But we are having a wedding here soon with a couple,
who of all the couples I have married, have inspired in me a sense of holy joy.
They are a very simple couple
they are what Australian sociologists would probably refer to as working class
and who our previous prime minister would have labelled battlers,
and who my gran would have called ‘salt of the earth’.
And they are coming together with 4 children collectively from previous relationships, three little boys and a baby girl
and they are coming together with a very clear sense of what they are doing
and why they are doing it.

‘Its like we were two broken families’
the man told me quietly and with passion
‘two broken things and now we are made whole’

I share with you this story, because today, we have been given a gospel story
about messy unconventional family relationships,
about children being parented with power and love
by parents to whom they are not biologically connected
and about something which was broken becoming whole.
And of course today also, we have participated
in our sacred baptismal rite, a rite which expands the great cosmic family,
the family of Christ.

Sometimes the things we feel called to do
don’t really seem to make much sense,
or at least not much sense to the outside world
or even to our own outside, external, intellectual, selves,
but sometimes what we feel in our hearts is really all that matters.

Joseph is a man (a man, we must not forget of a particular time and place a time and place where sex outside of wedlock was deemed a sin
and where woman could be stoned for falling pregnant outside of marriage
and where the possibility of being outcast for such ‘crimes’ was very real)
who wants to do the right thing, he wants to ‘do the right thing’
by Mary, by his family, by his religion and by himself
and so because he is a ‘righteous man and does not want to expose Mary to public disgrace he had in mind to divorce her from their betrothal vows quietly’.
But then something happens.
Something which cant be explained intellectually,
something which doesn’t make sense culturally,
something radical and something frighteningly new.
Joseph, the text tells us, woke up.
Joseph woke up.
Joseph our man determined to do the right thing,
the sensible thing,
the practical, logical, culturally safe thing
wakes up and goes with his heart,
his heart which has been opened up by Gods spirit manifest in angelic form,
he goes with his heart, takes Mary by the hand
and embraces a baby who the story tells us, is not his own.
When have you woken up recently?
When have you known that the logical practical sensible thing
would be to follow a particular path down a particular road but then
something,
something has happened
and you have gone instead
with your heart, with your hope, with your love?
Shereen and Douglas did something of the heart here with us this morning.
They did something with little Kiara and with all of us that doesn’t really,
at an intellectual level make much sense
and which certainly at a cultural leval could be seen as being slightly at odds
with our sophisticated secular society.
But they did it all the same because, like all our baptismal families,
they felt called in their hearts to acknowledge Kara’s sacred nature
and to give thanks for her
and to commit both her and themselves to living a life
which challenges the conventional materialistic culture of our time.
God sends us messages, in myriad forms, in myriad moments
 throughout our lives, the question is, can we like Joseph wake up to what god is telling us and can we say yes to what is required?