Saint Matthew 2:13-23
A long time friend of mine works as a concierge at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker and wrote this of his Christmas morning experience: “Nothing says Christmas more than a full-fledged family feud in the lobby of a hotel.” In a later post he elaborated: “a couple of guests and their two teenager-ish children were apparently upset that the father had done/said something about a relative at dinner last night.”
This post prompted another Facebook friend to reply: “Some of my worst memories when working involved Holidays, families........and alcohol.....not usually a good combination.”
I bet all of us have memories of holidays that have not just gone awry but somehow turned into unmitigated disasters.
I remember one, years ago, in which a friend’s grandmother and his father got into some kind of a royal battle after I had fallen asleep on the floor following Christmas dinner. I awoke to yelling and packages flying over my head. It was like being in one of those war movies where I had to crawl along the floor for fear that if I lifted my head I would be hit with an incoming Christmas present. I made a mental note that if I escaped the from line of fire I should probably spend holidays elsewhere for my own safety.
The sad fact is that Christmas can be like that. We want everything to go perfectly. We want there to be love, good cheer, and warm feelings but sometimes there is anger, sadness, and even some depression when the Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell Christmas’ don’t happen.
We want things to be perfect yet sometimes things happen that are out of our control and instead of carols by the piano we have a five round fight going on in our living room. It is almost an variation on the old Rodney Dangerfield line: “I went to a Christmas party and a hockey game broke out.”
Now let me be clear about one thing: This is a first world problem. Having our Christmas ruined by anything, except perhaps the death of a family member pales in comparison to what Christians and non-Christians in other countries are enduring.
According to The Pew Research Center, over 75% of the world's population live in areas with severe religious restrictions. Many of these people are Christians. Also, according to the United States Department of State, Christians in more than 60 countries face persecution from their governments or surrounding neighbors simply because of their belief in the person of Jesus Christ.1
The Syrian Civil War alone, besides producing countless dead, has also produced two million refugees, 500,000 of whom are Christians.
Most of these people live in countries where there is a totalitarian leader who displays no small measure of paranoia. Which is why today’s gospel is an important one for us to hear and to ponder.
An important and powerful part of the Christmas story is that Jesus, our Savior, began his life as a refugee, fleeing in terror from a paranoid leader.
Herod was an irrational, angry man. We have seen his likes in the dictators of our day who would starve, torture, and even turn their armies on their own people. They become the faces of evil for us. They are the faces of anger and hate. They represent all we do not like about those who will hold on to power at any cost to anybody except themselves.
Herod was a powerful and paranoid man.
The late Fr. Raymond Brown in his tome, The Birth of the Messiah, tells us that by the time of Jesus’ birth Herod already had two of his own sons killed when he perceived them to be a threat. And he instructed “his soldiers to kill notable political prisoners upon the news of his death. His goal was expressed thus: ‘So shall all Judea and every household weep for me, whether they wish it or not.’”
There has to be something wrong with you when you find out (through the Three Magi we shall hear about next week) that there is an child somewhere who might threaten your power. Remember, the Magi didn’t tell the king that there were armies amassing on his boarder, they only spoke of a star, and the birth of a child.
One of the symptoms of paranoia is a belief that everyone is out to get you. Often paranoid people lash out in unreasonable fits of anger. Herod should have been locked away in an asylum rather than reigning from a palace, but there he was, angry, powerful and afraid and so he issues an insane order.
He orders that all the male children two and under be living in Bethlehem be killed. This “slaughter of the innocents,” as it called may have taken the lives of only twenty or so children, because Bethlehem was a small town, but still it was twenty too many.
Jesus escapes because his earthly father Joseph is obedient.
An angel wakes Joseph again from a sound sleep and says, “Get up and flee to Egypt with the baby and his mother and stay there until I tell you to return, for King Herod is going to try to kill the child.” While Herod may have been a case study in unbridled anger, Joseph is an excellent example of absolute obedience.
Joseph listens to God’s voice while Herod listens only to his own and so in his only response to anyone who would challenge him is to lash out and destroy. Joseph’s response is to believe and obey.
Destruction born out of anger is a pretty easy thing to give into. It is also a pretty simple thing to do.
It’s easier to kill something off than find ways to help it live.
It is easier to cut people off from friendships than it is to work on and restore the relationship. It is easier to walk away than to face a problem and try to solve it. And, while all of us have the potential to do great harm to people and places we love we also have the ability to listen to God’s voice and dream God’s dreams.
Joseph did that twice and saved the life of the Christ child.
He did it when the angel came to him and called him to take Mary to be his wife. Who knows what Mary would have done alone without Joseph’s support. Joseph knew that God’s dream was right and so took up his duty to Mary and bore her burden with her until they, and we, could be blessed by the birth of the Jesus.
Now Joseph was called to do it again. To save his young son’s life by heading to a place of safety beyond the scope of Herod’s evil reach. Joseph takes Mary and Jesus off to Egypt and waits for an angelic all clear. He was obedient to the dream God gave him.
I think the power in this story lies in Jesus and his family being forced into exile by an angry, despotic, leader. Now, when all of those displaced persons around the world, forced to live in land not of their own choosing, pray to God for strength and safety God, because of Jesus, knows what it is like at a young age to be uprooted from your home and taken off somewhere where you otherwise would not have chosen to go.
God hears the cries of those who are far from home and understands their prayers in a very real way.
And to those of us who whose Christmas exiles are of our own making. Who let our anger get the better of us in the lobby of a hotel because of who said what to whom the night before.
I think this story reminds us to, quite simply, cool it and not be so focussed in ourselves that we forget the far greater needs of others.
This story stands to remind us what the church should be doing at Christmastime and all the time.
The church stands to remind people that the ultimate mover and shaker in the world is God and not those who represent the empire.
The church stands to remind people that real power lies in hope rather than anger and the desire to get even.
The church stands to recognize and call out false power when it sees it because we know that God, when God chose to come into the world, chose to do so powerless.
The church stands to be like Joseph and respond to the dreams God gives us even if those dreams demand even more time, and effort, and yes, even more sacrifice.
The church stands to remind us that it is in all of those places that we never expected we might go, if we are willing to follow him, Christ will be with us.
After all that is one of the names given to Joseph in yet another of his dreams is that his son would be called Immanuel from the Hebrew “God is with us.”
God is with you amid all that the anger of this world might throw your way.
God is with you in your exiles be they imposed by a angry tyrant or the anger that is within you.
God is with you in every moment just waiting for the right moment to call you back home.
As with Mary and Joseph and their baby boy God is waiting to call you back to where you belong. Back to him.
Back to the one who has saved you from your sins.
Back to Christ where anger’s exile ends and acceptance begins.
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1. _____, “About Christian Persecution. Opendoorusa.com.
2. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah. (New York: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group, 1993), p. 227.
3. St. Matthew 2:13. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
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