Reflection: Dad

First Presbyterian Church

La Salle, Colorado

December 21, 2025

4^th Sunday of Advent

King Ahaz was the kind of leader who didn’t want to hear things that would change his opinion.  He rejects asking for a sign, for something to guide him.  It’s hardly the happiest of signs.  A young woman – a young teenager by our standards.  To bear a son.  To be named Immanuel.  It’s the name that is the comfort amidst the weary world.  ‘God with us.”  What good is God without flesh.  God with us, despite, please note, the difficult and unwelcome situation into which this child will be born.  A young woman.  Poor, likely desolate, abandoned, because the men have gone off to war for corrupt and venial King Ahaz.  Poor.  Desperate.  The only food for the babe till he matures?  Paltry curds and honey. Food of poverty  Nevertheless:  God is with them.  The world may have abandoned them.  God the Father hasn’t. 

Isaiah 7: 10-16

¹⁰Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, ¹¹Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. ¹²But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. ¹³Then Isaiah said: “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? ¹⁴Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. ¹⁵He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. ¹⁶For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

New Testament Scripture

It wasn’t fair, but then that was because I was a kid and it was all about me.  Not the perfect child.  Kids, at least, are transparent.  Adults act the same way but disguise it beneath layers of expectations of what is good for you and everyone else.   Adult keep trying to manufacture the “idea of a world they cannot make work for them.”

Kids, at least, get quickly distracted.

But still, it wasn’t fair. 

Cousin Susan broke my Johnny Reb Cannon on Christmas Day only an hour after I unwrapped it.  The only damage I got to inflict was one measly Christmas tree ornament.  My Johnny Reb Cannon.  Two feet long and a foot high.  The Authentic Civil War Cannon by Remco.  Take one of the five plastic cannonballs and ram it down with the plastic ramrod till it catches.  Remove ramrod.  Aim.  Pull lanyard.  The spring releases.  Cannonball rockets out to kill and maim.  Sheer fun!  I was imagining the devastation I could inflict with such an ultimate weapon upon rows and rows of my Civil War figurines.  I also was trying to construe what other nefarious uses my Johnny Reb cannon could be put to in my ongoing battle with my two older brothers. 

That was until little Susan jammed some foreign girly object down its barrel with the red foam ramrod and broke the spring inside.  Little girl cousins can be far more vexing than little sisters.  You can punch on shoulder your sisters but you have to be nice to your cousins. 

That was a Christmas for the record book.  In a glut of good-will and frenzy of consumption, presents flooded out from the decorated Christmas tree in the corner, swamping well beyond the center pole supporting our porch roof.  All the families were celebrating the day together with all the familiar joys that arise when family comes together to honor the birth of our Lord and Savior;  in other words, competition for attention, crying jags, injury to ego and skin, neglect, snide remarks, strained nerves, tested patience, sulking, temper tantrums.  And so far, I’m just talking about the adults. 

Family is society’s version of the Babinski Reflex – stroke the bottom of the foot to determine brain injury. 

Count us up:  one dad, one mom, two grandmas, one marshmallow Jell-O making aunt, one uncle (dad and Ruth’s brother), mom’s sister, five children, seven more cousin squirts, and Susie our Fox Terrier too. 

Family.  But it couldn’t be helped.

We were forced to be nice to our cousins.  Mom and dad made us.  Mom and dad first played the pity card.  “Remember now,” they reminded us, “it has been hard on them.”  It had been.  They were strangers to New Jersey and our crude Jersey ways.  Aunt Ruth’s husband had been killed in a plane crash in the hills of Vermont.

Uncle Fred’s death, followed by Aunt Ruth’s hasty and ill-advised marriage to a brutal man, eventually led them – including little Joannie, newly plopped out into the family -- to relocate from New England to live with Aunt Ruth’s brother in Westfield, New Jersey.  For a song, Unk had bought the house in the early sixties, viewing it as an investment property.  The house sat around the corner from the house Charles Addams used as the model for his Addam’s Family cartoons.  How apt.  The investment property quickly turned into a full family home. 

Thus arrived refugee cousins into MY world.  

Then the other refugee cousins arrived to live across the street from us, my mother’s sister fresh from an ugly divorce.  From California to New Jersey she arrived with her three children matching my brothers and I exactly in age.  Which meant, I had to be nice to cousin Tommy and let him follow me around everywhere I went.

Us five, Ruth’s four, Aunt Eve’s three equals twelve kids, with my Dad the only authentic Dad.  Unk remained Unk, the bachelor Unk, and did his elegant part, but Dad was ‘The Bona-fide Dad,’ and we had to share him. 

Much to my resentment.  

Not as if he was around a whole lot for us to begin with, what with work six days a week, twelve hours a day, School Board President, Church Board of Trustees, Rotary, Bank Board.   Dad-time meant spending the day at the family factory unloading trucks or pumping varsol for the painters. 

We had to share our Dad.  I didn’t understand it then.  It took a while to understand it.  God with us, through others. 

It helps me appreciate Jesus for him sharing his Dad with us. 

Perhaps what we can gather about Joseph is what Jesus says about fathers in his parables. 

It is what you do for family.   You don’t abandon those who need you.   Joseph:  he chose to be kind,  He chose to listen.  He chose the righteous path knowing that it wasn’t about him.  He chose to protect.  Real manhood.  What a gift, to have your sons and daughters respect you.  

That’s what it means to be great. 

Matthew 1: 18-25

¹⁸Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

[Jesus – Iesus –from Yehoshuah, meaning:  Yahweh saves]

²²All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:²³  “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,          and they shall name him Emmanuel,”which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Let me tell you a story of a young boy.

90% of his younger years remain a mystery, but we can assume a few things about his growing up. 

He likely grew up much like any other boy.  Playing games with his friends.  Wrestling matches.  Seeing who could run faster.  Throwing stones. 

No doubt he had plenty of chores to do, working with dad when he became old enough, and when his younger brothers and sisters started getting born and demanding mom and grandma’s attention.

There alongside dad he learnt the family trade:  working with wood and stone, how to chisel and plane a yoke, how to fit a keystone in an arch. 

You can tell by the stories he later would tell how close he was to his father.  How much he respected his father.   Never do you hear him tell anything bad about fathers.   A Jewish boy learnt his faith from his father. 

He likely traveled a lot too, often visiting his mother’s sister and his cousins, John and James, in the village of Capernaum.  Capernaum was lovely spot, a lakeside town, small but cosmopolitan.   Just an easy 20 mile walk from his town -- his town, a dustier town, an insignificant town filled mostly with Jews, his own kind. There in Capernaum he and his cousins would sail out on the boats, go fishing, skip rocks.

In Nazareth, the boy grew up on the other side of the tracks.  Three miles away was the prosperous town of Sepphoris, high on hills, the beautiful and rich commercial center of Galilee with its theaters and markets, Roman villas and artwork.  It was destroyed by the Romans when Jesus was about 10 years old (6 AD) but was quickly rebuilt as the capital of Galilee for Herod Antipas.  The blue-collar tradesmen of Nazareth rebuilt it for the wealthy. 

Maybe Jesus and his father helped construct some of the villas and lay the tile, maybe even the mosaics we can see there today.

It is little wonder our young bright boy, who grew up naturally speaking Aramaic, would have learnt to read Hebrew (then a dead language), and probably gain a fair facility with Greek and maybe Latin. 

Neither was he a stranger visiting Jerusalem with all the big city’s commotion, there visiting and staying with his other cousin John who was busy studying to become an important priest like his father.  We see John and his father walking to the Temple from their home in the suburbs, John then shooed off to school in the Temple precincts.  

It makes sense that our lad delayed leaving Nazareth because it makes sense how his Dad died when Jesus was young and Jesus had to wait until his brothers could take over the family business.  It’s family.

Poor Joseph – he really doesn’t get a fair shake at Christmas.  Always in the background.   That’s what makes this Dad stand out. 

What is the greatest Christmas gift you ever got?

What is the greatest Christmas gift you ever gave?

What gift do you really want?