that's exactly what this Emmanuel is coming to save sinners from, "their sin." So Joseph couldn't dismiss the virgin birth on merely biological grounds. That would've been too easy. He confronted a whole incredible soteriology as well.

Putting it bluntly, the angel's announcement sounds like an insult not only to Joseph's intelligence but to his very self-worth. For the baby to be properly conceived, an outside Donor will have to be brought in, "the Holy Spirit," since Joseph cannot be trusted to beget his own son. How humiliating! What he must have been tempted to tell the angel was not just, "Look, I know how babies are made," but rather, "That desperate we are not, to need my paternity and my whole patriarchal ancestry by-passed." The announcement gave Joseph far more to disbelieve than just the virgin birth. If he had a disbelieving bone in his body he must've shrugged, "Who needs it?" And come to think of it, isn't that the question exactly?

Fathered as usual

It was you, Lori, who reminded me how deeply scandalous is this text's diagnosis. As you scribbled on your postcard last week, the text exposes our "over-sentimentalized notion of 'Emmanuel/God-with-us.'" "How interesting," you wrote, "to be sentimental about one who saves us from our sins." It's as if we blunt the whole devastating point of the diagnosis by smiling: "Our 'sins?' H-m-m. How nice." Is that why you also said the text's "placement in the Advent season" is fitting, Advent being a penitential season? You seem to imply that Joseph isn't the only one being humbled.

LAC: The themes of Advent really offer us two avenues into this text, don't they? If Advent is understood as a season of waiting ("Come Thou Long Expected Jesus") -- in which we wait for Emmanuel to come (again) -- then Advent has something to say about Joseph's situation. Joseph was at the mercy of a God who promised to send Emmanuel so that Joseph and the world could see God's salvation in their lifetime. So Joseph was subject to the Advent experience of waiting for God to fulfill his promise. And the "waiting" of Advent does have a humbling character to it. Because when we wait, things don't happen according to our timeline. We are dependent on Someone else to bring our waiting to an end.

Joseph had his untenable crisis to wait through: Superficially, it was Mary's problem pregnancy; spiritually, it was a God who was meddling in Joseph's otherwise manageable life. And we, likewise, have our own untenable situations in which we wait for God to make sense of our lives -- and give us hope. We too are at the mercy of God.

The other traditional theme of the Advent season is, as you suggest, a penitential one. Perhaps not so different from the waiting/anticipation idea offered before. For even when it comes to repentance, what do we do but surrender power into the hands of its rightful owner? In the case of Joseph, he thought that power resided in his fulfilling God's law. After the angel's announcement, however, Joseph found himself at the mercy of a God who declared that he would fulfill all righteousness -- not through Joseph, but -- through Emmanuel, his Son.

Before God's declaration that he would come into the world through Jesus/Emmanuel, Joseph could at least try to fulfill God's expectations under the law. After God's declaration, Joseph couldn't do a thing to meet God's expectations. Instead, Emmanuel will be the one who responds to the world's need by being God-with-us; through Jesus/Emmanuel, God promises to save his people from their sins. That's quite an ironic and humbling twist in a plot that begins with a "righteous man" (Joseph) trying to do the right thing: In the end, it is God (in the man Jesus) who does the "righteous" thing for the sake of unrighteous people by dying on the cross.

RWB: If that finally is how the text diagnoses us, by so humiliating us as to make the virgin birth what we need as sinners, isn't that likewise where the text does the very opposite: begins our recovery? The Solution commences at the very pit of our humiliation, not before, except that now the humiliation is no longer ours alone. Not even ours first of all. Look who is now humbled in our place: "God with us." That this God should ever have been an offspring in the first place, a dependent God, when