Hermily for 3.19.26
St. Joseph, pray for us
This feast and this saint are special to me personally, because on our honeymoon, my husband and I visited St Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, and we prayed there that St. Joseph would be the patron of our marriage. So each year when his feast day comes around we take a little pilgrimage to a St. Joseph church somewhere, and we eat zeppolis.
St. Joseph is also patron saint of Universal Church, fathers, workers, families, and a happy death. And so we thank him today for his prayers for us in the past, and ask his intercession for our needs and the needs of our families in the future.
The readings are here. I used the Gospel reading from Matthew.
I’m related to Benjamin Franklin.
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It’s through my mom, who was a Smith, but whose mother was a Folger. My grandmother’s father was Albert Folger, and Albert’s father was Edward, and Edward’s father was also Edward, and that Edward’s father was Elisha, His father was also Elisha, and his father was Richard, and Richard’s father was also Richard, and that Richard, born in 1617, 9 generations before me, almost 400 years before I was born, was the maternal grandfather of Ben Franklin!
And the reason you may not have heard me make my claim to the Franklin legacy is because, well, it’s kind of a long story, and in the long run, it doesn’t really matter much. I am the same person I was before I knew this genealogical link existed. Any admirable qualities of Ben or concerning characteristics of Ben have surely not made it through this long line of descendants to me. It’s just kind of… a neat thing that we’re linked somehow.
But in today’s readings, we hear a lot of emphasis on the fact that Jesus, through Joseph, is related to David.
In fact the first lines we hear in the Gospel today are actually the last lines of a long list in Matthew, that spell out the lineage of Jesus through Joseph, all the way back to David, son of Abraham— because as we heard in the Old Testament reading today, it was to David and his descendants that God promised, some 800 years earlier, a kingdom that would endure forever.
Unlike my story, Jesus’ genealogy was important to the people of Israel… even though within that list in Matthew, there are some less-than-perfect characters, and some less-than-admirable choices made by them. It would have been simpler to skip right over these family black sheep but the lineage was so vital to the people of first century Jerusalem that even the shameful bits of the genealogical story were included.
Because this line, this genealogy, doesn’t just link Jesus, through Joseph, to the family name, but to that promise; because the people of Israel had never forgotten that God had said “I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins, and I will make his kingdom firm… I will make his royal throne firm forever.”
To us, Jesus’ lineage is not the important part of his story. In fact, in our minds, Joseph might be nothing more than a background character in the story of Jesus. A lovely guy who decided not to shame his fiance, who was willing to live as father to her son, and who we never once hear speak in the Gospels.
But to the people of Israel, he was the link through whom the promise was kept. Through Joseph’s involvement and his family name, all the descendants of David could be assured that God had not left them out, had not gone back on his promise to them.
As for you and me, who may not be able to trace our lineage back through Joseph to David, Paul reassures us and his church community in Rome that the promise is ours, too. That this promise of God’s nearness and care forever does not depend only on genealogical lineage, but that “the promise may be guaranteed… not to those who only adhere to the law but to those who follow the faith of Abraham, who is the father of all of us.” Paul says that we, even those of us from outside the family, still receive a spiritual inheritance. He says, it’s not about being from the right family, but about living the values and beliefs of that family of faith; we too can claim David as our father, and the promise of the kingdom, ours.
Benjamin Franklin, (cousin Ben), was of course brilliant and has made incredible contributions to the world. Joseph, by all accounts, was a lovely guy, and we can claim our inheritance even through a lineage that is more spiritual than physical. That’s the good news for us today. We, as promised, are part of God’s family just by living the way God invites to live. And loving the way God invites us to love. We have nothing to prove to claim our inheritance or our place in God’s family.
And as we prepare to receive Jesus, present to us in the Eucharist, we remember that God’s promise is being fulfilled in us today. In the next few moments of silence, let’s thank Jesus for including us in God’s family, and return a promise to God to live worthily of his holy family name
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"On our honeymoon, my husband and I visited St Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, and we prayed there that St. Joseph would be the patron of our marriage. So each year when his feast day comes around we take a little pilgrimage to a St. Joseph church somewhere, and we eat zeppolis." Love it!