Month: January 2026

Righteousness

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Sermon for January 11, 2026

I want to rewind Matthew’s gospel for a few minutes this morning, back to the beginning. I want to go back to the very beginning of the story, before Jesus is born. One of the things that we are told in the very beginning of the gospel is that Joseph, Jesus’s adoptive father, was a righteous man. He was a righteous man, and when he discovered that Mary was pregnant (and not by him) he decided that rather than publicly shaming her he would put her away quietly. He wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He wasn’t going to go through with the marriage, but he would find some way to handle it discreetly. 

Now you need to understand that this is NOT what the law commanded. He didn’t HAVE to do that. Under the law, Joseph would have been completely justified in having Mary publicly shamed and even stoned. That was the penalty for adultery. And yes, we know that Mary was not an adulteress, but there was no way that an unmarried pregnant woman could have proven that to anyone’s satisfaction. Nobody other than Mary knows the real truth yet, not even Joseph. So, under a strict reading of the law, Joseph could have had Mary put to death, and he would have been justified under the law. The law was on his side. But Joseph didn’t do that. Even before Joseph had a revelation of the truth about Mary’s condition, he had already decided that he would be merciful to Mary and deal with the whole situation as quietly as he could. He didn’t HAVE to do that, but that is what he did. And that is why Matthew calls him righteous. He did something that he didn’t have to do. He sacrificed some of his own pride. The law gave Joseph the right to just walk away, but Joseph decided to do more than the law requires. And Matthew calls him a righteous man. 

So being righteous, according to Matthew, is NOT just about being on the right side of the law. It isn’t just about fulfilling the letter of the law. It is about doing MORE than the law requires. It is about doing more than you have to do. It is about putting mercy before justice. It is about being more concerned with what is right, than you are with what your rights are. It is about being more concerned with the needs of others than your own needs. That is righteousness. I wanted to go back to that moment earlier in Matthew’s gospel, because we encounter that righteous word again in today’s passage and it is helpful to understand what the author means when he uses that word. Righteousness is about more than just being right. It is a self-sacrificial way of relating to others. When we understand that, I think we will better understand what is happening when Jesus is baptized in today’s gospel.

Jesus meets John the Baptist in the river Jordan. John is baptizing people for the repentance of sins. People are asking to be washed clean and to start a new life in God. Well, if Jesus truly is the sinless Son of God, then this makes no sense. Why would someone who is without sin need to be baptized. It doesn’t make sense. Jesus is sinless, why does he need baptism? It doesn’t make sense to John the Baptist either, because when Jesus approaches him he says “I need to be baptized by you…why are you coming to me?” 

And Jesus’s response is: Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. There is that righteous word again. That is our clue that this is about a holiness that goes beyond the letter of the law. This act or ritual that Jesus is participating in, it isn’t about just doing what the law requires for himself. This is about doing more than the law requires for others. This is about compassion and mercy. Jesus doesn’t enter into the waters of baptism for himself; he does it for us. We just sang the hymn “Christ when for US you were baptized.” The law doesn’t require it for him. He does it for us. He does it to set us free. You may know that the gospel writer Matthew loves to draw parallels between Jesus and Moses. Well Moses was free, but he went back to Egypt to save his people. Jesus was free from sin, but he enters into it to pull us out, to save his people. He does it to be united with us in our sinfulness, ultimately so that he can redeem our sinful human nature. He unites himself with us so that we may be united with him. That is baptism. It is the place where divine love and forgiveness meet human sinfulness.

There is a prayer that I say to myself during the mass that happens when we are setting up for communion. As I bless the water that is about to be mixed with the wine I say “through the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” We are blessed to share in the divine life, because God was humble enough to share in our humanity. That is what baptism is about. That is what communion is about. That is what the whole Incarnation is about. Jesus was humble enough to be baptized, even though he didn’t need to be. Joseph was humble enough to care about Mary’s life and future, even when he technically didn’t HAVE to. That is Matthew’s understanding of righteousness. Sacrificing your own needs for the needs of others. Doing more than the law commands. Putting mercy ahead of justice. Jesus in his preaching and teaching, and in the example of his life, doesn’t negate or dismiss the law; he encourages us to go beyond it. Jesus isn’t baptized for his sake, he is baptized for our sake. And Matthew makes it clear that that type of sacrificial love is something with which God is well pleased.

You are not the first outsider to kneel before the manger

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Sermon for January 4, 2026

Readings:

The church of the nativity in Bethlehem is one of the oldest churches in the world. It was commissioned by the emperor Constantine, who basically was told to build it by his mother Helena, around the year 326. It sits on top of a cave that is the traditional birthplace of our lord Jesus Christ. People were already worshipping Jesus in that spot long before Constantine built a church there. That is why it was built there. So, it is probably the oldest site of almost continuous Christian worship that exists. Christ has been worshipped and adored on that spot from the first Christmas to this Christmas with very few interruptions. Constantine’s church would burn down at one point, but it was immediately rebuilt by another emperor, Justinian.  That building still exists to this day, but it almost didn’t. 

In the year 614 the Persian army invaded the Holy Land, destroying much in its path, but not the church of the nativity. Legend has it that the commander of the army, a man named Sharbaraz, noticed near the entrance to the church three figures in beautiful mosaic on the wall. And these figures were dressed like Zoroastrian or Persian priests. They were the Magi, or the wise men coming to pay homage to the baby Jesus. Well, the commander was moved, and a bit perplexed, and he thought that surely there must be something holy about this place. This was not just some foreign shrine to a foreign god. On the wall, there were people that looked like him worshipping the God that this church was dedicated to. The commander could see that this story, this shrine, this temple, and this God involved his own people. So, he spared the church and it more or less stands to this day. Or at least that is how the story goes. What is certainly true is that the Persians decided not to destroy that church even though they did destroy so much else.

What I love about that legend of the Persian army commander though, is that it reflects a truth that we find in the scripture story itself. People from distant lands, different races, different religions, different stations of life and different customs all manage to find in the child in the manger, a life that touches their own. This baby that has been born as King of the Jews, is noticed by people from outside the Jewish world from the very beginning. He is even noticed by the very stars in the sky.

Matthew tells us in his gospel that wise men, magi (magicians or astronomers) came from the East. They were not Jewish. They did not know the Jewish prophets. They were outsiders. They had been led there by another sign, a star, that spoke to them (as astronomers) in a way that the Jewish prophecies might not have. God sent them their own sign to lead them to Jesus. Now Jesus was still the promised Jewish messiah, so the wise men still needed some help and direction from the Jewish prophets and scriptures to actually find him and know him, but their journey to him began long before they ever hear a word of the Prophet Micah. God had been leading them to Jesus long before they ever got to Bethlehem. 

Now, the church has always held that the story of the wise men was an early sign that Jesus’s mission would be to the gentiles as well as the Jews. He came to save the whole world. His birth affects everyone. One of the things that I love about this story in Matthew’s gospel though is how few details we actually have about these mysterious characters. We are told they came from the East, but that doesn’t tell us much. We are told they were Magi (and you can translate that as magicians, astronomers, scientists). They weren’t Jewish. They travel following a star. They find Jesus and offer him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Then they slip out of town, having been warned by God not to offer Herod any assistance. We don’t really know where they came from. We don’t really know their religion or their race. We don’t even really know that there were three of them. The bible says there were three gifts, it doesn’t actually say there were three wise men. And sadly, it doesn’t say anything about camels either, but in my mind there will always be camels. The wise men are something of a blank slate or an uncolored page in a story book and I kind of have to wonder if God didn’t do that on purpose. We don’t know much about these outsiders that worshipped Jesus so we can fill in the details as we see fit. We can make them look and dress like us. Or we can make them look completely unlike us. You can make them look African or Asian or European. You can make them look tame or exotic. Yesterday, our youth went to an exhibit of Medieval illuminated psalms at the Morgan library in the city, and there in one of them was a depiction of the wise men looking an awful lot like European kings. These mysterious Magi who walk on and walk off the stage, they give us all another chance to see ourselves as a part of Jesus’s story. Their image is a sign to us today, as much as it was a sign to the Persian commander in 614, that it doesn’t matter how much of an outsider you are, you will not be the first outsider to kneel before the manger. Someone who looks just like you has worshipped this God before.