–Zane Grey  (The Rainbow Trail)

       “So when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth.”

                         –Luke 2:39 (NKJV)
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I have thought often of Joseph.  He must have been an extraordinary man.  The first thing we read about him, other than the genealogy is,  “And Joseph her [promised] husband, being a just and righteous man and not wanting to expose her publicly to shame, planned to send her away and divorce her quietly.” (Matthew 1:19, Amplified)  Before God and before man Joseph was a just and righteous man.
       Joseph had his plans set on a wedding, and having Mary as his bride.  Then he found out that she was pregnant.  We are not told how he found out; whether or not she told him, but the Scripture does say that “he thought about these things” (Matthew 1:20).  He wanted to do the right thing.  He wanted to act in a rightful manner.  It wasn’t immediately after he found out that Mary was with child that he received an answer; it was while he was thinking about Mary, and the right thing to do.  A dream came to him, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.”  (Matthew 1:20, NKJV)
       We do not see any questioning.  We do not see concern or being fretful, but we see obedience and faithfulness on the part of Joseph.  This was a man, who probably inside was in awe, who obeyed the voice of the Lord.  He took on the task of being the earthly father of the holy Son of God.  WOW!  Think of the responsibility!  It is a great responsibility to be a father.  That is one of the major problems in our country today–the lack of fathers taking their rightful responsibility.  There is one segment of society where 76% of families to do not have a father providing the leadership and the security that is his responsibility.  Then, how many families have what we would call “dead-beat dads”?  Men who are there in body only, but do not recognize their role as a father.  Oh they may be a buddy to a child, they may take them places once in a while thinking that the occurrence makes them a father, but they are not there to guide, to discipline, to teach.
       Joseph was a man who took on the responsibility to raise Jesus.  He was a man who was very familiar with the Old Testament, and now it was his duty to raise the One who would bring in the New Testament.  He must have been a man who was looking for the Messiah, and I wonder if he knew that he was raising the Messiah?  Notice, Mary was visited by Gabriel to tell her the good news and of her being chosen, but it was to Joseph that the messages came.  He was told to marry her, he was told what to name the child, he was told to leave Bethlehem, and he was told to return from Egypt.  The word of the Lord came to Joseph and he acted upon it.
       “And did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn Son.  And he [Joseph] called His name JESUS.” (Matthew 1:25, NKJV)  Here we have a man listening to the word in a dream, knowing the written word, and was going to be responsible in raising the living Word.  How about that for responsibility?  Upon Joseph lay the responsibility of raising Jesus in the words of the Law.  It was up to Joseph to name Him, to take Him to the temple and to present Him to the Lord.  What we see following that is, “And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.” (Luke 2:40, NKJV)
       In our day, the man of the house is to be ridiculed.  He is to be mocked, and as C.S. Lewis said, made to be a man without a chest.  No backbone in today’s society–that would not be true of Joseph.  He would have been a hard worker, he would have provided for his family both in the area of security, sustenance, and spiritual.  He was not rich, but he had a work ethic and he was a man of character.  He was a man who might not stand out in the crowd, but he was a man who stood out to the Father.  Upon this man–Joseph–was laid the burden and responsibility of raising His Son.

                         –Elmer Kelton  (Shotgun)

       “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”

                         –Matthew 1:21(NKJV)
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I came across this little bit of history many years ago.  I’m not sure where I found it, possibly Guideposts.  The author of the article is Elizabeth Sherrill.  It’s a little different from my normal devotion, but the information is inspiring.  The title is, “Christmas, 1818.”

       My husband and I were staying in the little village of Oberndorf, Austria, when the letter reached us last December.
       “You picked the right Christmas to be away!” our friend began.  Our church back home–St. Mark’s in Mt. Kisco, New York–he went on, was having the asbestos insulation removed from the heating pipes in the basement.  Since the air intake for the organ was also in the basement, this meant that so long as asbestos dust was being created, the in-strument could not be played.  If the job wasn’t finished by Christmas Eve, our friend continued, he and his wife would go to church elsewhere:  “Can you imagine the midnight service without the organ?”
       I put the letter on the windowsill and looked across the swirling gray water of the Salzach River to the distant Alps.  The Salzach takes a horseshoe loop at Oberndorf, and where the river curves, a church used to stand.  High water had eaten away its foundations, and eventually the building was torn down.  But I wanted to tell our friend about the vanished church.  Because there too, one Christmas Eve, the organ was silent…
       Damp from the river had corroded the pipes until by Christmas Eve, 1818, the organ in Oberndorf was emitting only a wheezy whisper–and the itinerant organ mender was not due in the village till the following week.
       The bad news especially affected two young men.  One was the 31-year-old church organist, Franz Gruber.  As a boy, Franz had often been beaten for sneaking away from his linen loom to take music lessons.  Now he had worked hard rehearsing the village choir for the midnight service.  But to ask them to sing the elaborate Christmas chorales unaccompanied was out of the question, and Franz Gruber was in despair.
       Equally distressed was the 25-year-old pastor, Joseph Mohr.  An illegitimate child educated for the priesthood on the charity of the church, Joseph had only recently been ordained.  He’d dreamed of making this Christmas celebration an especially glorious one, but here it was December 24, and no organ!
       Joseph did own a guitar.  But a guitar could hardly substitute for the organ on a night like this, with its tradition of elaborate fugues and cantatas.  If only there were some melody simple enough for a guitar to carry alone, with homely words to capture the holiness of this night.
       Even as the wish formed itself, the words began to come.  The young priest seized a scrap of paper and began to write, his quill pen racing across the page.
       It was afternoon of Christmas Eve when Joseph showed the little poem to the organist.  Could Franz set the words to a melody for the guitar?  Franz Gruber said he would try.
       The choir was assembling by the time he finished.  It was too late to teach them the whole piece, so Joseph and Franz decided to sing the song as a duet, with the choir repeating just the last line of each verse.
       And so it was that the disgruntled congregation, muttering over their mute and useless organ, heard instead the new pastor’s tenor voice and the bass voice of their organist, sing a song to the plucking of a guitar, with the choir echoing the final words.
       The words stuck in the worshipers’ minds, and so did the tune; many were humming it as they left the church.
       They were still humming it when the organ mender arrived in Oberndorf a few days later.  He liked the song so well he committed both the words and music to memory and played it as he journeyed from town to town.  In the Tirol a group of traveling singers added it to their repertoire.
       Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber never knew the end of the story.  Neither man guessed that the song they had created the night the organ failed was to become the world’s most popular Christmas carol.
       But it was about that original organless service back in 1818 that I wanted to write our friend.  There must have been many in that congregation who’d been tempted to go somewhere else that night.  And that would have been too bad.  They would have missed the chance to see what God can do with bad news.  They would not have been in Oberndorf to hear the very first singing of “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

     Amazing how God can work through man.  It is important to remember, not just at Christmas, that we can worship the Lord any time, any place.  Worship comes from the heart; it is a lifestyle.  I don’t know who said it, but there’s truth to the following–“You can’t always have a good day.  But you can always face a bad day with a good attitude.”

                    –Louis L’Amour  (Treasure Mountain)

       “Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.”

                    –Luke 2:8 (NKJV)
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Words–it’s the main way in which we communicate.  They can change or they can mean different things in different places.  I remember when we first moved to Florida years ago people talked about “gopher races.”  Now, to me, I had in mind those pesky little rascals that run around and live in holes in the ground.  Oh, but I was wrong.  A gopher was a turtle and they would place them on hot payment and watch them race against each other.  Where I lived, something you used to put goods in was a sack, but back East it was a bag, yet my Grandma called it a poke.  Sometimes, especially in our postmodern world, words have purposely been deconstructed to mean something altogether different than originally intended.  The carol I want to share with you this morning has some words with meanings that have changed over the years.
       It is one of the earliest carols written and is over five hundred years old.  It was written in the fifteenth-century for and by the common people.  It was sung for hundreds of years before it was actually published in the nineteenth-century due to Queen Victoria.  Before we look at the carol, I want to draw your attention to a verse of Scripture, “And the Angel of the LORD appeared to him [Gideon], and said to him, ‘The LORD is with you, you mighty man of valor!'” (Judges 6:12, NKJV)

            God rest ye merry gentlemen,
            Let nothing you dismay.
            Remember Christ our Savior
            Was born on Christmas day,
            To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
            When we were gone astray
                       O tidings of comfort and joy,
                       Comfort and joy,
                       O tidings of comfort and joy.

       This was the plight of man–we had gone astray and Satan was destroying mankind.  Yet the Lord appeared to give comfort and joy.  Now, let’s look at that very first line.  We cannot possibly understand what it is saying with the meaning of the words in today’s vernacular.  “Merry” had a very different meaning than just being “happy” and “carefree.”  It actually meant men of “great” or “mighty valor.  A mighty ruler was a merry ruler, thus “Old King Cole was a merry old soul…”  A gentleman was a person who was “gentle” meaning he was a person who took “appropriate action.”  Now look at the word, “rest.”  It means to “keep” or “make” and the punctuation should be slightly changed.  That first line in today’s English would read:  “God make you mighty, gentlemen.”

            From God our heavenly Father
            A blessed angel came.
            And unto certain shepherds
            Brought tidings of the same,
            How that in Bethlehem was born
            The Son of God by name:

            “Fear not,” then said the angel,
            “Let nothing you affright,
            This day is born a Savior,
            Of virtue, power, and might;
            So frequently to vanquish all
            The friends of Satan quite;”

       Contemplate those words.  The composer, unknown to us, had a good grasp of the Christmas story.  Instead of a helpless babe in a manger, look how he describes the Lord–“a Savior, of virtue, power, and might,” then he tells of His purpose in coming to earth.  The shepherd, at first terrified, then in awe, listened to the words of the angels and hastened to Bethlehem.

            The shepherds at those tidings
            Rejoiced much in mind,
            And left their flocks a-feeding,
            In tempest, storm, and wind,
            And went to Bethlehem straight-way
            This blessed babe to find:

            But when to Bethlehem they came,
            Whereat this infant lay
            They found him in a manger,
            Where oxen feed on hay;
            His mother Mary kneeling,
            Unto the Lord did pray:

       Mary knew a little of the story because of the angel Gabriel.  All through her life she would add tidbits of truth to what she had been told and what happened to her on that blessed night.  She knew, I believe, that this child was to be the Savior of the world (whatever that meant at the time), and she was comforted.  There had to be an inner peace within her heart that night as the shepherds came to visit.
       
            Now to the Lord sings praises,
            All you within this place,
            And with true love and brotherhood
            Each other now embrace;
            This holy tide of Christmas
            All others doth deface…

       The world scoffs at the meaning of Christmas.  They demean the words of the prophets, the songs, and the message of Christmas.  It was the same when this carol was written, but has become much worse.  The world would seek to sully Christmas; dirty it up, make a mockery of it and change it to mean something entirely different.  Therefore, o man of God, o woman of God–God keep and make you mighty…  Go through the season with faith and joy and comfort in your hearts and minds.  Say–“Mighty Christmas!”
            
(reference, Ace Collins, “Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas, Zondervan, 2001)

                         –D.C. Adkisson  (Winter of the Wolves)

       “Then the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.'”

                         –Luke 1:30 (NJV)
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Does God play favorites?  Not in the sense that we would use that term, but if we read the words of the Prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” (1:5) we might conclude that He has put in place individuals for special purposes.  So, I ask the next question:  “Why Mary?”  What made her so special?  Why was she chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus?  Questions that we really cannot answer, but there are some things we know or can conclude about Mary.
       She was not the choice of random selection.  She came from a small town, and did not stray from her humble beginnings.  When one reads the wonderful “song of Mary” we see her humility shine throughout.  We know she was a virgin to fulfill the prophecy of the birth of Christ.  She was a young girl and at first was troubled when then the angel Gabriel appeared.  He said she was “highly favored,” that the “Lord is with you” and that she was blessed. (Luke 1:28-29)  Gabriel further reinforced his saying, “you have found favor with God.” (1:30)  For some reason, she was chosen above all the others to bear the Son of God.  “God sent the ultimate Christmas gift, not just to Mary but to all of us.” (David Jeremiah).
       I would encourage you to read and contemplate Luke 1:46-55.  We have insight into this young woman.  She is visiting Elizabeth who is also pregnant with John and when John leaps in the womb of Elizabeth recognizing through the Spirit  that Mary was pregnant with the Son of God, she breaks forth into song.  We see that she is knowledgeable of the Scriptures.  We see that she believes in the God of her ancestors and must have come from a devout Jewish family (Ashley Hooker).  Her faith is seen, not only here in these verses but also in her response to Gabriel, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord!  Let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)
       Her voice rises in praise, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” (Luke 1:46-47)  She speaks of His mercy, His strength, His faithfulness.  Mary is ready to obey, and accepts the responsibility placed upon her; she knows that God has it all under control.  At first she questioned the possibility of such a miracle, but when convinced by the angel and in her heart she firmly follows God’s direction for her life.
       We hear Mary displaying an attitude of thankfulness.  “Mary could have focused on the situation and felt nothing but fear.  Instead, she focuses on the blessing within the turmoil.” (Hooker)  In the midst of this “confusing” situation she is full of trust.  As a young girl (possibly sixteen) engaged (betrothed) to Joseph, who has also to hear from the Lord, she has accepted this as part of her life–being chosen for such a time as this.  We don’t know all her thoughts, her fears, her questions, but we do know that she was obedient, faithful, and trusting with confidence in the Word of the Lord.  I like what David Jeremiah says, “She honored and obeyed the will of her Father, providing His only son a home from which he would emerge to launch the work that would define all of human history.  The child toddled behind her in his infancy.  Then, in time, she followed behind Him–all the way to the cross and the tomb.”  And I might include, beyond to the upper room on the Day of Pentecost.