GBBW: An Angel Visits Joseph
Christmas, week 2/5
Welcome to week 2 of the Christmas Series for the Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough! For each of the 5 Sundays of December, you’ll get an email with the usual GBBW goodies:
A paraphrase of the story
Ideas to wonder, play, and pray
Background details for grown ups to help with kids’ awesome questions
and as a bonus, there’s a preschool version for kids under 5 as well!
Normally the GBBW includes a mini-essay, but for this month, we’ll have a mini-devotion instead. Let’s dive in.
Joseph’s story is one of those Christmas vignettes we’re so very used to, so familiar that if we aren’t careful we might miss what’s right under the surface.
God is making a big, big ask of Joseph. In a culture that values honor above all else, he’s being asked to sacrifice his honor, putting his life on a very different trajectory than the good and faithful carpenter could ever have imagined, all in the name of protecting a child who wasn’t even his own, on the basis of a dream vision.
For Joseph, Christmas is a story of hope. But standing in front of the hope, maybe almost blocking it entirely from view, is the massive choice he’s being asked to make: whether God can be trusted to guide him in what will inevitably come next.
Joseph wakes from his dream and does exactly what the angel told him to do, choosing to believe that God will, in fact, guide him as he walks down the difficult path of sacrifice, and that as God guides him, he will find that the path of sacrifice is, paradoxically, also the path to abundant life.
READ
Matthew 1:18-25
18 This was how the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place. His mother, Mary, was engaged to Joseph; but before they came together she turned out to be pregnant—by the holy spirit. 19 Joseph, her husband-to-be, was an upright man. He didn’t want to make a public example of her. So he decided to set the marriage aside privately. 20 But, while he was considering this, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared to him in a dream.
“Joseph, son of David,” said the angel, “don’t be afraid to get married to Mary. The child she is carrying is from the holy spirit. 21 She is going to have a son. You are to give him the name Jesus; he is the one who will save his people from their sins.”
22 All this happened so that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: 23 “Look: the virgin is pregnant, and will have a son, and they shall give him the name Emmanuel,”—which means, in translation, “God with us.”
24 When Joseph woke up from his sleep he did what the Lord’s angel had told him to. He married his wife, 25 but he didn’t have sexual relations with her until after the birth of her son. And he gave him the name Jesus.
REFLECT
Where do you need God’s guidance right now?
PRAY
God, Sometimes I want it to work where your clear guidance means the next steps will be easy. Where your presence with me means I don’t have to sacrifice much. But that’s often not how things play out in real life.
So today I ask for clear guidance and to be aware of your presence, and I ask for wisdom, strength and courage for the parts that will be challenging or require me to sacrifice.
Amen.
