{"id":37,"date":"2008-03-22T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-22T20:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/advent-4-joseph\/"},"modified":"2008-03-22T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-22T20:59:00","slug":"advent-4-joseph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/advent-4-joseph\/","title":{"rendered":"Advent 4 – Joseph"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say that you wait ages for a bus to come along, and then two come along together. Well, here I am again for the second time in a month and, not only that, it\u2019s the same Sunday as I talked on last year, The last Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before Christmas. L<\/span>ast year, the reading focussed on Mary, and I felt fairly out of my depth trying to identify with a 15 year old, unmarried, newly pregnant, woman. This year, the reading focuses on Joseph, which, on the face of it puts me in a better starting position. If it weren\u2019t for the fact that Joseph was in a fairly unusual situation.<\/p>\n

L<\/span>et\u2019s walk this through. <\/span>Joseph was a righteous man, a just man. So why didn\u2019t he have Mary stoned<\/span>? How would you feel? Your fianc\u00e9 comes to you and says she\u2019s pregnant, but you know you haven\u2019t slept with her, and not only that but she says and angel told her it was from God.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d be devastated, angry, lashing out, vindictive.<\/span> And the law says, in Deuteronomy that Joseph would have been well within his rights to have her stoned. But he didn\u2019t. Not because he was merciful, but because he was just.<\/span><\/p>\n

Continued here…<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They say that you wait ages for a bus to come along, and then two come along together. Well, here I am again for the second time in a month and, not only that, it\u2019s the same Sunday as I talked on last year, The last Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before Christmas. Last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[62,56,58,25,60,61,59,57,55],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-luton","tag-advent","tag-angel","tag-humility","tag-incarnation","tag-joseph","tag-justice","tag-matthew-118-25","tag-mercy","tag-micah-68"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}