HELLO!

As mentioned in my previous blog, I am not preaching this Sunday. In years past, when I did offer a sermon on the Sunday after Christmas, when pews are typically empty, I was faced with one of the most unpleasant New Testament texts outside of Revelations. Matthew 2:13-23 “An angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, remain there until I tell you; for Herod is searching for the child, to destroy him. When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he had all the children in and around Bethlehem killed who were two years old or under.”

King Herod’s paranoia and brute power remind us of Pharaoh; Joseph’s attention to God’s leading through dreams sounds like his ancestor Joseph long ago; the flight of Jesus and his family to Egypt looking for safety from a threat sounds like the sojourn of the people of Israel. Matthew’s earliest listeners would have heard all of these similarities to their own story in the story of Jesus’ birth. Mary Hinkle Shore, Dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, provides this contrast, between the “powerful centre” and the “powerless margins”. She asks churches, disciples, do we live “on the edge” or “in the centre” today?

Some of us read this terrible story and ask, “Why did God kill these babies just to make the Scriptures come true?” This would be a mis-reading, or mis-hearing, of the text. Matthew is careful in his wording, saying not “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” but “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet.” According to preacher/author Thomas Long, this matters, because Matthew doesn’t call these murders God’s will; rather, he tells this story to reassure us nothing, not even the most despicable evil we can imagine, can stop God from accomplishing God’s purposes.

Perhaps it’s easier to welcome a sweet little baby if we don’t have to think about what the little baby was taking on. Perhaps it’s not a pretty image for the Christmas season, but then the Incarnation isn’t about “pretty”; it is God entering our own lived reality, including the pain and suffering and the struggle as well. It seems Matthew tells this story to remind us of this conflict waged in every soul, in every age. Or as Paulo Freire says, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” Or Plato, who wrote, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when we are afraid of the light.”

Peace, Kevin