Dove Sermons

Sermon for July 19, 2026 – Matthew 1:18-25

Alright, let’s start with a confession. Preaching this text in July feels a little strange, right? I mean, there’s no decorated tree up here on stage with me. Nobody’s fighting over parking because their cousin is in town. The kids aren’t dressed like shepherds. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and we’re talking about a baby born under a star.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe about this strangeness: it can actually be a gift. Because when we read this story in December, we already know how it ends. We’ve got the manger in our peripheral vision. We’ve got “Silent Night” queued up in our heads before I finish the first sentence. The story is wrapped in so much familiarity that it’s hard to hear it as news anymore. It’s just… Christmas. It can become background noise for a season we already know how to run.

So today, out of season, I want us to consider what Matthew is doing in these eight verses. Because Matthew is not simply telling us a birth story. He’s making an argument about faith, obedience, and how we respond in life when things go sideways.

Here’s the first thing worth knowing, and it’s a detail most of us miss because it doesn’t survive translation. Matthew opens his Gospel with the words “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ.” That word, genesis, is the exact word used to title the first book of the Bible in the Greek Old Testament (called the Septuagint) that Matthew and his community would have read. He uses it again right here in verse 18: “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”

Same word. Genesis. Beginning.

So what’s Matthew doing here? He’s telling you, right up front, that something on the level of creation itself is happening in the story of this Jewish peasant girl in a small hill town. A new Genesis. God is doing again what God did in the beginning; speaking into chaos and calling forth something new.

That’s a huge claim to make about a couple who, as far as the record shows, had no money, no political standing, and, as we’re about to see, no small amount of scandal attached to their names. God’s new beginning doesn’t start in Rome, in the halls of religious power, or among people with the wherewithal to pull it off. It starts in the mess of an ordinary betrothal that’s about to fall apart.

So, let’s talk about what “engaged” actually meant in first-century Judea, because our English translations undersell it. When Matthew says Mary was “engaged” to Joseph, he’s describing something much more binding than what we mean by the word. In the first century, this was a legal contract. A betrothal, usually arranged by the families, could only be dissolved through divorce. Mary and Joseph were, for all practical and legal purposes, married. They just hadn’t come together as husband and wife yet. That step, the wedding feast, moving into the same home, was still ahead of them, sometimes as much as a year out.

So picture Joseph’s situation. He is legally bound to a woman he has not yet taken as his wife, and word reaches him that she’s pregnant. He knows the math. He knows it isn’t his. In that culture, under that law, there is exactly one conclusion a reasonable man draws: Mary has been unfaithful.

And here’s where Matthew does something interesting. He calls Joseph righteous, right here, in the same breath that Joseph is planning to divorce his pregnant fiancée. Not righteous despite his decision to end things. Righteous, in the text, right alongside it.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it cuts against how a lot of us were taught to read this story. Joseph isn’t righteous because he’s furious and demands justice. He isn’t righteous because he lets it slide and pretends nothing happened. He’s righteous because he tries to do the most merciful thing available to him within a system that gave him very little room to be merciful at all. The law entitled him to expose her… to make a public example of her, with consequences that could have been fatal. He chooses instead to end it quietly, privately, protecting her as much as he legally can while still doing what he believes he has to do.

That’s a man trying to hold together justice and mercy with the limited tools he’s been given. And before God ever speaks a word to Joseph, the story in Matthew wants you to know: this is a good man, doing the best he knows how, in an impossible spot.

Then God interrupts him.

An angel shows up in a dream and tells Joseph three things: First, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife. Second, the child is from the Holy Spirit, and finally, and this is the part I want you to catch, name him.

That final instruction is important. In that world, the man who names a child is the man who claims that child. Joseph has no biological stake in this baby whatsoever. But when the angel tells him to name the child Jesus, God is asking Joseph to do something legally and socially decisive: to step forward, put his name on this child, and raise him as his own son. That act is what makes Jesus, legally and promise-wise, a son of David… because Joseph, not Mary, carries that royal bloodline. Jesus is God’s Son by nature and Joseph’s son by choice. Both are true, and Matthew needs both to be true for the rest of his Gospel to work.

I want you to notice what obedience costs Joseph here. It’s not a small ask. Joseph has to walk back into a small town, take a visibly pregnant woman as his wife, and let every single person who does the math draw their own conclusions about what that means for his character and hers. He is choosing public shame over private (and legally sound) separation, because an angel told him the truth was stranger and better than the story everyone else would assume.

That’s not a passive man. Whatever quiet the text gives Joseph, and he never says a word out loud in this whole passage, his obedience is loud. He gets up. He does it. Verse 24 says it plainly: Joseph did as the angel commanded.

I think about the men in this room, the fathers, the grandfathers, the husbands, the ones carrying responsibility for people who are depending on you. Joseph is not a hero because he felt something. He’s not remembered because his heart was in the right place. He’s remembered because when the word of God contradicted his own plan… a good, reasonable, defensible plan, he laid his own plan down and obeyed anyway. That’s costly. That’s the kind of faith that doesn’t get a single line of dialogue in scripture, and yet without it, there’s no Christmas story at all.

The angel tells Joseph the child’s name before the child ever draws breath: Jesus. In Hebrew, Yeshua, meaning “God saves.” It was a common enough name in that era. Lots of Jewish parents named their sons some version of “God saves,” because they were living under Roman occupation and praying, hard, for God to do exactly that.

But this child’s name isn’t just hopeful. It’s a job description. “He will save his people from their sins” (v. 21). And I want to push back gently on something a lot of us assume when we hear that line. We tend to hear “sins” and think immediately of our own personal moral failures… the private stuff, the things we’d never say out loud in this room. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete, and it’s a fairly modern, individualistic way of reading an ancient, more communal word.

Matthew’s readers would have heard “save his people from their sins” against the backdrop of exile, the whole story of Israel being carried off to Babylon because the nation, collectively, had abandoned justice and covenant faithfulness. Sin, in that frame, isn’t just what you did on a Tuesday you’d rather forget. It’s the corporate, structural, generational mess a whole people can get tangled in. The systems, the injustices, the corruption of power that Israel’s own prophets spent centuries calling out.

That means the salvation Jesus brings isn’t just a private transaction between you and God, settled and filed away. It’s social. It’s political, in the true sense of that word, concerned with how people live together. It’s cosmic. Jesus didn’t come only to fix what’s wrong in your heart. He came to fix what’s wrong in the world your heart lives in, the greed, the exploitation of the vulnerable, the systems that grind people down. That should change how we hear “salvation” every time we say it around here.

Matthew closes his argument with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures, Isaiah 7:14: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, God with us.

Scholars have spent a long time working through the Hebrew word behind that verse. In the original Hebrew, that word seen in Matthew as virgin is Almah, which simply means “young woman,” not necessarily virgin. See, originally Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous birth eight centuries out; he was giving King Ahaz a sign, in his own moment, that God had not abandoned the people of Judah in the face of an Assyrian threat. Matthew, reading the Greek translation of Isaiah that used the word Parthenos, virgin, takes that ancient promise and reads it forward, seeing in Jesus the ultimate, once-for-all fulfillment of everything Isaiah had only glimpsed.

That’s an interesting enough note, but I don’t want us to get stuck arguing linguistics and miss the point Matthew is actually making. “God with us” is not primarily a comfort verse, even though we love using it that way, especially at gravesides, in hospital rooms, and in the hardest moments of people’s lives. That comfort is real, and nobody can ever take it away from us. But Matthew means something bigger. He puts “God with us” in the very first chapter of his Gospel, and then, turn all the way to the last verse of the whole book of Matthew, Jesus says it again: “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew bookends his entire Gospel with that promise. It’s not simply a footnote. It’s the frame the whole story hangs on.

God with us means God has entered the actual mess of human history… betrothals gone sideways, reputations at risk, occupied territory, corporate sin, ordinary families trying to figure out what faithfulness looks like when the plan they had gets interrupted. God didn’t wait for the mess to get cleaned up first. God moved in.

So why does any of this matter to us on a hot Sunday in July, when Christmas is five months away in either direction?

Because I think we’ve let the season do our theology for us. We save “God with us” for December, wrap it in lights, and pack it away with the ornaments in January. But Matthew didn’t write this as a seasonal decoration. He wrote it as the foundation his entire Gospel stands on. If Emmanuel is real, it’s real in July too. It’s real on a random Tuesday when your plans fall apart and you don’t get a dream or an angel; you just have to decide, like Joseph did, whether you’ll trust that God is present and working even when the situation makes no sense and doesn’t reflect well on you.

Some of you are living a Joseph story right now. You had a plan… reasonable, responsible, defensible, and life handed you something you didn’t ask for and can’t fully explain to the people around you. Maybe it’s a crisis. Maybe it’s a job that ended. Maybe it’s a kid who’s struggling in ways you never saw coming, or a marriage carrying more weight than it was built for. You are standing exactly where Joseph stood: holding a good plan in one hand and an unexpected, unwanted interruption in the other, trying to figure out which one is actually from God.

Here’s what this text tells you. God doesn’t usually ask us to have all the answers before we obey. Joseph didn’t get a full explanation up front on the virgin birth. He got one dream, one instruction, and a decision to make in the morning. Faithfulness looked like getting up and doing the next right thing, in public, at real cost, trusting a word from God over the story everyone else was going to tell about him.

This is a church with lots of educators, with lots of people who value getting the facts right, who want their faith to be intellectually honest and not just emotionally comfortable. Good. Wrestle with the Hebrew, ask what almah really meant to Isaiah, take seriously that Matthew is doing sophisticated theological work here, not just reporting facts. That kind of rigor honors God. But don’t let the wrestling become a substitute for the decision Joseph had to make. At some point, knowing the text well enough has to turn into trusting the God the text is pointing to.

Because here’s the heart of the matter: the God who moved into an unwed mother’s story, who interrupted a righteous man’s reasonable plan, who took on a name that meant rescue before he’d said a single word… that God is not seasonal. He is not waiting for December. He’s with us now, in whatever mess July has handed you, asking the same thing he asked Joseph: will you trust me enough to get up and do what I’ve asked, even when you can’t fully explain it to anyone watching?

That’s Christmas. Any month of the year.

Amen.

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson