Christmas 2021: Joseph with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaChurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

So good to see you here.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta, and we are officially in the Christmas season.

Uh, we've got a series of Christmas messages this week, next Sunday, and then concluding on Christmas Eve.

We're so excited for Christmas Eve services.

At the end of today's message, if you consider yourself a part of the movement here at MetaCurch, we're gonna have like a quick family meeting.

I'll give you a little bit of heads up.

Last week was our soft open.

It was our first time to gather together in the building.

It blew away our expectations.

It showed us what happens when everyone who comes to Meta all comes on the same Sunday.

We had over 800 people in attendance last Sunday.

We were so excited about that.

That is uh by far the biggest number we have seen since you know pre-pandemic numbers.

And crazier than that is in two services, we saw close to 150 children in Medikid.

So that was an all-time record.

Before the pandemic, we would have 1,200 people and about a hundred kids.

So I'm just here to tell you, I know what y'all were doing during this pandemic, all right?

Oh, locked up at home and whatnot.

Okay.

And so what it told us is if we want to reach the community around us, we're gonna have to scale up.

You know, we used to have four services.

After the pandemic, we had three.

We got a much bigger space, so we went to two.

We are gonna have to scale back up, and that requires uh volunteers, man.

It takes an army of volunteers to do what we do here.

When you become a volunteer, not only do you get intentionally engaged with the community here at MetaCurch, you move from being a consumer of our Sunday service, which is fine, but you move from that to being a creator of what we're doing here in our Sunday services.

And so we'll talk through some of the details on that.

Our highest needs are in our next gen programs, Metakids and Meta Youth, but we have some other teams.

If uh if dealing with kids isn't really your thing, we have some other opportunities for you.

So at the end of service, I know like I say amen and we all start packing up and try to, you know, beat each other's to canes, chicken tenders, or whatever, but like just give me a couple of minutes at the end.

Today we are gonna jump into a Christmas message, and it's kind of a three-week series of sorts.

And what I wanna do is slow down a little bit because Christmas comes every single year.

And every year you are reminded of the Christmas story.

But there's this thing that happens to us as humans, I'm calling it narrative fatigue or story fatigue.

And what happens is the first time we hear a story, the way that we process it is like an IMAX movie.

You know, we take in all the little details, it's high resolution, we really see all the little pieces and parts of it.

But the more times a narrative is repeated, the lower and lower our resolution of it becomes in our minds.

And so instead of being this incredible, multi-dimensional, multi-sensory experience, pretty soon it's just kind of like a two-dimensional, just very plastic, very simple to put together story.

And so, you know, maybe you can relate to this with some stories from your childhood or some stories you've heard again and again.

I feel like my kids feel this way because I like telling the stories, you know, about how Katie and I met and how we fell in love and just this whole story that means so much to me, you know.

But my kids have heard it so many times.

They're like, we get it.

Y'all went to the same church and you met each other, and then whatever happened, and y'all got married, right?

Like really low resolution.

And for me, the moment I first laid eyes on my wife, it I mean, time went in slow motion, you know, and there was a beam of light and a fan on her, and someone released doves indoors.

Like, that's how it went for me, and it matters.

And so all my kids are like, okay, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

We did it.

We've heard it, we've heard it, right?

And I was just wondering if perhaps that is how God feels sometimes when he looks down at how we handle the Christmas narrative.

Because we have the nativity in these little bites, and we've heard it so many times that we end up with a very low resolution image that we carry with us.

It's like, you know, Mary and Joseph and Silent Night, Holy Night, and Jesus was born, and joy to the world, the end, right?

Like we can do it so quick and from God's vantage point.

It's the most important event in human history.

The world was without hope.

The world was filled with darkness.

Humans were separated from God, and there was no answer.

And then God Himself put his love into action by leaving a perfect heaven and coming down to a broken and jacked-up world.

He put on human flesh to feel pain like we feel it, and disappointment like we feel it.

He became like us to serve us and to give his life worse.

And it all started at Christmas, and we make it so narrow and so simple.

What we're gonna do over the next three times that we're together is we're gonna look at the nativity three different times.

There are three Gospels in the Christian scriptures that tell the story of Christmas: Matthew, Luke, and John.

And what's really interesting is that each of those authors tells the Christmas story through the lens of a different Christmas character.

In John, we see the Christmas story told in a really, really unique way.

We're gonna look at on Christmas Eve through the lens of Jesus.

In Luke's gospel, the Christmas narrative is told through the lens of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

And today we're gonna look in Matthew's gospel because he actually tells the story through the lens of Joseph.

Now, Joseph during Christmas time honestly does not get much love.

We have a family tradition where during the holidays, we pick a day, we go to Dairy Queen, we get a blizzard, we turn on some Christmas music, and we drive the neighborhoods in our community and we look at all of the Christmas lights.

And you know, you'll see a lot of nativity scenes out in the front yard, and most of them are made out of, you know, plastic or cardboard.

They're about this thin and they're propped up, they're really unidimensional, which is kind of how we carry the narrative anyway.

But it's interesting when you look at a nativity scene because front and center, you have Mary and you have Jesus, and they are glowing, and the lights are on them, and they've got the frisbees, you know, right above the head.

And Joseph is like the Christmas side piece, you know.

He's off to the side, he just looks like all of the other dudes.

He usually doesn't get his own halo.

If you don't think that Joseph is really left out on Christmas, here's a challenge, and it's a little bit trespassing, but here's your challenge.

You go to your neighbor's nativity scene, swap Joseph with one of the shepherds, and I bet money no one will ever notice.

He's just one of the guys.

You could switch him with the magi.

They even have crazy hats on.

No one will notice because nobody's focusing on Joseph.

We sing Christmas songs, we sing lots of Christmas songs to Jesus, and and he deserves that.

We should sing lots of songs to him.

But we also sing songs about Mary.

Mary, did you know?

She knew the angel told her.

Do you guys like read this?

We'll get there next week.

But she knew, but we sing songs about Mary and we sing songs about Jesus.

No songs about Joseph.

No, like stepdad of the millennium award for Joseph, you know?

He is really left to the side, and it's really a shame.

And I think it's because we have this narrative fatigue.

It's like we know the story, and because we know the big points of the story, we've lost the details, and the details matter.

And the Christmas narrative has something so significant to teach us.

Because it isn't just cardboard cutouts in our front yard, it is a real history of real people living through really, really difficult circumstances.

And what we believe is that God is perfect and he has executed his plan to perfection, which means he handpicked Mary and He handpicked Joseph, and he gave them these key roles in the story he is telling throughout time.

These roles that have unbelievable world-shifting purpose.

And if we can slow down a little bit and we can really investigate these key characters in the Christmas narrative, I believe that we can find some key characteristics that they possessed that if we could add them to our own life, would make us ready and available to live out the purpose that God has placed on us.

And we have a starting point at MetaCurch.

We believe that God made you on purpose and he made you with purpose.

He made you on purpose.

It is no accident that you are here on planet earth, and he made you with purpose.

He has placed something in your life and on your life, and he wants to use all that you are and all that you have, all of your gifts and talents, resources, and personality to do something significant in the story that he is writing throughout time.

Today, we're gonna start with Joseph, a real man, put in a really, really difficult position.

And we're gonna learn the first key characteristic that can put us in a place where we are ready to fully be used by God.

Would you pray with me?

God, we do thank you for Christmas.

We we thank you that you are not a distant God.

There are a lot of claims of different gods out there.

They are all distant, they are all separate, they all sit on high and judge us down below.

God, you, the true God, not just spoke out your love for us, but put it into action by coming to our world, by living in our pain, by facing the same temptations that we face day in and day out.

We thank you for Christmas, the moment that changed everything, the moment that hope came to this world.

We ask that you would help us to learn from these key characters, and God, that we would be able to add these characteristics into our own life.

We love you, and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everybody said, Amen.

We're gonna be in Matthew's gospel.

This is Matthew's historical account of the life of Jesus.

It's in the New Testament or the Christian scriptures, Matthew chapter one, and we're gonna start in verse 18.

It says this the birth of Jesus Christ came about this way.

This is how it happened.

After his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, it was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant, and she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit.

Now, Matthew is writing this in retrospect.

He knows the whole story, he knows the immaculate conception, the miracle of Mary, who was in fact a virgin becoming pregnant through the power of God, fulfilling prophecies written hundreds of years earlier.

Matthew knows this, but we're looking at this through the lens of Joseph.

And in real time, when it was discovered that Mary was pregnant, Joseph did not have the full perspective.

All he knew is that the woman that he was betrothed to Mary, in the Jewish custom 2,000 years ago, he was already legally married.

He was waiting to be socially married through the wedding feast, and then spiritually married through consummation of the wedding.

He was in this for the long haul, and she comes up and is pregnant, and it's not his.

And we know this because they hadn't been together, is a polite ancient way of saying that they had had no sexual contact.

This guy does not need Mari Povich to show up and let him know he's not the father.

He has got this unlocked.

He knows that he knows, that he knows that is not his kid.

And I don't know.

Maybe you are just that much more spiritual than the rest of us in the room.

But if I'm in Joseph's shoes and your answer is, look, look, look, look, it's not yours, but don't worry, it's God's.

I'm not buying it.

It's too far-fetched.

It's like, Mary, for real?

Like you can't come up with a little bit better than that?

You're gonna blame this on God?

You're gonna pull the God card right now?

Joseph didn't buy it, and we know that he didn't buy it because in verse 19, it says, So her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly.

We don't know how the whole moment went down.

All it says is it was discovered that she was pregnant.

In the very next verse, we see Joseph's intentions, which are to break off this marriage.

And sometimes we have this narrative fatigue, so we don't think a lot about the Christmas story, and when we do think about it, we have this tendency to project our culture onto their context.

And it's important to understand the story, how it was when it happened, which means in their context.

2,000 years ago, on the other side of the world, it was a very, very different time and a very, very different place.

You would become betrothed when the man, in this case Joseph, would go and make a legal transaction with Mary's father.

You see, for most of human history, and the same was true at this time in Israel, men and women were not equal under the law.

Women had virtually no rights.

Their rights existed at the level of like cattle and property, and men held the rights in the community.

And I know that we don't like that, but that is the setting that the story took place in.

And so Joseph made an arrangement with Mary's father, and it was a legal arrangement, which means they're only engaged or betrothed, but they are legally married.

In order to break this off, it would require a legal divorce.

It's much different than how we get engaged these days, where you have a verbal commitment and usually a sign of the commitment, like a ring.

But if you want to walk away, it doesn't require a legal process to break an engagement.

Back then, it was very different.

And as soon as you were legally engaged, there were significant consequences for going outside of the marriage and committing adultery.

It says that Joseph was a righteous man.

And we see his righteousness displayed on every line of this verse.

You see, at this time, with his position as the man and the rights afforded to him by his culture, he could have completely ruined Mary's life, not just then, but ruined it forevermore.

We see these moments of grace, but we can't really see them if we don't see it in its context, because for a husband to give a wife a legal right of divorce was an act of grace at that time.

Women had no earning capacity in the culture.

Your only hope at having a good and comfortable life was through marriage.

And if your husband left you and did not give you a legal certificate of divorce, no other man would ever marry you again.

A legal certificate of divorce at that time was your lifeline, and it was your hope for living a life that wasn't completely impoverished.

Joseph doesn't think twice.

He's obviously mad.

Remember, Joseph is a human.

He has all the emotions that you have, and he is feeling the same way you would feel in this situation, and yet he doesn't think twice.

He's going to make a pathway for Mary to still have a good life.

And he doesn't just give it to her, he gives it to her privately.

And scripture tells us why he did not want to disgrace Mary.

He did it in secret.

Now let's talk about the rights that he had as a Jewish man 2,000 years ago.

He had the right to literally drag Mary into the public square.

He had the right to call people in to listen to what had gone on.

He had the right to speak out his case.

And as a woman, she would never get to defend herself.

He had the right to shame her, disgrace her, to put a mark upon her, to make sure that no one would ever be in relationship with her again.

He had the right to ostracize her and marginalize her.

And in the Jewish law, he even had grounds for stoning her or even killing her.

Those were his rights as given to him by his community.

And Joseph, instead of exercising his rights, acts righteously.

He does it in secret, making sure that no one puts a mark on her that would keep her from ever being engaged in relationship or commerce.

Again, he keeps her and shields her from the disgrace of a community.

He reacts not in anger, but he thinks through his decision.

This is the lesson that Joseph gives us.

God is looking for righteous people.

And I have to be honest with you, growing up in church, I would hear the word righteous, like God is righteous, and he's calling us to be righteous, and he's looking for righteous people.

And it is such a loaded, loaded church word.

Righteous, you know?

It felt like an unobtainable goal.

It felt like it was so high up that I myself would never have a chance to live a righteous life.

In my mind, righteous people looked a certain way and they talked a certain way.

They carried themselves a certain way.

They were decked out at church.

Three-piece suit, four-piece suit.

Are there four-piece suits?

You know me, I don't know.

Tie on, medallion over the tie, a Bible that looks like it was bound by Moses himself, you know.

Like these people look, they smell a certain way, you know.

It's like they know the right things to say.

They've got all of the scriptures memorized.

In my mind as a child, that was a righteous person.

And then you grow up a little bit.

And you realize that not all of them, but a lot of the people that you grew up in church with, who had all the outward trappings of righteousness, were actually some of the most hateful, judgmental people that you have ever been around in your entire life.

That righteousness isn't about something that you can spot from the outside, that righteousness is a disposition of your heart that is available to every single follower of Jesus.

You can live a righteous life, but we have to have a critical conversation.

If we take it from their context to ours, we're often referred to as the American church, broadly, all the churches in America.

We're referred to as American Christians.

And it's difficult because there's a lot of different facets to your identity, who you are.

One part of who you are comes from where you are.

If you're a citizen of the United States, then you are an American.

And because you're an American, you are covered by the laws of this land.

And our Constitution was written with an understanding that we all have inalienable rights, that we have rights just because that we're human.

And they tried to spell those out for us, and those are rights that you possess.

We have some significant rights, and it's important that we see that and that we acknowledge it, and even that we appreciate it.

The problem is, you are not just an American.

When you put your faith in Jesus, you become a child of God.

You begin to enact and actualize the spiritual part of you that goes beyond this life, that is identified beyond where you are locally and located in this world.

That you are an eternal spiritual being that has a purpose that is outside of this world, that your first priority is not to live for the country that you're a part of.

Your first priority is to live for the kingdom that is yet to come.

And so we have a dual identity where we have, as American citizens, some rights.

And here's what's true you can exercise your lawful rights and still be all the way spiritually wrong.

You have all kinds of rights.

We have the right of free speech.

I think it's one of the most important rights that we have.

It's important to be able to say what we need to say, but what that also means is that you can use your words against other people to tear them down.

You can cuss them up and down, you can defame them in so many ways, and it is your right.

You can blast off on social media.

Man, you can see someone put a post and they should have known better.

How can they be such idiots?

You can tear them up.

That's the new public square.

That's your right.

But just because it's your legal right does not mean it's right.

The conversation American Christians have to start having is the conversation of rights versus righteousness.

We are called first and foremost to follow our Savior and to live for a world that is beyond this world.

We are secondarily living where we're living.

We happen to be born here.

We have some rights.

We should be thankful for them that we get to come in here, we get to do this, we get to assemble, we get to worship our God openly.

That's great.

But so often we stand up on our rights and we are quick to take an offense and to respond with what we have the right to do instead of first prioritizing what is the righteous thing to do.

And so often we conflate American Christianity, and we have churches all over America who start their fursilins, their first filter are their rights as Americans, and then they view the purposes of God through their rights that they have in their country.

And it is backwards.

And so they will stand against people who we are supposed to be standing up for.

They will claim their rights, and in their rights, they are turning away all of the people who are looking for something more significant.

It's a delicate balance.

And we wrestle with this all the time.

Joseph had the right to disgrace her, to shame her, to abandon her, to drag her into the public sphere, even to kill her.

But just because you have the right doesn't mean it is right.

One of the things we were a little bit worried about when we bought this building is that we have some neighbors in the community who live like 40 yards that way.

You know, they're right behind the building.

And we run a pretty loud rock show kind of worship experience.

It's we try to keep it under control, but it's loud.

And we were a little bit worried about it.

And you don't know this, but our band starts rehearsing like at seven o'clock in the morning.

And so last week was our first week in the building, and they get rolling just a little bit after seven, and they're doing their thing and they're rocking out and they're getting ready for the opening.

And it wasn't long after that we got our first visit from a neighbor.

And as you can imagine, they were not happy.

We had woken their kids up.

I wouldn't be happy either.

And they asked if there's anything we could do about it.

Here's where it ties in.

Because I've worked in bands and worked in church, because I've been in these situations, I know the law around sound ordinance.

We had the right to make however much noise we wanted to make.

And it's it's a complex situation, right?

Because we bought this building to reach the community.

And one of the ways we reach the community is in these services.

And the way that we pull off a good service is we do good music.

And the way we do good music is we practice good music.

And so now by practicing our good music, we are actually offending the community that we started out here to reach.

It's complex.

And we had the rights.

We could just let them deal with it and grow bitter.

And so maybe they won't come, but some other people will, you know?

And our music will be lit and it'll be great.

And they'll be mad, and they can be mad because we've got a bigger picture.

We're trying to reach hundreds, not just one person.

But is that what Jesus did?

Is that the righteous move?

You see, I thought righteous, a righteous life, righteousness, it was too far out there, it was too hard to grasp, it was too high of a value, unobtainable.

Righteousness is using your rights for the good of others instead of yourself.

It is something that every one of us can do.

And time and time again, when the church becomes the American church, when the Christians become the American Christians, and when we prioritize our rights before our righteousness, I'm telling you, that version of church is going to become more and more obscure until it disappears altogether.

If we just grab our rights as quickly as possible and use them as weapons against others, there will be nothing different between the church of Jesus and everything else that is happening out in the world.

Rights or righteousness, we know which one God has called us to, and he gave us a model for a righteous life in the person of Joseph.

In verse 20, it says, After he had considered these things.

After he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

After he had considered these things.

You see, one of the things a culture of rights does is it helps us move quickly.

You know your rights, you memorize them, you've got them in your holster.

So anytime an offense comes, or anytime an inconvenience comes, or anything that makes you angry, you can draw really quick.

You know your rights, and so you can fly off the handle, you can move quickly.

How dare they tell you that?

I know my rights.

And Joseph slowed down.

There's no telling how many problems we could solve in our lives, how many problems we could solve in society if we would just slow down a little bit.

Let me help your marriage.

That text, you know that text?

Like where you're finally gonna straighten them out, you know?

Someone needed to tell you this for a long time.

That's how you start the text.

Somebody has needed to tell you this for a long, a bunch of o's, long time, you know, and you're gonna be the one, you're gonna get them straightened out finally.

Write that in your notes, and then go to bed.

And then wake up and read it and go, Wow, I am glad I did not sin that.

You can write it out in your text, but I'm just letting you know right now, I've done that before, and then I I want to hit delete, but I hit sinned, you know?

Sorry.

If we just slowed down, man, if we took our rights, it's good you have rights.

This is Military City USA.

We have people out dying for our rights.

We should be thankful for them.

But your rights have to be held up to the scrutiny of God's word and his plan for your life.

We have rights, but we have responsibilities.

And as believers in Jesus, our highest responsibility is to what he has called us to do.

And there are no coincidences in scripture.

After he considered these things, after Joseph slowed himself down, thought a little bit before he made a decision, after that, the angel of the Lord came to him.

And had he just flown off the handle, and had he just exercised his rights to drag her into town, disgrace her publicly, cast her out into the outer darkness, if he would have moved quickly, he might have missed the opportunity to get the full perspective of the opportunity that was right in front of him.

An opportunity to be a part of changing the world, to be the stepdad to the savior, the one who raised Jesus and loved Jesus' mama, the one who became a role model to God incarnate.

Jesus followed Joseph for 30 years in the same trade as a carpenter, an unbelievable opportunity that he took advantage of.

Because in his righteousness, not his rights, his righteousness, he slowed himself down.

In verse 21, the angel said, She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

And here's the payoff.

This is a part of God's plan for the world.

Jesus came to earth to enact one of the first phases of God's plan, which ultimately is the rescue and redemption of humanity and the world itself.

And you need to understand that God is offering you a role in that same plan.

That yes, you were put on earth and you were given purposes, and there's levels to that purpose, and it's beautiful, and you're dating, and you want to get married, you want to have kids, and those are very purposeful things, and those are great responsibilities, and you want to get a good job and you want to make some money, and those are good things, and you should pursue those things, but you need to understand that ultimately why God has you here on earth is for something so much bigger than yourself.

This was an incredibly difficult situation for Joseph to find himself in.

A situation that anybody would have walked away from.

But God picked Joseph.

God, who sees the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end, picked someone who would choose righteousness over his rights.

He picked someone who would love Jesus' mama the right way.

Jesus is not just a sideshow to the Christmas story, he is an integral part of it.

He has something to teach us about the kind of characteristics that God is looking for to call people in to key roles in what he is doing throughout time.

In verse 24, it says, When Joseph woke up, he did as the Lord's angel had commanded him.

He married her.

In verse 25, but he did not have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.

And so Joseph is inconveniencing himself.

He's taking his power and his authority, he's taking his rights, and he is using them not for his own benefit, but for the benefits of others.

And even though now he is legally married and he went ahead and married her, he had the feast, he respected the word of God that said Mary would give birth as a virgin.

And so now he has all the rights and all the responsibilities, he has all of the weight of marriage, and even though they went through all the steps of marriage, he refuses to consummate it in order to uphold the word of God.

Joseph is consistently letting go of his own needs and his own desires, giving them away to other people in order to be a part of something significant.

Joseph is the ultimate example of a dad, of a man.

Our culture says that manliness is about getting as much power as you can and using it to prop yourself up.

Our culture is selling us a version of manliness that how you are respected in the culture is based on how wealthy you can appear and how many women you can get in your bed.

And the scripture is laying out a new alternative, the true definition of what it means to be a man.

It's not about not having power, it is about having tremendous power and using it for the benefit of those around you.

This is what we are called to as the people of God.

The Christmas narrative has three key characters: Jesus and Mary and Joseph.

And each of them has something significant to teach us about characteristics that if this Christmas we would add them to our own life, we would position ourselves to be fully used by God in ways that you could not even imagine.

Joseph teaches us that God is looking for people who are righteous.

And I know that is a loaded word, but I am telling you, we are all broken, we are all jacked up people, but you can live a righteous life.

You can use your power for the good of others.

God is looking for people who are righteous, even at the expense of our rights.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

We thank you for Joseph.

We thank you for his response, a response that doesn't make sense, honestly, to me.

A response that I hope I could have had.

A response that has so much faith in you and who you are, so much determination to serve and love the people around him.

God, a display of power so immense.

I pray that as your children, we would redefine power, not into what we display or put forward, but power is ultimately what we can withhold for the sake of the people around us.

God, I pray that we would slow down.

That we would not take for granted the most important event in human history.

God coming to this earth.

Continue to teach us and shape us.

I pray this would be the Christmas that we truly believe we have a purpose and we seek to begin living it out.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.