The Carpenter Who Chose Solidarity: What Joseph Teaches Us About Scrubbing Off What Doesn't Serve

I didn't grow up with the church calendar. In my house, "lint" was something you picked off your clothes and threw in the trash, not a season of spiritual preparation. I came to Advent late—well into my twenties—and even then, it took years before I understood why marking time by the rhythms of Jesus's life rather than the calendar of consumerism might actually matter.

But here's what I've learned: Advent is not about soft music, dim lighting, and good-smelling oils. Advent is a Korean spa scrub. If you've never experienced a Korean spa, let me paint you a picture. You walk in thinking you're about to have a nice, relaxing time.

Instead, you meet a middle-aged person who is utterly unfazed by your pain, who will scrub every inch of your flesh until dead skin you didn't even know was there rolls off your body. They do not care about your modesty or self-consciousness. Their job is to scrub off the buildup, and it will not be comfortable. But you will be clean. You will wonder if you have ever bathed before.

That's Advent. That's what these four weeks are supposed to do to us. This year, as we light the fourth candle—the love candle—I want to talk about what we need to scrub off. And I want to talk about a carpenter from Nazareth who did exactly that, two thousand years ago, in a way that quite literally changed the course of history.

What Quietly Builds Up When We're Not Paying Attention

Erna Kim Hackett, founder of Liberated Together, writes that living in the United States within an empire where Christian nationalism feels increasingly normal and violence is widely tolerated means "the buildup happens slowly. And most of the time we do not even notice it."

Y'all, this is the truth we need to sit with. Just like the dead skin that accumulates on our bodies even when we shower regularly, there are things that build up on our souls when we live inside systems of domination and dehumanization. We think we're fine. We think we're clean. But we're walking around covered in the residue of empire, patriarchy, and coercive power—and we don't even know it's there. During Advent, we're invited to scrub off our numbness. Our immobilization in the face of violence. Our capitulations to coercion. Our simple and bored resistance to the riches of wonder.

The old hymn gets it right: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." Hope and fear, fear and hope—they're not opposites. They're dance partners in the dark, and the Christmas story holds space for both.

Joseph: The Patron Saint of Scrubbing Off Patriarchy

Let's talk about Joseph. Poor Joseph, who gets barely a mention in Scripture and never speaks a single recorded word. The man who was engaged to Mary, who found out she was pregnant, and who had every reason—every social, religious, and personal reason—to walk away. I wonder what Joseph felt when he found out. The devastation of heartbreak. Betrayal. Humiliation. Anger. Maybe he started hearing Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" in his head. (Don't act like you don't know that song. It's a whole mood.)

But here's where it gets interesting. Even in his pain, Joseph was "righteous"—committed to God's revealed will as expressed by the letter of the law. And his righteousness was already tinged with mercy. He decided to divorce Mary quietly, without public reproach or explanation. That would have cost him, by the way. People probably would have blamed him, thought he'd violated purity codes too. Then comes the dream. The angel appears to Joseph at night and calls him to something beyond righteousness tinged with mercy. Beyond charity. The angel invites him to solidarity and proximity and radical involvement with what cannot be explained.

"Do not be afraid."

But there was so much to fear. Loss of status in an honor-shame culture. Lack of relevance in a society where biological children were everything. Fear of being defined by a woman's calling instead of his own. Fear of what this said about his masculinity as a man who clearly didn't control his woman's body.

Was there a split second when Joseph wanted to retreat to the safety of the idol of biblical manhood—which then, as now, is only thinly veiled patriarchy? Was there a moment when he wanted to shore up the idol of us versus them, scapegoating Mary to preserve his own social status?

Whatever his first reactions were, Joseph ultimately refused to participate in the cycle of idolatry and inhumanity. Instead, he reached out a hand. He chose to create a cycle of solidarity.

"Joseph's power wasn't in control—it was in his subversive tenderness and willingness to not be the main character."

In all those years I spent reading John Piper and Wayne Grudem voraciously, nobody ever told me that Joseph was the model of biblical manhood. That his choice of nurture and care and solidarity was a blow against coercive and dominating power. That real strength looks like embracing the feminine not just as something to possess, but as something to embody.

This is the scrubbing off we need. If you're a person of privilege—a man, white, economically comfortable—I want you to sit with this question: Where in my life am I clinging to being the main character? What would it mean to faithfully accompany instead?

And if you're not in those privileged categories, here's your question: How might I lean into main character energy and practice the faith to ask for and the willingness to receive support? Charity Keeps You Comfortable. Solidarity Costs You Something. Let me be honest with you: I've spent a lot of my life choosing charity over solidarity while telling myself I was doing the right thing.

Charity feels good. Charity lets you help while maintaining distance. Charity keeps you in control of the narrative and the outcome. You write the check, you volunteer for the shift, you donate the canned goods, and you go home feeling like a good person.

Solidarity is different. Solidarity requires proximity. It means showing up in ways that might change you, cost you, complicate your life. It means your well-being becomes entangled with someone else's in a way that you can't untangle when it gets inconvenient.

Joseph chose solidarity. He didn't just provide financial support for Mary from a distance. He married her. He protected her. He shielded the sacred life growing inside of her and ended up protecting and providing for the savior of the world.

The question we have to ask as a church is this: Who among us is carrying something sacred and heavy, quietly in danger? And how might we acknowledge that and act?

*Not with charity. With solidarity.

Hope Isn't Math (And Thank God For That) Here's something I need you to understand: hope and optimism are not the same thing, and we've been confusing them for far too long. Mary Ann McKibben Dana writes in her book Hope: A User's Manual that "optimism does its best work in the before. When the evidence points plausibly in a positive direction, when you can still anticipate the best possible outcome." But when the facts suggest otherwise?

Optimism isn't enough.

I've heard optimism described as a mathematical construct—an equation where past experience plus present striving equals future greatness. Optimism relies on external circumstances lining up in a certain way. Hope isn't mathematical. It's philosophical, physical, and maybe even musical.

True hope defies cause and effect and has impact regardless of outcome. This is the kind of hope that the Christmas story invites us into—not the shallow optimism that says everything will work out fine, but the deep hope that says even in the darkest night, even in Bethlehem under occupation, even when Herod is slaughtering innocents, God is still at work in ways we cannot control or predict. Joseph models this hope. He doesn't have all the answers. He doesn't know how this is going to turn out. He just knows that in a dream, at night, when he was utterly out of control, he received revelation. And he chose to trust it.

The Spirituality We Actually Need

Here's what Erna Kim Hackett says, and I need you to really hear this: "It is no accident that revelation in this story comes at night. In the face of danger and state violence as Jesus's arrival hangs by a thread, Matthew shows us that one of the antidotes to empire is mystery, dreams, angels, and night."

"The spirituality we need to survive this era is not the one many of us were given. Not mountaintop highs and self-improvement, but a spirituality of descent, hiddenness, mystery, and deep attunement in the darkest of night."

I don't know about you, but that's not what I learned in Sunday School. I was taught that faith meant staying positive, praying harder, climbing my way to peak experiences with God. I was taught that doubt was weakness and mystery was something to solve rather than something to sit with.

But Joseph teaches us something different. He teaches us that sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is listen to dreams we receive when we have no control. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is embrace humility instead of grasping for certainty.

Joseph lived in the shadow of Herod—a puppet king who built massive projects and displayed wealth to shore up his power. Joseph was a simple carpenter. Herod pursued the affirmation of others constantly. Joseph lived a life of simplicity and humility, seeking primarily to please God.

As Pastor Adam Hamilton writes, "Joseph is the patron saint of those who give themselves to God, who live a costly faith and never receive nor expect any credit."

I often think of Mary as the one who nurtured Jesus in the ways of revolution, with her bold belief that in God's economy, the mighty had already been cast down. But I suspect Jesus learned humility from Joseph. I suspect those seeds from Joseph's steady, faithful life flowered into teachings like: "You know the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant" (Matthew 20:25-26).

Receiving Your King

Friends, the one who is God with us—the one who has come in the past, will come in the future, and longs to come to us in the present—asks us today to receive him, to love him as Joseph did. The one who scrubbed off divinity for the sake of vulnerability, for the sake of a womb, invites you past your numbness. Past your immobilization in the face of violence. Past your capitulations to coercion. Past your simple and bored resistance to the riches of wonder.

This fourth Sunday of Advent, we light the love candle, praying that it soften us and make us tender again. That it give us the courage to scrub off what we've been taught is normal but is actually antithetical to Jesus. That it help us choose solidarity over charity, hope over optimism, mystery over control.

Today, may you receive your king, raised by a carpenter who knew how to chisel hope out of fear.