Sermon preached by Christy Brown on Sunday, December 29, 2025
Good morning, Vine Street
My name is Christy Brown, and I am a third year divinity student and this is my second year interning here at Vine Street. I am grateful for this opportunity to preach this morning and I am grateful to each of you who showed up here today on this last Sunday between Christmas and New Years! So, thank you for being here!
Will you join me in prayer as we prepare out hearts and minds to receive the word?
Lord, take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds and think through them;
Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for You.
Amen.
For the past month Margie and Wesley have been talking about fear and hope in the Advent Season and how God’s presence can give us hope in a fearful world. And I know that we here at Vine Street are full of hope. It is because of hope that we gather each week. It is because of hope that we offer grants, and host Room in the Inn, and collect school supplies and food for people who have had their SNAP benefits cut, because we know that the church can help spread God’s hope in a world of fear. And it is because of hope that this church just voted for a young woman to be our senior pastor in a time when some denominations are actively removing women from ministry.
This week I have found hope because my sons who live far away have been home, and together, we have traveled and we have visited with cousins and aunts and uncles. And we got to celebrate here at Vine Street on Christmas Eve. It has been joyful and stressful and full of travel and friends and family.
I know that some of you have also had family coming to town, and some of you have traveled, and some of us have been missing those who are not here this year.
But whatever your Christmas has been like, December never feels like just a normal month.
When I compare our modern Christmas to the story Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. I see some overlap.
For the census, all their extended family had to return to the homeland. It was crowded and noisy and although there was no room for them at the inn, they were still probably celebrating some reunions with old friends and family that they hadn’t seen in a while. Their whole clan had to come together and there was joy in the birth of a new baby.
But just like our Christmas, things change after Christmas day. After the baby is born. After the census when people start packing up to go home.
Today’s story focuses on that part of Christmas. What happens after. And it’s a whole different story. We have been so focused on the joy of a new baby, we forget that as soon as that baby enters the world, his life is in danger. Herod has learned of Jesus’s existence. And Herod is a king who feels threatened by anyone else who has a claim to be king – Even a tiny baby is threatening to an insecure man clinging to power. So, when the wisemen tell Herod that they are following a star that marked the birth of a new king, Herod feels threatened. He uses his power to declare that all Hebrew baby boys should be put to death. If he can’t single out which baby boy is the Christ, he will just kill them all.
And even though we have just been on this spiritual high from Christmas, we are suddenly thrust back into the real world. A world of political unrest where the Hebrew people are not in power, but they are subjects to the whims of an insecure king.
Sound familiar?
We all know what this world looks like. It’s a world where a powerful men use their positions of authority to bully others. It’s a world where one ethnic group feels superior to people of other ethnicities. Herod issuing an edict to kill all the Hebrew baby boys is a lot like ICE arresting undocumented Latino children from their schools. Or arresting their parents who have no criminal records on their way to work. It’s a world that shoots pepper balls at a pastor while he prays outside an ICE prison. It’s a world that blows up capsized boats to ensure there are no survivors of an illegal drug raid.
Herod was not concerned about how many Hebrew children he killed as long as he could remain in power. His story is still playing out all over the world. In Ukraine, in Gaza, in Venezuela, and in the streets of America. There are children and families crying as they live through horrific circumstances because of leaders who view them as political chattel and not humans.
And yet, the story in today’s scripture is different. Because it is not just a story about Herod. It doesn’t end with just the cruel edicts of an insecure king.
It is also the story of Joseph, a man who bravely and quietly listens to God’s call to do what he can to help one child. It’s not about the violence of Herod, It’s about how God uses a normal, everyday man to change the future of the world.
I don’t know a lot about Joseph. So, this week, I scoured the Bible and reference books to see what I could find out about him. Smith’s Bible Dictionary says it best, Joseph, “son of Heli, and reputed father of Jesus Christ. All that is told us of Joseph in the New Testament may be summed up in a few words.”
But how can that be right? He’s Joseph, the father of Jesus, he’s in all our nativity scenes. I only own 6 Biblical figurines, and he’s one of them, Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, and 3 wise men. He’s gotta be important, right? It turns out no one knows very much. There was a much later book called The History of Joseph the Carpenter, written in the 5th century. It places a lot of emphasis on the lifelong virginity of Mary by claiming that Joseph was an 89-year-old widower and already the father of James and other sons, when he agreed to wed the teenage, pregnant Mary. The same book says that he died at age 111, when Jesus would have been about 22 years old, so that explains why he wasn’t present for any of Jesus’s ministry.
The New Testament gives us much less. Joseph is only mentioned by name as a person who does something in a handful of verses, and in a few more he is referenced as “Jesus’s parents” or part of Jesus’s lineage.
The Gospel of Luke tells us that Joseph was engaged to a virgin named Mary and that he went to Bethlehem for the census where his pregnant wife gave birth to Jesus. That’s about it for Luke.
And while, Matthew’s Gospel gives us a little more: outlining Joseph’s lineage through Abraham and David and calling him a righteous man, Joseph by all accounts, seems like pretty a normal, quiet guy – just trying to provide for his family. And he doesn’t even have enough clout to make it into the inn in Bethlehem, so he finds a stable to provide shelter for his wife and child.
Joseph is just trying to get by in a world that is stacked against his people. Added to that - his life is in upheaval. First, when an angel of the Lord tells him that his future wife is going to give birth to the child of God. And later when an earthly king uproots his people and forces them to travel to Bethlehem for a census. It’s not a long journey by today’s standards, only a few hours by bus, but for Joseph and Mary it would have taken several days to make the trip, maybe even a week, on a donkey, with a very pregnant wife, and probably Joseph experienced some ridicule from the caravan who knew that Mary was pregnant before he took her as his wife.
No wonder when Jesus is born, the family decides to stay in Bethlehem for a little while. Mary is certainly in no condition to travel after childbirth, and Joseph is a tradesman, so he can probably find work in a lot of locations. Besides – show of hands – how many of you have ever traveled with a baby? And Mary and Joseph didn’t even have a stroller or a pack-n-play! They had a donkey and a manger.
So, it’s logical that Mary and Joseph decide to stay in Bethlehem with the baby for a while. We don’t know exactly how long, but some scholars believe it could have been several months or even a couple of years that the family lived in Bethlehem. Until one day, after the shepherds have come and gone, and the magi have brought their gifts and started their journey back home, after the Christmas story, when life is settling into something normal, an Angel appears to Joseph again.
Now even though Joseph is only mentioned in scripture maybe a dozen times, and he never once speaks, one of the ways we know that he is a righteous man is that he is visited by angels four times. In today’s scripture, just 10 verses, Joseph is visited by angels 3 times and the scripture says that each time, he followed the angels’ instructions. He did what God said. Even though Joseph could have dismissed their visit as just a dream, he did what God was calling him to do.
First, there was the angel back at the beginning of advent who appeared and told Joseph to honor his betrothal to Mary and serve as an earthly father to her child.
Then today’s story, a few years later, when an angel warns him to take his family and flee to Egypt. Joseph wasn’t in danger in Bethlehem. Even Mary was safe to stay there. But Joseph packs up everything and leaves his country to protect a child that technically wasn’t his because God’s angel appeared in a dream and told him to.
At this point the family has moved to Egypt and probably established a home and routine there. Maybe they aren’t even considering going back to Israel. But again, an angel appears to Joseph, this one telling him that it’s safe to return to his homeland, and he packs up to follow God’s call.
And finally, even when he is on his way, doing exactly what the angel told him, taking his young family back to Israel, Joseph learns from another vision that Herod’s son is now king, and he changes plans and takes the child farther north, up to Nazareth – a more isolated area north of Jerusalem where Jesus is less likely to attract attention. Joseph’s life revolves around protecting Jesus and yet he is rarely mentioned in the Bible and we never once hear him speak.
What can we learn today from Joseph, this silent man of action who listened for God’s call even in his sleep and immediately shifted his entire life to do what God directed?
We can say that angels don’t visit us today like they did in the Bible, but do they? Do we also get nudges from God in our sleep or in or subconscious minds? When we witness injustice in our world, do we feel a tug to do something about it? Isn’t that exactly why Vine Street had a food drive during the government shutdown when we knew people were losing their SNAP benefits? What else is God calling us to do?
We live in a world that likes to provide warning signs. If there’s a chance of bad weather, we have sirens that sound all over Nashville so people know to protect themselves, stay indoors, go to a save place, and crouch down in that position that we learned through drills in school. And that’s just the old-school technology. We also have alarms on our phones that can notify us of anything we want to know about. Weather alerts, amber alerts, silver alerts. Kroger has called me on more than one occasion to notify me that I purchased some peanut butter that might have been part of a recall. But I wonder, in a world with so many loud alerts, are we missing God’s quiet nudges?
Being a member at Woodmont, one of my favorite songs was Thom Schuyler’s Still Small Voice. If I had Margie’s singing voice, I might sing a few bars for you, but you can thank me now that I’m just going to read a couple of lines.
It’s not in the pounding of the thunder,
It’s not in the whip of the wind.
This planet could shake and take you under
But that’s not how you’ll hear from Him.
It’s louder than mountains as they crumble,
And softer than sweet morning rain,
And there in the midst of all your trouble,
Just listen as He speaks your name.
With a Still Small Voice
God calls us. But in our world where we are constantly on our phones or laptops or on Apple Play in our car, how do we hear that still, small voice?
And don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is when we ARE paying attention to media that we hear God’s voice. When we see pictures and videos on our phones of people being treated unjustly, that is also God’s voice.
Jesus told us, “whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”
That’s convicting. Because wherever we see the least of these. We see the face of God.
Whenever we hear a choking voice calling for justice or begging for help, we hear the voice of God.
Angels were watching and guiding Joseph in his dreams. But how many times have you tried to go to sleep and just couldn’t stop thinking about that image? The picture of war-ravaged Ukraine or Gaza, or the image of a hungry child’s eyes, the look of fear etched across a face of an undocumented worker, or from the man who was just asking for money on the side of the road with a sign that said, “I’m hungry. Anything helps?”
It's different for all of us, but what message is God planting in your heart today?
For Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, God was guiding them towards safety. Away from political forces that wanted end Jesus’s life even though political forces did ultimately crucify Jesus, Joseph protected him so Jesus could grow up and have a ministry and start a movement that changed the world. Without Joseph we wouldn’t have Christianity.
And it’s the same story throughout the Bible, God’s people are almost always fleeing from something. Moses, Joseph and Jacob were all fleeing. From Pharoah, or famine, or even family conflict.
In our world, people are still fleeing from war or famine or political oppression, as well as from hurricanes and forest fires. But the one thing they are not doing is sitting still.
Because fear requires an action:
We live in a fearful world, but fear leads us to action.
And fear can even be holy. When it draws us to protect others, like Joseph. Fear for others is why churches provide sanctuaries. It’s why we write to our government officials to protect SNAP funding, or protest at the capitol to protect queer and trans youth from unjust laws. And fear sometimes even causes us to break the law – like Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee who was recently convicted for allowing an immigrant to leave her courtroom by the back door when she knew ICE agents were waiting to deport him. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean we won’t face trouble, but it does mean we can face ourselves in the mirror knowing we stood on the side of justice.
Herod is also fearful. He fears losing his political power, and he politicalizes his fear, lashing out against perceived threats. Just like leaders today who exercise their authority at the expense of those who have no power to fight back.
But Joseph’s fear is not against something. He is fearful FOR the child. It’s a fear of protection and love that causes him to act
So today I ask myself, how do I react to fear?
Do I react like Herod and lash out to keep what is mine? Or do I fear FOR others and use what I have to help those who have even less?
I know sometimes I want to bury my head in a hole and forget it, but that doesn’t make the threat go away.
The Sanctified Art writers says “The Holy Family becomes a model for us – not because they lived without fear but because they allowed fear to move them toward justice, safety, and protection.
Fear FOR others is what fueled the Underground Railroad. It’s what causes people to create elaborate networks to protect battered women and children. It’s what causes volunteers to go into Ukraine or to travel into flood waters and fires to help those who are trapped. God’s hospitality often comes from unexpected places, through unexpected messengers, who can provide shelter in the arms of a stranger.
The Christmas story does not promise us a world without Herods, but it does promise us Emmanuel – God with us.
May our fear, like Joseph’s lead us to protect someone else.