Sermon for Christmas 1 - 2019
St John the Baptist, Tisbury
Isaiah 63:7-9, Matthew 2:13-23
“I will recount the steadfast love of the LORD, the praises of the LORD, according to all that the LORD has granted us…according to the abundance of his steadfast love.”
Earlier this week, we celebrated the glory of God coming as a baby into our broken human world; God incarnate revealed in sheer humility and vulnerability, born to an unmarried teenager, lying in a manger, welcoming us into God’s presence as the unexpected Christ-child. But now about a year has passed for the infant Christ and we suddenly find ourselves face to face with Herod’s massacre of innocent children, and we watch with bated breath as the Holy family flee into Egypt. The labour pains of Christmas eve have become wails of grief, and the horrific reality of Herod’s jealousy isn’t quite what we want to think about so soon into our celebrations.
Our time of meditating on the beautiful story of the Christ child, heralded by Angels, visited by shepherds and astrologers, has been invaded by the brokenness of human reality, bringing us back into our current world with a bump. And whilst we might be relieved for the holy family, obeying the Angel and fleeing into Egypt, their escape doesn’t relieve our anguish over the other children. But this moment of acknowledgement in Matthew’s gospel is one of the most important parts of the Christmas message.
The gospel writer didn’t just skip over the nasty bits, because at no point was Jesus’ birth meant to promote a rose-tinted escapism. God incarnate, God with us, means that God embraces us in our brokenness, pain and grief. ‘Rachel is weeping for her children, she refuses to be consoled’, our gospel reading quotes from Jeremiah. Finally, in this narrative, the grief that is so deep that it refuses to be consoled has a place. It is honoured and treasured here as part of the story of God’s work in humanity, as part of what it means for humans to know God in the Christ-child.
In our Old Testament reading from Isaiah we have this same theme. If we paraphrase the second half of the reading, we get something like this:
‘For God said, “surely they are my people”… and in all their distress (which he did not afflict) …the ambassador of God’s presence saved them. In his love and in his pity, he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.’
There are two really vital parts of this passage. The first is that God recognises God’s people. The second is that God’s presence saves them in their distress, not from their distress. In the New Testament we see Jesus healing people and saving lives in such a concentrated space that we often forget that salvation is about restoring relationship with God and not always about immediate rescue. Just as courage is not the absence of fear, pain is not the absence of comfort. God’s presence as Emmanuel, God with us, embraces us as we are, in our joy, in our hope, in our pain and grief and sorrow.
There are two stories in the Old Testament that resonate with me when I read about the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. The first of these is the story of Moses’ mother placing him in the reeds because she can’t hide him any longer from those murdering the Hebrew boys in Egypt. The second is the story of Esther risking death by flinging herself into the presence of King Ahaxerses and begging him to end the persecution of the Jewish people. In each of these stories, the protagonists face death because of their identity, whether religious or cultural, just like those seeking refuge today.
In our readings, then, we see God who embraces the suffering of others, and God who comes as a refugee child, fleeing death. In his incarnation, God both embraces us in our vulnerability and embodies vulnerability itself, and so, as those made in the image of God, we are challenged to do the same. Embrace all people and say ‘surely these are God’s people’, be vulnerable and embrace those who are too, remember that God is with us even when we are so deep in grief that we refuse to be comforted, and bear lovingly with others when they are in that same place.
We can’t do this without God’s continual work in us, and the survival of the Holy Family reminds us of the hope that we have, that God can work through all people in all circumstances. Christ’s eternal and complete work, in his death and resurrection, and the work of the Holy Spirit, enable our sometimes very broken church to be Christ’s body on earth and together we cherish the promise that Christ will come again and bring his broken church into a glorious eternity.
