Today's gospel reading is short, but pretty important. Joseph sometimes gets sidelined in the nativity, he seems like kind of a bystander. That certainly wasn't true. This little piece of the story of Jesus' birth is important because it gives Joseph a stake. Remember that whole list of names we read yesterday? Naming matters, and a Biblical man's name was often connected to his father. That God came to Joseph in a dream and told him to give Jesus his name means that God was asking Joseph to connect himself to Jesus, taking part the the generations of fathers who named their sons. God didn't wish to operate outside the human realm, he includes humanity in the story of Jesus at every point.