Advent 1998

"Will you come home with me?"

Cis for Cornell

In this issue Pastor Lori Cornell joins me in conversation about the gospel lesson for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, concerning the problem pregnancy of Mary and Joseph. Pastor Cornell is enjoying the recent birth of her own newborn, her second daughter, Anna Lydia Cornell Chamberlain. As she explains, "My second child (like the first) was not conceived by the Holy Spirit (athough certainly he had a hand in that too), but with the help of my husband, Pastor Douglas Chamberlain."

Lori, Doug, Elizabeth, and Anna reside in Lakewood, Washington, where Lori serves as Associate Pastor at Christ Lutheran Church. Doug serves at Lutheran Church of Christ the King ten miles down the road. The family has recently spent several weeks becoming better acquainted before Lori goes back to Christ Lutheran to preach about another baby on Christmas Eve.

Besides parenting and pastoring, Lori also serves as the Board President for the Lakewood Area Shelter Association (LASA). LASA offers transitional shelter, education, and emergency outreach services to families in Lakewood who might otherwise find themselves with "no place in the inn."

What follows in this conversation with Pastor Cornell is someone else's resume'.

rwb

RWB: The gospel lesson you have chosen for our conversation is Matthew 1:18-25. It's bold of you to take on that text. For it's long been one of the most controversial, dwelling as it does on Jesus' so-called virgin birth. (It's probably more accurate to speak of his virginal conception.) And here you've just given birth yourself--for the second time!--so you approach the text pretty empirically. That being so, the text must strike you as rather unbalanced since it does not really feature Mary, the mother, so much as it does Joseph, "poor" Joseph, as if he were the one with the big worry, and he the hero who comes through after all. But I suspect that you, always the inclusivist and the caring pastor, see Joseph as typical of us all, both in his fear and in his faith. How fitting to have a young mom help us identify with this conflicted father, who's not even the real father.

First, I assume that Joseph's most glaring problem was that his fiance was pregnant, no thanks to him. The text records that already before Mary and he "came together, she was found to be with child." (v. 18b) Is the sheer fact of this problem pregnancy -- a fact no one denies, as far as I know -- our problem, too? Else it would be hard to make a "crossing" out of it, from Joseph to us. If it is our problem as well, do you see us somehow caught between the same two alternatives to which Joseph was limited? (v. 19)?

LAC: Joseph's predicament (and, you could say, ours) begins even before we hear about Mary becoming pregnant by the Holy Spirit. As soon as the gospel writer Matthew tells us about Jesus' genealogy in the first verses of his gospel, he gives us a clear indication of the way God intervenes in human affairs: "An account of the genealogy of Jesus the