We’re moving into a time that’s all about telling
stories. Stories about who Jesus
was and what he said. Tonight we
hear a good chunk of the story of Jesus’ birth, and the less-told story of what
happens afterward.
My mother is the kind of person who always wonders what
happened afterward. We’ll go to a
movie and she’ll be wondering what happened after all the action and
drama died down. She’s interested
in the quieter, more personal dramas.
How do relationships change after sustaining a trauma? How do people live their lives after
something incredible has happened?
Matthew’s gospel presents us with a quieter story of Jesus’
birth, a less told story, less dramatic than Luke’s account, with no manger, no
shepherds. Simply an angel that
appears in a dream and changes the course of a simple man’s action. And after the birth of the child,
Matthew tells us a bit of his version of the story that appears no where in
Luke: things get really really complicated.
Joseph might have been thinking, okay, I did it. the child was born, I named him
Jesus. We’re good now, right? But it
wasn’t going to be that easy.
Matthew’s version of this story throws into sharp relief that
the movement of the Holy Spirit is predictably followed by conflict and
violence. God comes down at
Christmas to make a home with us in human flesh, and those who see rejoice...and then conflict erupts with force and power. For Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, it means becoming sudden exiles
from their homeland, hiding in Egypt as the birth of their son, astonishingly,
causes the death of every child under two years old in that region.
There’s two things that stick out to me in this story.
The first is that the young Jesus had an experience as a
child of living very, very close to the edge. Traveling was not safe in his day, especially with a woman
and a child, and the family can’t have had many resources. After eeking out a living in Egypt,
they move yet again, to a town where they have no relations, and put down roots. I was reading in the times today that the
number of people in the US surviving only
on food stamps has doubled in the last two years. I read the stories of people in Florida who are moving in
with families after foreclosing on their homes, with food stamps as the only
constant in their lives. I can’t
imagine what it feels like to live that close to the edge. Jesus knew the feeling well.
The second thing that strikes me is the presence of the
angel in the life of Joseph and Mary.
After that initial appearance to Joseph, the angel appears to him three
more times. It’s hard to know how
long this trek to Egypt and back takes, but we might imagine that Jesus is 6 or
even 8 by the whole story plays out.
This means that, for years, perhaps, Joseph hears nothing from the angel.
He’s changed his life, uprooted his family, fled to a foreign land, all
on the strength of two dreams. And
in those long nights when he wonders what on earth he’s doing and how he got
here, wonders if he’ll be able to sustain his wife and child through these
times, I can only imagine how isolated he feels.
I think most of us have had moments like that. We’ve trusted God to lead us somewhere
new, and then we find ourselves utterly alone. Unable to feel God’s presence. Unable to sense the light within us that burned so brightly
just a short while before.
But what I notice about this story is that the angel never
lets Joseph down. God gives Joseph
the messages Joseph needs to hear, and expects sheer trust to get him through
the interim.
It’s easy enough to say, “God will carry you through, God’s
got you.” But to trust, when
you’re living only on food stamps…that’s faith.
My angel looks a little different from Joseph. I met God face to face as a teenager as
I held a torch in a huge procession at my Cathedral on, as it happens,
Christmas Eve. And like Joseph,
there have been moments of seeing God again since that brilliant moment as a 14
year old. And like Joseph, there
are long stretches when God seems entirely absent, just plain gone. And I have to trust the memory to get
me through.
We share our sermons at St. Lydia’s. What experiences would you like to
share after hearing the text and my words this evening?
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