Biblical Text

You can read Matthew 2.1-23 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

Unless Christmas falls on a Sunday, as it did in 2016, we have another Sunday before ringing in the New Year. And quite frankly, we don’t know what to do with that Sunday. It’s almost as much a mystery as Holy Saturday is. Both of these days have massive build ups to them – Lent in the case of Holy Saturday; Advent in the case of Christmas Sunday. Yes, that’s today’s official name – Christmas Sunday.

And if we do something on this Sunday, very often it is to focus on the Magi. After all, they seem to be important to the Christmas story. And they are. But despite their importance, we will skip the Magi and focus instead on one major contemporary issue that the movements of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus directly relate to. But allow me first to quote from a BBC article published in September 2018.

“In 1991, ‘The Lady’, as Aung San Suu Kyi is known, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the committee chairman called her ‘an outstanding example of the power of the powerless’. But since becoming Myanmar’s de facto leader in 2016 after a democratic opening, Ms. Suu Kyi has been rounded on by the same international leaders and activists who once supported her.

Outraged by the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh due to an army crackdown, they have accused her of doing nothing to stop rape, murder and possible genocide by refusing to condemn the powerful military or acknowledge accounts of atrocities. [Her] critics say she has lost moral standing – and certainly her towering reputation as someone willing to stand up for human rights despite the personal cost.”

That’s the end of the quote. And now we turn to Mary and Joseph.

Every time I preach on Mary or Joseph, I am newly amazed at how incredible these two individuals were. It is quite certain that Mary was a teenager. There are some disagreements about Joseph’s age, but these are not relevant. What is relevant is how deep their commitment to God and to each other was and how they were willing to follow him in ways that are unbelievable – at least to someone like me who daily struggles to follow Jesus.

And today we will see the extents to which they went to follow what God had told them. Their obedience should be an example to all of us on a day to day basis and not just once a year during Advent. So I hope that, after this message, each of us is encouraged to study these two remarkable individuals and learn from them what it means to follow the living God – both the joys of it and the inevitable dangers of it, for we cannot have one without the other.

Now, whether we know it or not, we are treated as puppets on strings. Our politicians pluck the strings that sound out our fears, giving voice to our paranoias, and toying with our insecurities. And the media is no better. With their evident biases and filtering of content in the name of personalization, we are never given a holistic view of any issue. Rather, we are always shown only one side of any issue and become as putty in their hands. It takes a lot of effort these days to sift through the propaganda and agendas of those who presume to guide us – the politicians and the media.

Now, Mary and Joseph must have been thrilled to receive the Magi. After all, this was another clear indication that God was doing something in and through their son. News of him had spread far to the East and these visitors had traveled a long distance to come and pay homage to Jesus.

But unbeknownst to them, the Magi had already consulted with Herod, a man riddled with paranoias and who was ruthless to boot. And they had told him about the birth of a King of the Jews. Given their lack of discretion, I think we should never call them ‘the Wise Men’. I mean, who in their senses would go to the current ruler and announce that they had come to pay homage to his successor? That’s a clear lack of wisdom. Anyway, they did consult with Herod, firing up his paranoias. And so Herod would have had some plan about how to tackle the issue of this upstart he had heard about.

When the Magi leave, Joseph is warned in a dream to flee to Egypt, which he does right away. Mind you, they were not going to Egypt for a holiday. They were not going to take in the wonderful sights – a Pyramid here, a Sphinx there. No! To the contrary, they were at that time political refugees, fleeing from their native land because the then ruler had insecurities that he used as an excuse to lash out against those whom he perceived to be a threat to his reign. They were escaping to Egypt because staying in Judea posed a threat to their lives.

In all our sentimental ideas about Christmas, announcing joy and peace, do we pause to think that this baby whose birthday we are celebrating was once a fugitive, an outlaw, an outcast? Do we pay any heed to the fact that he was, like so many millions today, displaced and dispossessed? And when we think of immigrants or refugees do we identify them with the baby Jesus?

Immigrants and refugees are similar but not the same. The first is normally driven by pull factors – reasons that make the destination attractive. On the other hand, refugees are propelled by push factors – reasons for which one’s current home has become inhospitable. But, both are saying, “Where I am going promises to be better than where I now am.”

What was Jesus’ situation? Herod wasn’t conducting some kind of widespread purge. Horrific as it was, he was targeting a very specific and small segment of the population – boys in and around Bethlehem who were no more than two years old. There was no ‘ethnic cleansing’ or structured pogrom against any group of people. There was no sustained persecution or attack on any group. The Slaughter of the Innocents, as it is called, would have taken a matter of days, too quick for any reliable news to spread to Egypt.

So what if you were an Egyptian immigration officer and saw this Jewish family – a husband, a wife, and their toddler – coming to the border. They had no papers, no visas. They could not prove that their lives were being threatened in Judea. All the ‘reasons’ they gave seem like special pleading. “Yeah, right,” you say to yourself. “Your child is so important that Herod sees him as a threat!?” And you think of saying, “If that’s the case then I am Augustus Caesar’s heir!” What would you do on hearing such an unbelievable story of persecution directed specifically at them? Would you allow this family in even though they didn’t have the proper documents?

These issues have not gone away, have they? Today too, in various parts of the world, people attempt to migrate or flee for a number of reasons. In many cases they feel their lives are at stake. And very often they cannot prove a threat.

So would you have told Joseph, “I’m sorry but I can’t let you in simply on the grounds that you think you are in danger. We have no news of any persecution by Herod. It’s evident that you just want to leech off us Egyptians. Well, I can’t let you through. Please go back to Judea.” Would you have said that? Or would you have let them through?

And once they were in Egypt, what was their lot? From what we know, Joseph was a carpenter, a skilled laborer. The time between the census that had brought them to Bethlehem and Herod’s death was less than two years and the time they spent in Egypt was probably somewhere around a few months. That was insufficient time for Joseph to get any sustained kind of work that used his carpentry skills. So he probably did menial work, working for daily wages. And he probably worked for much less wages than Egyptians would have accepted. This would have ensured he got work regularly, even if it were not for wages that would allow them to live comfortably.

Now, if you were an Egyptian who saw Joseph get work almost daily because he worked for less than you were willing to work for, what would you have thought? Would you have thought, “Curse these lowlife Judeans. They come here and take our jobs. Me and my family are struggling because of these foreigners who have come to ruin our nation and our society”? Would you have thought that?

You see, the issues really haven’t gone away. And they will never go away. As long as there is disparity among nations, people from one nation will want to go to the other nation. And immigrants are always willing to work for less than the accepted minimum wage. That’s the only way they can get a foothold in a new country and among the native people.

And where would they have stayed while in Egypt? There is strong evidence that the Egyptians did not like to mingle with the Jewish people. I guess the feelings were mutual! If you were an Egyptian with a room to rent would you have rented it to this Jewish family? Or would you have considered them unclean and believed that they would ruin your room? Would you have considered how you would have lost face with other Egyptians if you rented your room to these unclean outsiders? And would you have thought twice about coming to any agreement with them?

Very likely Joseph and Mary and Jesus would not have been able to rent a place to stay. They had no social standing. They were fugitives, after all. No one there would have been willing to give them a character reference to facilitate a lease. They probably lived on the streets for those months.
I have seen the looks people give migrant workers who are involved with various construction projects in the city. Perhaps you have seen these looks too.

These people most often live right next to the place where they are laboring. But they are evidently not from around here. And people look at them as though they are the scum of the Earth, as though they were somehow sub-human, as though the world would be better off without them. The next time you see some such family, especially one with an infant or toddler, think of Mary and Joseph and Jesus in Egypt, wilting under the withering, scornful glares of the Egyptians.

I am humbled when I think of all that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus had to bear when they were in Egypt. I can barely withstand a day without a fan or even a moment of embarrassment with friends. But the three of them lived on the streets and bore the scornful looks of the Egyptians for months on end because they knew that returning to their homeland was not an option.

Returning to their homeland is not an option for many millions of people in the world today. And just to give you an indication of how unstable Asia has become, the number of refugees in the past ten years has increased by over 5000 %. Yes, you heard that right. In ten years the number of refugees in Asia has increased by over 5000 %.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the church of Jesus the refugee doing much in the way of addressing these concerns. We are happy celebrating Christmas as a private, cloistered holiday while forgetting that the one whose birthday we are claiming to celebrate was displaced and dispossessed, a refugee and a fugitive.

This is not something new. I don’t want to blame the usual suspects – commercialism, Santa Claus, Hallmark cards, and what have you. These are just excuses we use to blind ourselves to the real issues at stake.

The problem begins in the early 4th century when the Emperor Constantine legalized the Christian religion. What his intentions were we can only guess at today. But what this legalization did was to remove the political threat that the church faced. And in time, when the Christian religion became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church forgot that there ever was a political aspect to its faith.

This amnesia was exacerbated in the 17th century through the writings of the towering Enlightenment figures like Voltaire, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, who insisted that religion and politics are separate.
These writers argued that religion belongs to the private sphere while politics belongs to the public sphere. And the church, having forgotten the political roots of its faith, quietly agreed and is quite proud of having agreed.

And we are heirs to that falsification of the gospel. For the gospel is not that God has a plan for my or your life, but that the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth. This is gospel – good news – because the crucified and risen Jesus has not forgotten what it was like to be an outcast and a refugee and a reject of society.

We must first reassert that there is no Christian faith without the claim that Jesus is Lord. And to say that Jesus is Lord is to say that there is no other person or institution that can command our ultimate allegiance. And we must resist the temptation to surrender our allegiance to them.

This is because, to say that Jesus is Lord is to say that every other authority is answerable to Jesus today and one day will have to answer to Jesus for everything done in its name.

But the good news is that this Lord is the same one whom Joseph took quickly to Egypt to escape the paranoid lashing out of a tyrant. This Lord is the same as the one who was a political refugee in Egypt and who bore the scornful glares of the Egyptians. This Lord is, therefore, the one who has intimate knowledge of how oppressive the powers that be can be and how unjust they can be. This Lord is, therefore, the one who, because he was exiled and pursued, knows what it means to be exiled and pursued.

It is good news because he can empathize with those who face the wrath of the powers that be because he is one who himself has faced their wrath. And because he can empathize, he can humanize.
Ever since the first humans rejected their vocation to be God’s image bearers, humans have lived with an us versus them mentality. We have always been driven by defining who is a part of our group and who is not. And inevitably, in the attempt to insist that our group is superior, we end up dehumanizing those who are outside our group.

It’s not sufficient for us to focus on our good qualities; we must at the same time show that others have horrible qualities. It is not enough for us to recognize that the others are different; we must also claim that they are deficient. They either lack intelligence or have damaged souls or have more pronounced animal tendencies. This is how humans have defined themselves – always in distinction to others who are concurrently thought to be in one or more ways less than human and, therefore, undeserving of our respect.

But it is only in Jesus that we realize that this way of drawing lines is itself a sign of our sinfulness. It is only in Jesus that we can worship and fellowship with those who are different from us. It is only in the church where one’s race is recognized and respected but not made a condition for distinction. It is only in the church where one’s gender or lack of it or uncertainty about it is accepted and appreciated but not allowed to create a hierarchy. It is only in the church where one’s citizenship or lack thereof is allowed and admitted but not permitted to take precedence.

And even as I say this, we can see that I have condemned much of the church throughout the world. For we have made distinctions based on class and gender and citizenship within our churches. And we have allowed these distinctions to spill over outside the church.

But in today’s passage we see Jesus identify with the outsider and outcast. We see him become a fugitive and a refugee. And we stand condemned if we attempt to draw lines demarcating who is in and who is out based on class or gender or citizenship. We stand condemned if we attempt to portray ourselves as superior based on any of these considerations.

And that is because Jesus identifies with those without any rights – the political refugee and the social outcast. He comes to us as someone completely vulnerable, with no recourse to the law, or perhaps as one who bears the brunt of a miscarriage of justice. And if we think we would have treated him better than he was while he was a fugitive, then we owe it to ourselves and to him to act in like manner today, telling our leaders that the refugees and migrants are to be welcomed into our midst for we belong to Jesus – the humanizing refugee.