Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Life is messy at times.
Just walk into a teenagers room if you want to see a mess.
Lots of things about life can be messy.
Our schedules can be messy, our finances can be messy, our family life can be messy.
Our kids can be messy.
Our mess can be messy.
Can we all agree that life can be messy?
I know that my life can be messy from time to time.
I cleaned my desk off a week or so ago.
Someone had remarked that a messy desk is a sign of intelligence.
I must have been really smart at the time I started cleaning it.
As I was writing my message for today, I had empty egg cartons on my desk because who doesn’t need empty egg cartons on their desk.
I had a roll of paper towels because you never know when you are going to make a mess.
Desks can get messy and life can get really messy.
Life got extremely messy for Mary and Joseph.
The Bible doesn’t tell us how Joseph found out about Mary’s pregnancy.
We don’t know if the news was shared by a tear-filled, anxiety-ridden Mary.
We don’t know if it was a friend who heard from a friend who heard from Elizabeth.
Or it could have been that, after returning from her visit with Elizabeth, she was no longer able to hide the signs of growing life.
This picture is how most people think about Joseph’s reaction when he found out Mary was pregnant.
It is a nice picture, they are both smiling.
Joseph is happy to hear the news that the woman that he is betrothed to is pregnant and he is not the father.
What a joyous occasion for him!
Not!
This is probably a better picture of the look that crossed Joseph’s face when he heard the news!
We don’t think much of Joseph at Christmas, our focus is on Jesus and then Mary.
But think for a moment about the emotions that Joseph went through when he heard this news.
However he found out, it had to feel like a blow.
Betrothal wasn’t like a modern-day engagement, where all you need to do is return a ring and cancel your wedding plans.
Betrothal was more contractual than our marriages are today.
Betrothal involved a contract with a payment from the groom as the price for the bride.
If either the bride or groom died during this betrothal period the living partner would be referred to as a widow or widower.
The betrothal could only be broken by legal action.
It required a certificate of divorce.
Their commitment was deep.
It was only at the end of the betrothal period that the wedding ceremony was held and then the couple would begin living together as husband and wife.
But then everything changed.
Mary could explain as many times as she wanted that this child wasn’t another man’s, but who would believe that?
Joseph may have been a righteous man, but he wasn’t delusional.
He knew how babies were made, and even in the stories he heard growing up of God intervening to grant children to the prophets of old, they still involved a man and a woman.
She had obviously had an affair—or maybe she had been raped.
The whole spectrum of emotions and explanations probably swirled into his mind.
It was bad enough that she tells him that she is pregnant, but she goes on to explain that God is the father of the baby.
That had to have been to much for Joseph to even begin to grasp.
I know a young lady who has a 3 year old daughter that is in foster care.
She has been deemed unfit to raise her child.
The state has been trying to determine who the father is.
The girl has no idea who of the many men that she has been with is the father of this little girl.
We scratch our heads at that and wonder how she could not know.
Joseph could have gotten angry.
He could have her brought to trial to decide if she was a victim, a participant in prostitution, or had had an affair.
He could have her brought out of her home, where she most likely lived with her parents, to be stoned in front of the entire community.
These actions would have been within his rights, and nobody would’ve blamed him.
That was what people did in those days for such crimes against the law of God.
This is not Luke’s birth narrative.
There are no angels singing in the sky to peaceful shepherds in a field.
No halos sitting over Mary’s head.
This is not the sanitized nativity scene we see all over this time of year.
This is messy, chaotic, awkward, and hard.
This is real life, and it involves difficult decisions, destroyed reputations, rumors, and hardship.
Jesus did not come into a sanitized nativity scene.
Rather, Jesus came into this very messy, chaotic, awkward, hard world—through ordinary people called to extraordinary things.
What can we learn from the birth of the King?
It is really important that that we remember that Joseph was a righteous man.
The most natural meaning of this term is that he was a law-abiding person.
Even a private divorce would have required two witnesses.
His conflict was with how much public disgrace he would force Mary to suffer.
It is likely that Matthew’s use of the word righteous to describe Joseph also reflected this concern for Mary’s well-being.
Imagine being Joseph.
It doesn’t matter what Mary says—it would still be difficult to believe.
You would go through all your options, but most of us wouldn’t land where Joseph did.
It would be easy for him to cry out for justice.
We know that people have killed others for far less.
The feelings of betrayal would be hard to see through.
This marriage was not necessarily a marriage of love.
It most likely was contractual between Mary’s family and Joseph.
He would have promised an amount of money for her—which he wouldn’t have to pay if he could prove she had been raped or unfaithful.
His reputation could also be saved and his side of the contract upheld if he took her to trial and found out about some sort of infidelity on her part.
Despite this being a contractual relationship and an unbelievable situation, he chooses the path least damaging—not to himself but to Mary: divorce.
The Bible says there in verse 19:
Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly.
A quiet divorce would not necessarily prevent rumors.
There’s a chance people would always believe they had broken a vow to not sleep together until the marriage was complete.
A quiet divorce would, however, possibly give Mary a chance at just returning to her parents’ home.
While she would still have a difficult life ahead, she would be alive, versus a stoning or a lengthy, public, shameful that could still end in death for her.
Joseph’s act of mercy shows us that, though he is a man committed to Jewish law, he is also a person of mercy.
He clearly has love for Mary.
Whether his feelings toward her are romantic isn’t clear, but what is clear is that he cares enough about her to seek mercy.
“Righteous” is often described as doing the right things for the right reasons, and this defines Joseph.
Despite the pain, he wanted to do what was right for those involved.
Would you do that?
Would you take the path of grace and mercy if the person you loved failed you in such a major way?
The second thing that we can learn is that in the midst of the mess, an angel of God shows up.
The Bible says that an angel comes to Joseph in a dream.
This dream happened after he had made up his mind that he was going to divorce Mary.
This dream came after the decision had been made in his mind.
This couldn’t have been an easy decision, and the decision he made illustrated his righteousness.
Have you ever had to make a really hard decision?
They do not happen easily.
Sometimes when you go to bed you wrestle with that decision throughout the night.
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