Behold

"In scandal, find reconciliation," a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent I watched yesterday, opened my eyes anew to just how "scandalous" the Christmas story is. The Rev. Winnie Varghese, whom I heard at St Mark's in the Bowery and is now at Trinity Wall Street, was preaching on the apparently thankless first chapter of Matthew, a forty-two generation genealogy of Jesus (well, of Joseph) and the start of the nativity narrative. Yet if we were familiar with the names in the genealogy, she suggested, it would tell you all you need to know about the kind of story Matthew was beginning. This isn't Mary's family yet, but the genealogy, surprisingly, includes the names of four women in its cascade of male begettings: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and "the wife of Uriah." If you know what they underwent - perhaps Mary did - you know this will not be an easy story.

For his part Joseph, son of Jacob, isn't the first Joseph, son of Jacob in the family, and like his forebear (an uncle many generations before), he's a dreamer. In Matthew, Rev. Varghese recounted, Joseph sees four dreams, follows them, then disappears from the story. He never speaks. Mary doesn't either. The powerful - the Magi, the Governor - speak, but Mary and Joseph listen, and see. There's a lesson already in this. And what does Joseph see? His first dream comes in Matthew 1, as he's instructed not to cast away his unaccountably pregnant young fiancé, as righteousness would require, but rather to care for her and her child. A scandalous response to a scandal, upending a scandal-filled family history - but this, Rev. Varghese reminded us, is what the justice of God looks like. Wow... It's like hearing the story for the first time.

There are no shepherds in Matthew's telling. They come in Luke, society's lowliest the first to be told of the birth of the savior... and the only audience for a performance by the hosts of heaven! He's born in a manger, surrounded by beasts of burden? Scandalous! Venite adoremus!