Sunday, January 11, 2026
“Following Joseph: Moving Ahead with Faith, Courage and Resourcefulness”
Steve Jacobsen delivers the message “Following Joseph: Moving Ahead with Faith, Courage and Resourcefulness” with music from Kathleen Sieck and the music team.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 2:13-18
The Escape to Egypt
13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
Rembrandt, “Joseph’s Dream,” 1645 Rembrandt often paints angels so they are visible to us as viewers but not to the person who is receiving their message — they are a felt but unseen presence. One commentator says this: Rembrandt chooses a moment at once intimate and momentous: the message arrives not in a palace or temple but in the straw-scented anonymity of a stable. Joseph’s fatigue is palpable; he is seated low, chin cupped, posture folded in on itself, the very picture of a man exhausted by travel and recent events. The angel’s presence radiates urgency tempered by compassion, a heavenly emissary who stoops to the scale of a poor family’s shelter. By binding the extraordinary to the ordinary, Rembrandt honors the Gospel’s paradox that world-altering news reaches the world through quiet rooms and sleeping people…