Sermon for Jan. 5, 2024 (the Second Sunday of Christmas)
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23
If you were looking forward to the arrival
of the Three Kings today, I’m sorry to disappoint you. With the winter storm and the warnings to
stay off the roads, it seemed prudent to delay our royal visitors and have them
come next Sunday instead.
Among other disruptions, this change
throws the sequence of our Gospel readings out of whack. Instead of hearing about the magi and King
Herod today, we move to the next episode in Matthew’s story. But, in the category of finding the silver
lining in the clouds of our blizzard, this gives us the chance to hear part of
Jesus’ family story we usually miss because of the kings’ visit here.
For today’s Gospel reading to make sense,
you have to know not only that the magi have just left from visiting Jesus but
what that means. As we’ll hear next
Sunday, the story of the wise men concludes in two parts. First, they give Jesus gold, frankincense, and
myrrh, symbolizing his status as God’s own king – the messiah. But after that, the story ends with an angel
visiting the wise men in a dream, telling them to avoid King Herod as they make
their way home. Why? Because King Herod was trying to use the wise
men as spies. He’d told them to go find
the baby King and then report back, supposedly so Herod could go and worship,
too. Right. What we hear today is what Herod really had in
mind, which was to kill his tiny rival to strengthen his grip on power.
So, in today’s story, the spotlight shifts
from Herod and the wise men to the Holy Family. And because it’s Matthew telling the tale, the
central character among the Holy Couple isn’t Mary but Joseph.
The reading begins with an angel, a
messenger of the Lord, coming to Joseph in a dream. This time, the angel isn’t offering wise
advice; it’s acting as a first responder. “Get up,” the angel says, “and take the child
and his mother and flee to Egypt … for Herod is about to search for the child
to destroy him” (2:13). And then comes
one of those lines in Scripture that, by itself, holds enough material for a
book: Joseph does what the angel says; the family escapes Bethlehem in the
middle of the night, moves to Egypt, and stays there until Herod dies. I’d like to hear the rest of that
story.
Anyway, this was no quick camping trip;
this was the Holy Family fleeing to a foreign country as refugees from
government persecution. And they were
exactly right to have left because Herod’s next act in the story is to
slaughter all of Bethlehem’s children two years and younger, an act of state
terror that would have killed Jesus, too. We don’t know exactly how long Joseph, Mary,
and Jesus lived in Egypt but probably a few years as they waited for Herod to
die.
Now, let’s hit the pause button on this
story and think about Joseph for a minute. In Matthew’s version of the Christmas story a
chapter earlier, there is no annunciation to Mary. In Matthew, the annunciation comes to Joseph
when, you guessed it, an angel visits him in a dream and says, “Do not be
afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the
Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20). Now, if we
were Joseph, we’d be thinking, “Right; sure that’s where the baby came
from.” But Joseph shows himself to be the
paragon of trust. He may not have been
happy with the angel’s news, but he lets it be. He takes Mary as his wife anyway.
Well, now, the angel is back. If the first news was strange, this news is
terrifying. The angel tells Joseph,
“Remember what I said about this baby being God’s instrument to save people
from their sins? [Matthew 1:21] Well,
first you’ve got to save this baby from Herod.” And, like I said, Joseph follows the angel’s
instructions. He trusts this voice he
hears in a dream. He uproots his family
and treks hundreds of miles across the desert to go to … who knows where? It’s not like Joseph had family in Egypt. He didn’t even have a plan. Like Abraham and Moses, Joseph simply went
where God told him to go. It’s trust I can barely fathom.
OK, then our reading picks back up again. We don’t know what the Holy Family has been
doing in Egypt, other than not being killed by King Herod. But eventually, Herod dies, and Joseph has
another dream. The angel tells him Herod
is dead, and it’s time for the Holy Family to go back where they came from – well,
sort of back where they came from. Joseph is figuring they’ll head back to
Bethlehem, or at least somewhere in Judea, near Jerusalem. But once they arrive, they learn that Herod
has split his kingdom among the three sons he hadn’t killed yet, and the one
now ruling Judea, Archelaus, is no better than his father. So, what to do?
Well, if you’re Joseph, you go to sleep to
find out. Once more, God comes to him in
a dream, telling him to take his family north to Galilee instead – still Jewish
territory but with a different history and, now, a safer ruler. And so, in Matthew’s Gospel, this is how the
Holy Family ends up raising Jesus in Nazareth.
So, what do we take from this story of the
Holy Family and their journeys? One
lesson I hear is that Scripture calls us to take refugees seriously. In our day, these are people fleeing war and
persecution in search of a better life.
For example, the refugees served by JVS, a local resettlement agency
with whom St. Andrew’s partners – those refugees have been through a
documentation process that’s beyond thorough, registering with our government,
being carefully vetted, and usually waiting years before being resettled
somewhere like Kansas City. Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph were living the refugee story, fleeing the harm of an oppressive
regime. So, today, welcoming refugees
into a new land is being true to the teaching of our Scriptures.
But here’s the other lesson I hear in this
story. It’s about Joseph, the saint who usually flies under the radar of the
Sunday readings. I see Joseph as an
astonishing example of what many of us – maybe most of us – find to be a huge
stumbling block in our relationship with God, and that’s trust. If someone says to you, “Trust me,” what’s
your first impulse? And that reaction
comes when it’s a real, live person asking for your trust. How about when it’s a voice in a dream? Spiritual discernment is notoriously tough; as
parishioner Doc Worley used to say, it’s hard to know whether what’s keeping
you up at night is the Holy Spirit or the chili you had for dinner. Trusting that what we hear is the voice of
God, taking the leap of faith – that just might be the hardest thing God asks of
us. And yet, here’s Joseph. He hears from an angel in a dream not once,
not twice, but four times. And
the response is always that Joseph follows the call the angel puts on his heart.
I say it that way because the heart is
where seeds of divine trust blossom and grow. As you’ve heard me say before, even our primary
statement of faith asks us to look to our hearts, not to our heads, to nurture
our relationship with the God who is Love. Each week, we say the Nicene Creed. And, for those of us who offer Morning or
Evening Prayer – each day, we say the
Apostles’ Creed. That sounds like an intellectual
exercise, reciting the claims of these creeds, these fundamental statements we make
as followers of Jesus.
But remember where that word “creed” comes
from. In Latin, it’s credo, which
means, “I believe.” But deeper down, credo
comes from an Indo-European root that’s also the basis of the prefix cardio.
That ancient root means “heart,” not
“head.” For faith is not about agreeing
with intellectual propositions. Faith is
about trusting the Love those propositions describe. And to help myself do that, I cheat when I say
the Apostles’ Creed by myself. I don’t
say, “I believe.” I say, “I trust” – “I trust
in God, the Father, the Almighty, creator of heaven and earth….”
Why do I do that? Because our faith, Joseph’s faith, is all
about the work of trust. The practice of
faith is to remind ourselves, over and over again, that the God who is Love has
our back. That’s good news, always. But it’s especially good to remember late in
the night, when we hear the angels calling us to take the leaps of faith that
bring us life.
