Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. (Matthew 1:19)

I’m getting married in the morning!

Ding dong the bells are gonna chime!

I’m getting married! I’m getting married!

So get me to the church on time

I have a number of friends - some of them former pupils, some of them colleagues - who are engaged and planning their weddings and they’re so excited, if perhaps a little nervous. Do you have any idea how much weddings cost these days? An absolute fortune. I get it though. They want everything to be right for the big day. They want everything to go smoothly. They want it to be perfect. It was the same in New Testament times - there are several references to weddings in Gospels. Perhaps the best-know is the wedding at Cana where Jesus, according to John, performed his first miracle. The host had run out of wine. Disaster! So Jesus turns water into wine so that nothing will spoil the couple’s big day.

So let’s try to put ourselves into Joseph’s head for a minute or two. He’s engaged to be married. He’s excited and, perhaps, a little nervous. Maybe we can imagine him walking, a spring in his step, down the streets of Nazareth singing the song we started with to himself - or whatever the first century Aramaic version of it might have been. He’s marrying Mary and, no doubt, they’ve been planning the wedding for some time.

Then his world falls in. Mary is pregnant. He knows he’s not the father, so what’s he going to think? What would any of us think? That she’s cheated on him. That she’s been unfaithful to him. How could she do this to him? Last week I was talking about how there seems to be nothing special about Mary; nor is there anything special about Joseph. Sure, he’s a descendant of David, but so is half the population. He must have felt angry. He must have felt betrayed. He must have felt humiliated. Who wouldn’t? 

Joseph, in that sense, was nothing special. Except in this. However angry, however betrayed, however humiliated Jospeh felt he, in the only way he could, kept faith with Mary. He chose quietly to separate from her. He could have been vengeful. He could have taken her to court. Betrothal was a binding legal contract and he had the most compelling evidence that she’d committed adultery. Bad things happened to women caught in adultery; shame and humiliation from being dragged through the courts would have been the least of it.

But he keeps faith. Then he gets visited by an angel who tells him what’s actually going on and that God has a purpose for this child that is to be born; that God is working his purpose out in him. Matthew links the angel’s pronouncement to a passage in Isaiah. And Joseph trusts this vision and goes ahead and marries his pregnant bride. This can’t have been easy. I can’t believe the wedding celebrations would have been as joyful as they might have been. He and Mary are now Scandal Central in their small community.

But Joseph is faithful to Mary and he is faithful to God’s promise. He accepts their child, Jesus, as his own and brings him up with love. How do I know that? How often in the Gospels does Jesus talk of love in terms of the love of a father for his child? Where did he get that template? How did the love of a father for his child get to be so important to Jesus if he had not known it from his own father?

This is the faith of Joseph; that when his world fell in on him he chose to trust God. He chose to trust that there was a purpose in God’s actions. He chose to trust that, even if things were going to be hard, that God was with him; that he would fulfil his promise. This is a recurring idea in the Bible - that God delivers on his promises; that God will stick with his people always unless they choose to walk away from him. That even in the darkest of times God doesn’t forget us - any more than he forgot about Joseph and his hurt.

This is the faith of Joseph; that he trusted God. And that, ultimately, is what faith is. It’s trust. Faith, ultimately isn’t about beliefs or theologies. You can recite the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s prayer to your hearts content - and there’s nothing wrong with that - but it doesn’t get to the heart of Christian faith. We can debate until the cows come home about how many sacraments there are or how we should interpret scripture - and that’s fine as long as we do so in fellowship - but it doesn’t get to the heart of the Christian faith. We can build welcoming churches, sing glorious hymns, compose fine prayers - and we should - but it doesn’t get to the heart of the Christian faith.

The heart of the Christian faith is none of these things. It is a relationship with God in Jesus Christ. It is a relationship based on trust - which is, ultimately what faith is. The trust that even in the darkest times God is there for us. The trust that when the church seems to falter, when people fall away and when society mocks it, God is still working his purpose out. That he is working it out in us. 

The foundation of trust is love. The heart of the Christian faith is that God loves us - loves us so fully, so completely, so perfectly that he gave his own son for us; that for all the times we break faith with him and give way to greed, selfishness, vengefulness, hatred, he does not give up on us; he does not break faith with us. This is love and it’s why we can trust God even if he can’t trust us. And maybe it’s love that meant that Joseph would not put Mary to shame even if, for a time, he could not trust her. Maybe that is the faith of Joseph.

Or maybe that it is just that he trusts God to work his purpose out and that he loves us. We all have times when it seems the world is falling in on us, but God never leaves our side. We all have doubts about what we believe sometimes, but God does not despise us for our doubts but embraces us in them. We all have times when it’s hard to grasp what God’s purpose is but God is working it out. However hard it is sometimes to trust God in faith, he remains faithful.

So let’s face forward in confidence and hope. Let us adopt the faith of Joseph and trust in God’s love for us and for all humanity. Let’s gather at the manger of Betlehem - the ultimate sign that God is faithful, that he has a purpose and a design for his creation and his children. Let us gather at the manger of Bethlehem - the ultimate sign of God’s love for humanity and that we can trust that, however dark things are, whether the world falls in on us, he will be with us always. That he, in Christ, is Emmanuel - God with us.

Lord grant us faith. Faith that you love us and all your children. Call us to the manger and Bethlehem and grant us hope in the smile of a newborn child. Grant us love that we can reflect into the world and truth that we can share