We turn from Mary to Joseph this Sunday in our worship series Casting Christmas. Joseph’s character invites us to consider what it means to play a supporting role in the lives of others. One writer describes the story of Joseph this way on homileticsonline.com:
The story of the journey to Bethlehem and the birth itself, when viewed through lenses ground to focus on only Western European cultural traditions, finds this ordeal strange and cruel. We see Joseph foolishly dragging a very pregnant Mary out on a long, hard trip. Instead we should see a man who had so welcomed the Holy Spirit into his life that he took the pregnant Mary for his wife without any reservations or revenge. She was so thoroughly his wife that he did not dream of leaving her name off the official Roman role-call being taken. He brought her, with a pregnancy too advanced for the amount of time they had been formally married, right into the middle of all his relatives during this Roman-forced family reunion.
Think of a time when you supported someone even though it wasn’t the “easy” or “popular” way to go. What did you have to let go of? What did you have to take on? What did you learn from this experience that might help prepare you to take on a supporting role once again?
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