Date: 24 December 2015 – Christmas Eve
Site: Bethany United Church – Halifax, NS
Text: Matthew 2:13-23
In 25 years of pastoral visitation there is one conversation that repeats itself, it goes something like this… “Kevin, what is this world coming to, this world is a mess!” Usually I let the person vent, list all the things that are not as they used to be, “we never had to lock our doors at night” being the most common lament. I remind the person that the world has always had “troubles” as the Irish say. I can list some of the challenges, the violence and the pain our ancestors lived through if you wish. Nostalgia is a lovely thing but history it is not.
But this year…this year was brutal. The news was darker, scarier, and more worrisome than it has been for some time. As the Globe and Mail read this week, “Charlie Hebdo, the Paris massacre, San Bernardino, thousands murdered by terrorists in Africa and the Middle East, passenger planes blown out of the sky, unstoppable climate change, and unprecedented rates of species extinction”, and the list goes on and on.
And so here we sit, we like believers around the world, in churches swelled like no other day in the year, with our faith in a loving God and our fear that this faith cannot help us in a year like this one. Do we sit here and take in the beauty of the sanctuary, the warm glow of children’s faces and the rich melody of Silent Night, and try to put the fear aside? Or do we revisit our faith, pull it out at this most sacred time, and ask God what to make of these common challenges?
So tonight I dusted off the reading we rarely discuss from our Bible, the Slaughter of the Innocents, when the tyrant Herod, haunted by a vision that a child would soon be born who would challenge his authority, would order the deaths of thousands of little infant boys. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas states, “Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants.”
There’s no getting around it: Matthew’s “slaughter of the innocents,” as the church has called it, is a god-awful text. Some of us may remember being taught “the Flight into Egypt” as children, usually in a matter-of-fact way, sometimes as an adventure story designed to make Mary and Joseph heroic, when in fact they were simply refugees. I don’t recall being terrorized by images of soldiers slaughtering babies, but I certainly got the point: this was one very dangerous world for Jesus.
The world has seen its share of bloodthirsty tyrants; Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet…but Herod was in a category all on his own. Augustus is said to have made the grim pun that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son. Herod gave orders when dying that the leading citizens of Jericho be slaughtered so that people would be weeping at his funeral. And so in the midst of all this comes the birth of a child to a teenage unwed woman, in a cave, under the guiding light of a bright star. This violent, unpredictable world, where life-expectancy was low and poverty and disease was widespread, there was a birth in a stable, a light in the dark sky, a cause for hope among faith-filled people. This birth gave hope to generations of believers but it did not stop the carnage.
There is a troubling part to this story that few notice. Listen to the text. “Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him. Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt.” Why didn’t Matthew write this story differently, move Joseph to go back and warn the mothers of these other sons what was to come to them? He does not even whisper a word to others. Instead he takes his own child and flees.
That’s another way we often deal with these worldly challenges, we embrace our faith’s message of love and reaching out to others but limit it to the safe places where we live and work. How many times have we heard these Bible stories, prayed over their meaning and acted out our convictions, but kept that love to “our own”. As the old expression goes, “charity begins at home.” By the way, that is NOT in the Bible.
Moving on with our text tonight Matthew tells us, “And after being warned in a dream, Joseph went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth.” Does Nazareth ring any bells? John’s gospel includes this gem, “can any good come from Nazareth?” Nazareth was a backwater town of that region, the butt of every joke. The light of hope in our darkness, the Savior born to a broken world, he was born to a teenage unwed mother, in a cave and was raised in a town everyone labelled as a backwater.
In an article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail author Ian Brown asks L’Arche founder Jean Vanier where his faith is grounded. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/jean-vaniers-comfort-and-joy-find-the-places-of-hope/article27842806/?utm_source=Shared+Article+Sent+to+User&utm_medium=E-mail:+Newsletters+/+E-Blasts+/+etc.&utm_campaign=Shared+Web+Article+Links “We have to find places of hope. I love the idea of waiting for the moment…There are those moments – it could be looking at a picture, reading a book – it’s a moment of a meeting. With what? With truth? With love? When you see the birds or the trees, you can’t help but think of all that, the origin and beauty of our universe, the beauty of the animals, the flowers. It suddenly hits you: Something is there. So that is why I wait for the moment.”
There are moments. But you have to be open for them. Our culture has a hard time with this. Our culture tells us we can control everything. But we can’t. We need to let go and let God show us those faith-filled moments. And some of our religious background, well-meaning, tells us that if we are “good” and play by the rules, God will reward us with moments, lots of moments. But that is not the God of the Bible, that is Santa Claus. In the Gospels stories the pain of the world does not stop, children die, we die, the earth dies. We are called by Jesus’ example to do everything in our power to stop the pain. But in the midst of this effort we need to remain open to moments of peace and hope. Moments of frailty, weakness, of unexpected places of grace and love.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.3364225/toronto-family-to-welcome-43-syrian-refugees-into-home-1.3364230 The other night on CBC Radio’s As It Happens I listened to a story about a former Syrian who now lives in Toronto, a church goer, who had one of those moments of peace and hope. This woman and her mother are bringing 43 Syrian refugee family members to Canada. All will be staying at the Youssef's Scarborough bungalow…The bombings in Syria, it was all too much for this woman and her mom, so they looked into how they could bring relatives to Canada. "When someone's asking you please save my son…you can't say no," says Youssef. "We knew that there was a way to help." Youssef and her mother have raised $250,000 to bring their family members to Canada. To do it they had to take out a loan out from the bank and put a second mortgage on their home. But Youssef says the financial strain is worth it. "Growing up, I thought I had no hobbies and I thought what am I doing with my life. Now, I realize that I'm helping save lives and that means more to me than anything else."
She was open to the moment. But it need not be our family. I leave you with Vanier’s closing words in the Globe story. Brown asked Vanier why he thought he could care for two disabled men on his own, with no training to speak of, a young man fresh from the war and university. “I thought we might have fun,” he said. “And how did you plan to do that?” Brown asked him. “Well, I had a little car, one of those little two-horsepower Citroëns. I thought we could go for drives.”
May a peaceful, a hopeful moment, come your way. May you find the moment where God is often found, in unexpected places of frailty and vulnerability. May this moment help you understand what to do with your life and may you have fun along the way. Peace.