Audi, Hot Santa, Joseph, and You
It’s Christmas season…actually, it’s Advent, but advertisers don’t know how to make Advent profitable, so after Thanksgiving we just skip to Christmas. With Christmas season comes Christmas ads. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching TV or on your phone or just driving down the street you are getting bombarded with ads…billboards, commercials, influencers, etc., etc. The interesting thing about ads is they are a mirror. They reflect back to us what attracts us, what entices us, what we find appealing. They are windows into our values and beliefs. One of the most blatant examples in recent memory is an Audi Christmas commercial from a few years ago. It shows people doing good deeds. One woman walks down the sidewalk putting quarters in all the meters before she returns to her Audi and pulls away stifling the mean looking meter lady. Another guy is shoveling snow off a driveway and you discover it’s his neighbor’s driveway when he walks back to his own house where his Audi sits in the driveway. And at the end of the commercial the tagline is: “Not all gifts are given, some are earned.” I almost threw up when I first saw this. It still makes my stomach turn. We’re not even going to get into the ridiculous idea that people who drive Audis are all pillars of morality. Although, I must confess we do have an old Audi. But the slogan “Not all gifts are given, some are earned”…is just flat out wrong.
A picture of moral righteousness?
This is what we think though. As we’ve established Audi is just mirroring back to us what we want to hear. We believe this…that we have to earn our way…even our gifts! Small detail a gift by definition cannot be earned. Saying not all gifts are given literally makes no sense. If you earn something it is not a gift it is a reward. You earned it…you deserved it…it was owed to you. Any and every gift is always given without exception…that’s what makes it a gift. BUT we don’t think this way. SO many of our Christmas traditions are consistent with Audi’s commercial. The whole concept of Santa Claus has gone this way. You know the song… “you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout I’m telling you why, you’re elf overlord is coming to town. He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” The idea of Santa giving so called gifts to all the good little girls and boys and giving coal to the bad ones goes even further than Audi…it’s saying that all gifts are earned, not some. You get what you deserve.
The interesting twist in recent years on Santa is that we want Santa to be more attractive. We want a hot Santa. Have you noticed that? Just follow the links and watch Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods recent campaigns. A pretty buff Santa with a nicely shaped beard and good hair is the one judging who is naughty and nice. If we’re gonna bust our butts to be good for some imaginary authority, then we at least want the payoff to be better than just the approval of some old bearded dude. We want the law…we want to have to prove we are good, but we also want the law (in this case Santa) to be kind of sexy. The reward is best if it comes from someone we find attractive. This is what we have done with Christmas. We’ve turned the tradition of Saint Nicolas, who, legend says, secretly gave gifts to desperate and needy children, into the cops. Santa and his elf minions are the morality police, but at least he’s good looking. Not all gifts are given, some are earned…you get what you deserve.
Both cops
Thank God this is not what Christmas is about. Audi is wrong and our version of Santa Claus is wrong, no matter how attractive we try to make him. Christmas is all about a gift, THE gift, and we did nothing to deserve Him. We did not earn Him. He did not come because we were good little boys and girls…it was the exact opposite. He was given to us freely not because of us, but because of the Giver.
Consider Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father. You gotta sympathize with poor Joseph. Can you imagine being betrothed to your sweetheart, excited to get married and start your life with her. Then she goes on a trip to visit her old cousin, and she comes back pregnant! That would have been devastating. Kate and I were engaged for a long time because we were young, and I couldn’t wait to propose to her. I wanted to marry her so badly. She was a year behind me, so I knew we would want to wait to actually get married until after she graduated from college, but I wanted to ask her to marry me. SO I did, and we had to wait almost 18 months to get married. Even still it was such a relief to be engaged. Once you take that step and ask, and she says yes…you make that commitment to each other, and you can begin to finally talk freely about what life is going to be like. You can dream together, plan together, and rest in the security knowing that the potential what ifs and uncertainties of dating have begun to finally fade. That’s where Joseph was, and then all of sudden Mary is pregnant. Disappointment is an understatement. If I were him I would have been devastated…heartbroken, betrayed, sad, angry, uncertain, scared. The life I had envisioned with her, that I was so pumped about, that I had been waiting for was now over. I thought she was the one. I love her.
Matthew tells us that Joseph was a good guy. He wanted to do the right thing. We can still see his love for Mary because he decides to divorce her quietly. This was an act of love. Now that may not seem like a very big deal to us, but when you know the law…the moral law…which if you own an Audi you already know because you are an expert on morality remember. Under the law of Moses, given by God, a betrothed woman that commits adultery was to be stoned to death. That was the penalty…we obviously think that is extreme, but it speaks to how seriously they took righteousness then. Adultery is a sin and the penalty of sin is death. But Joseph loved Mary, and he did not want that to happen to her. So, he decided to divorce her quietly and not bring extra attention to her and her unfortunate situation.
The funny thing about this is that very often we read this part and think, “Ah, there’s the earning part.” Joseph was a good guy. He was doing the right thing and God saw that. God knew his heart and that’s why he chose Joseph to be Jesus’ earthly father. This is the way we think. We’re so desperate to earn our way…we are so allergic to the idea of a real gift..something unearned, undeserved that we subconsciously search for something that we can hold onto that will reaffirm our belief that we get what we deserve. We want to be able to say, “just be a good guy like Joseph, and God will be pleased with you.” We think we’ve got to earn it. We want the law not grace. It’s all about us and what we do or don’t do. But that’s not what really happens here.
Joseph was doing his best to deal with a bad situation, but he was wrong. He thought Mary was unfaithful to him. He thought she had betrayed him. He jumped to all the wrong conclusions. His perspective, while understandable, was way off until God by his grace explained it all to him. Joseph was still thinking according to the law, and according to even the law of nature there’s only one way a woman gets pregnant, and Joseph wasn’t involved, so she must have cheated, right? The law cannot comprehend the miraculous. It’s all about the rules. But God is so much bigger. He goes beyond the law’s comprehension and reach. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, God operates with deeper magic. The angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him what’s really going on. He addresses Joseph in his fear, knowing how unsettling all of this was, and he tells him what God was doing. This wasn’t just any baby. This child was not the product of sin…exactly the opposite. This baby is from the Holy Spirit…he is God’s great gift to the world! You will call him Jesus because he is going to save his people from their sins. He doesn’t leave Joseph in the dark. He doesn’t leave him in his ignorance. He tells him the same promise that Mary heard. This child is the one you have all been waiting for…he is the Savior. And the angel is very clear that this is going to happen…there’s no hint of “oh I hope Joseph makes the right choice.” The angel says Mary will bear a son, and you will call him Jesus. This is God’s good will for his creation. He was keeping his promises and Joseph is a very important part.
Matthew spells this out even more clearly for us in case any of us doubted that this was God’s plan all along. This was to fulfill the prophecy given in Isaiah 7 that “a virgin will conceive and bear a son and they shall call him Immanuel.” God was doing just what he said he would. No one understood what he meant when he said it, but it was starting to become clear. All of it was certainly a surprise to Joseph and Mary…they didn’t think that they were special in anyway. They didn’t think that they were deserving, that they had earned this from God. It was all a gift. It all depended on the Giver, and the Giver delights in giving good gifts to his children.
God had promised from the very beginning after Adam and Eve fell that he would reverse what we had done. He would undo the sin and brokenness that we brought into the world. He made promises to Adam and Eve. He made promises to Noah. He made promises to Abraham. He made promises to Issac and Jacob. He made promises to Moses. He made promises to David and on down the line to the promises he made to Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, and now Joseph. God was making good on all of his promises. Jesus is the gift that we had been waiting for since the dawn of time. He is the one that would come and save us from our sin. Those are his names that Matthew highlights for us here. The name “Jesus” tells us what he will do…it means “God saves.” And the name “Immanuel” tells us who he is…it means “God with us.” This child is God himself dwelling with us, as one of us, and he has come to save us once and for all.
None of this was earned, none of this was deserved…not by any of the characters we hear about throughout Advent, and not by any of us. It was exactly the opposite. We are getting what we do not deserve. We are given God’s grace. We are given God’s mercy. We are given God’s own Son. It is all gift. As Paul says, “All of God’s promises find their yes in Him.” This is what Christmas is really about…the awesome gift of God for you and me, Jesus Christ. He is for you, and he is with you. He is yours, and you are his. Amen.
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