches tells me to be fearless. She doesn’t mean fearless as in recklessness or taking unwarranted risks. She is telling me to fear less than my faith. What she means is that I need to “up my faith”—trust the faith I might have in myself, my abilities, my run, rather than succumbing to my fears that I can’t finish, that I don’t have what it takes, that I will somehow lose in my endeavor and fail. She reminds me that being fearless is about not allowing my fear to outweigh my faith.
Joseph is afraid. Mary was too. Soon shepherds in a field will be as well. In all three cases and at other times in scripture, the first thing the divine being says is some form of “fear not”. The angel that visits Joseph is no exception, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid…” I wonder about this fear that the angel speaks to soothe.
I think it is easy to say that a visit from an angel would be a scary thing. Possibly, but I am not sure that is always true. And though it is possible that these appearances were scary, might Joseph’s dream been technically a nightmare? Regardless of whether or not the angel’s appearance to Joseph was scary, I think there is more to the words “do not be afraid” than the simple surface level of “don’t be scared of me.” On a deeper level, I think the angel of the Lord that visits Joseph is telling him to be fearless. He tells him not to be afraid to act—“do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.”
Joseph is a righteous man. Simply put, he is pious. He goes to synagogue, he prays, he follows the law of Torah faithfully. Now Mary has turned up pregnant and he finds himself in a difficult position. His piety is structured by particular rules. To disregard those rules leads him to a place of insecurity and fear. It puts him and everything he believes in, at risk.
We’ve seen a lot of that in the last two years. The pandemic threw the playbook out the window. It took all the rules we understood about the social order of things and spun them on their head. We didn’t go to work or school. We all but stopped traveling. We didn’t visit family, friends, the sick or shut-ins. We didn’t even go to church. We stayed home and tried to live a life completely centered on our selves and families. And we were driven there by fear. The more our social order was disrupted, the more our fear became. And the more our fear became, the greater our social order was disrupted. We were in a vicious cycle that we have slowly begun to break. But it is not an easy cycle to break.
At the height of the pandemic, we vented our fears and anxieties on the dissatisfactions we felt with those in authority—police, politicians, church leadership. We externalized them. Now those same fears and anxieties have become more internalized and they are affecting our expectations of one another, even of ourselves. We’ve had our own way for so long because we really didn’t have to think about other people—unless they were on a zoom call. Now that we are back in the world, our expectations have become a little distorted. We are a little quicker to judge. We have lost patience with one another or those things that we cannot control and aren’t performing the way we want them to. We have become tempted to walk away from those things we don’t like or don’t agree with simply because we cannot have our way. We have become Joseph.
Joseph resolves to dismiss Mary. In his eyes, she has distorted the social order and introduced a level of insecurity and fear into the system. The only way for him to regain his equilibrium is to bring his life back to status quo. He is not wrong. We have all known some time in our life in which our fears and doubts and insecurities have pointed us back to where we were, encouraged our resistance to whatever possibilities might lie ahead, overwhelmed our hopes and dreams. We have all allowed our fear to be more than our faith. Joseph has allowed his fear to lessen his possibilities not increase his faith.
When we allow our fear to direct our lives, we lose touch with the purposes of God. The church will be the first place to tell you that life is not about less suffering, it is about more faith. And if we are afraid we are going to suffer in some way and allow those fears to dictate that path, then we will be lessened not strengthened and certainly not made righteous. If the pandemic has taught us anything, I hope it has taught us that.
The purposes of God are to love God and love one another as we love ourselves. We might make an argument grounding Joseph’s decision to dismiss Mary quietly as an action of love, but we know that it is an action of resistance. Resistance to God who acts through God’s people and often unbeknownst to us—certainly unbeknownst to Joseph. Enter a divine being—an angel of the Lord—to set right the path in front of this righteous man. And the angels’ first words are “do not be afraid.”
Fear can so easily take hold of our hearts and rule our lives. And when we allow that fear to motivate our actions, our behaviors, our thoughts then we diminish one another and ourselves too. We don’t give each other a chance. Instead of lifting one another up, we tear one another down. That is true not simply about people, but the way we approach systems and institutions. We stop giving things a chance and simply label and define them as less than what we expect—judge them unworthy—and walk away doing nothing to help make them better.
Maybe that is ok. Maybe sometimes we need to walk away because we’ve gotten too close, we’re holding on too tight. But maybe sometimes, if we aren’t paying attention, if we’ve shut our hearts to the world around us and, subsequently, shut our hearts to God, we miss out on the opportunities to fear less and faith more. Just think what we might have missed out on if Joseph had walked away from Mary—he would have walked away from Emmanuel, “God with us.” To be fearless is to live life knowing God is with us and we can only do that when we are willing to stay connected to one another even when the other disappoints us or doesn’t live into our expectations.
An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and said, “do not be afraid…” What he meant was, “do not let your fear overwhelm your faith. Be fearless.”