First Sunday of Christmas, December 29, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our redeeming, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I wonder how you hear this story from the Gospel of Matthew’s birth narrative this morning. With Christmas carols ringing in your ears? Do you notice the fulfillment of so much scripture according to Matthew? Are you scratching your head trying to place the various Hebrew bible references? Do you notice Joseph’s many dreams? If you were a Jewish congregation from the first century of the common era, you might all be thinking, “Jacob’s son Joseph was a dreamer and he ended up in Egypt because of it.” If you were a Jewish congregation from the first century, you would know that Ramah was the site of national disaster when Babylonian armies gathered the people of Israel there to begin the forced march of deportation into exile. And you would also think that, “hey! Jesus was just like Moses! Moses survived Pharaoh’s mandate to kill all of the male babies of the Hebrew people.” And when you thought that, you might feel a glimmer of excitement and hope for an exodus from enslavement to the Roman empire!

I hear the story from the perspective of a mom. Because today is my daughter Laura’s birthday, I do that mom thing of remembering when she was born. And since I’m preaching today, I thought I would do it in a public way — you know, recalling the story of her birth – especially the moment I first saw her — the infant I had only known by feel from the inside for so many months. I recall the first moment I held her in my arms, tears streaming down my face, overwhelmed with happiness and relief and wonder. It was not unlike the scene of her older sister’s birth nearly two years before. The second time was not in any way diminished by my previous experience. I remember both of those moments very clearly.

The days after Laura’s birth are a little blurry in my memory, but leaving the hospital with her and riding home is clear as a bell in my mind. It was terrifying. Somehow I thought that it wouldn’t be so frightening the second time. I thought that I would have some confidence built up in my ability to care for an infant without a team of doctors and nurses and other helpers on hand. But I didn’t. What’s more, I had an adorable and rambunctious twenty-two-month old child waiting for me to come home. I was not feeling confident at all! I was really scared that I couldn’t keep either one of my daughters safe! I hear the story of the flight of the holy family and enter it that way – in touch with the deep desire to keep my children safe (no matter how old they get)!

I have to tell you, though, that I also hear this story of the flight of the holy family and enter the narrative another way – a much more tragic way — with the news from Syria that 11,420 children are dead in the civil war there: surely that is a slaughter of Holy Innocents. And I think, “the infant Jesus was a refugee.” At least half of the two million registered refugees from Syria are children, 75% of those are under the age of 12. The United Nations estimates that another two million children are displaced from their homes still within Syria. In Syria, like many many other places in the world, people are suffering, children are dying, and oppressors are getting away with murder. Surely every one of those children is as precious as my own. And I know that even as we sing our carols and celebrate our holidays, enormous numbers of people are fleeing, or trying to flee, violence all around the world. It’s very possible that this Gospel story is not based on an historical event – it may be a literary device recalling Pharaoh’s command to slaughter children that Moses escaped. But it doesn’t matter whether this really happened during Jesus’ infancy, because it does really happen. I cannot preach about this story as if it is metaphor only, or as if it is ancient history. So then, where is the Good News in the narrative of our Savior’s birth?

I don’t know about you, but the Christmas story always sounds different to me in the daylight a few days after Christmas Eve with its story of wonder at the manger. What kind of good news is it when folks are hoping for a savior and get a helpless infant? Blogger Brian Volck writes that it’s troublesome to gaze upon an incarnate, vulnerable God who will grow into someone who will encourage us to “turn our life projects upside down and follow him to an uncertain end. We’ve all worked so hard, meant so well, sacrificed so much to trade away what we have coming for something so flimsy as faith.”

And faith in what? What kind of faith celebrates when one child is saved at the expense of all the others?¹ What kind of good news has only one father being warned and fleeing without his telling the neighbors to flee as well? Well it turns out that all of the Good News of the Bible is like this – glimpses of hope amid devastation. In the first or second testaments, whether it’s Egypt or Assyria or Babylon or Rome – the grim Good News is that the tyranny of any empire is unable to completely kill all hope.

Perhaps you know the book, My Bright Abyss: A Meditation of a Modern Believer, written by Christian Wiman. In it he writes: “One truth… that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ [the redemption of God] is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see.”²

When we sing Joy to the World, we implicate ourselves in helping to see a future that has not yet ever existed. We’re not trying to get back to some good old days, and we’re not trying to maintain the status quo. In her book about mysticism and resistance, German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote that “those who want the world to remain as it is have already acceded to its self-destruction, and consequently, betrayed the love of God and its restlessness before the status quo.” ³ I add, those who want the world to return to as it was “have already acceded to its self-destruction, and consequently, betrayed the love of God and its restlessness” to a misplaced nostalgia.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of experiencing God’s restorative justice and not even knowing it. While measurable pessimism among people increases, life on this planet is actually improving. Perhaps you’ve seen Zack Beauchamp’s article on Bill Moyers’ web page, Moyers & Company. While there is plenty of work to be done, enormous suffering to alleviate, resources to redistribute, and environmental health to improve, there are some good reasons to give thanks to God as this year comes to a close. According to the World Health Organization, the percentage of children who died before their fifth birthday dropped by almost half between 1990 and 2010. Maternal deaths also dropped by half. Deaths from AIDs-related illnesses are down by 24 percent since 2005. Life expectancy has increased 50% since 1950 with improvements in every economic bracket. Perhaps best of all to my ears, “nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare of foreigners is historically unprecedented.”

Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty and the world is getting happier. War is becoming rarer and less deadly, even when taking Syria’s horrendous civil war into account. People around the world are freer and safer than ever. Violent crimes – one person against another and governments against citizens are down dramatically. Forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia are on the decline because people’s minds are changing and governments are passing laws promoting equality – not just in the US but around the world. Of course there is backlash and it’s not that the problems are close to being solved. I know this is cold comfort for people who are suffering from injustice, but the improvements are dramatic over the last decades.⁴

Dr. Paul Farmer was recently asked by James Carroll about whether Farmer thought Pope Francis’ demonstrated concern for the poor was just for show. “Farmer shrugged, and said, ‘If it’s just for show, I say keep showing it.’ ”⁵ When we sing Joy to the World – it is a particular prayer both of thanksgiving and of hope, not a victory song of universal accomplishment, nor is our own private party. It’s Joy to the world, the Lord is come rather than has come. The prayer is that the Lord’s arrival into the most unwelcoming and dangerous circumstances is ongoing. There is no place on this earth that has immunity to hostility or violence. There is no place on this earth where humans dwell that does not need redeeming. So when we sing Joy to the World, we are proclaiming our hope that God’s redeeming Love will become more true in more places – that God’s redeeming Love will become true in all places. The scriptures will be fulfilled. Love will indeed be for plea and gift and sign.