Matthew 2:13-23
December 29, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Last Sunday was a great Christmas Sunday when we all gathered at the Y to watch a Christmas pageant! The children were on cue. The donkey talked. And the children all dressed up in their costumes were into their characters. What more can we wish for at Christmas but for our children to know the story of Christmas through a pageant!
Even if you don’t know much about Christianity, even if you haven’t been in a church in years until today, I’m sure that you know this story. It is a story repeated for two thousand years. It is told in art and music, on Christmas cards and Nativity scenes. We “repeat the sounding joy” of this story.
We know that most good things that happen to us happen to us in repetition. Our 7 ½ year old granddaughter Sage was testing me in my multiplication and she couldn’t believe that I can give the answers up to 12 X 12. I told her that I memorized them by repetition while she was adding up the numbers in her head.
This is true with the Christmas story. Just try changing some of your menu for Christmas dinner or modify your decorations around the house, and you’ll find how important predictability, sameness, and repetition are in the life of your family.
We marveled that even when our children were in their twenties, they would rush home for Christmas and first thing they would do is to check to make sure that the manger scene was in exactly at the right place, every figure just as they remembered, and all the rest. For the longest time, we would always have Pillsbury orange Danishes on Christmas morning with corn beef hash and eggs. I eat better now.
Essentially, we only insist on repeating that which is very, very important. When our children were young, they never got tired of hearing our parental accounts of their nativity. They memorized every detail of their births. Our son would say to his mother,
“Dad was at church like he always is. Right?”
“Right.”
“And Po Po was with you at home playing Scrabble, right?”
“Right.”
“And you named me after Gregory Peck or was it the doctor who delivered me?”
“It was Gregory Peck because I like him as an actor.”
“Oh. And then what happened? Say it again,” he demanded. “Tell it one more time,” he begged.
We just couldn’t tell these stories enough. We couldn’t change one detail or substitute some other story, for it was not only a story of how they came to be, but also a story of who they were. This is how we came to be; this is who we are. It is like an old song that never grows old because it is the substance of who we really are, dear to us all the more because of its sameness.
So when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper next Sunday, every first Sunday of the month, we tell the same story repeatedly, over and over again.
And on this day we tell again the old, familiar story of Jesus’ birth among us. This day we are retelling the story of how we got Jesus. But this story also has implications about the meaning of Jesus’ birth in our world today.
Escape to Egypt
Today’s lesson picks up the Christmas story after the Magi have come to visit the Nativity. While we would like to end our Christmas story like the pageant did last Sunday, the story continues from Matthew with the slaughter of the innocents. It’s still Christmas, but there’s no sweet story here to tug at the heartstrings. Instead, we have a tale of terror.
At Christmas we long for peace on earth, we remember God’s promise to reconcile all the world. But in the Christmas story particularly from Matthew today, the gospel truth is that Jesus was born into a violent world. In today’s lesson, the truth is that Jesus’ birth made that world more dangerous.
Somehow, the word gets out to the rest of the world; wise men from afar looking for this one who is heralded as king of the Jews. Naturally, they go to Jerusalem, the political center of Judea. Then, King Herod and “all of Jerusalem”—the movers and shakers of that place—react with fear, and resolve with violence.
King of the Jews? Herod is king of the Jews. This is treason, and Herod acts quickly to put an end to this challenge to his rule.
He pretends that he wants to go worship Jesus himself; tells the wise men to come back and report to him. But they are warned in a dream to take a detour and stay away from Herod.
When Herod finds out that they’ve gone home without reporting to him, he’s furious, and his paranoia runs wild. This is a king who has murdered his wife and one of his sons, a man determined to hold on to his power by any means necessary.
An angel comes to Joseph again, with an urgent warning. Herod is on the rampage, searching for Jesus. Get out of the country and fast. Joseph packs up his little family, and they flee to Egypt. The exodus in reverse, as these fugitives from Herod take refuge in the very place their ancestors escaped.
In Judea, Herod goes on a killing spree. Deceived by the wise ones, he’s been frustrated in his plan to hunt down Jesus. But he’s determined to get him anyway, even if he has to wipe out half a generation to do it. He gives the order to kill every male child under two years old in the whole region around Bethlehem.
Now you know the reason why there are no children in worship this morning. It’s a terrifying display of power, and the abuse of power. This too is an old, old story that the world knows so well. But somehow we seem to be repeating it over and over again.
Massacre of the Innocents
This world’s tyrants rage, and innocent people die. These days, we call it “collateral damage”—a bloodless word for the blood shed by those in harm’s way, innocent people, including children, who die in car bombings, suicide bombings or drone attacks, or have their legs blown off by land mines or are sitting on their front steps when a drug deal goes bad and a spray of bullets meant for someone else hits them instead. Just as Jesus did, we live in a world where innocent people suffer and tyrants get away with murder.
Earlier this month, Joy and I with a delegation of American Baptist leaders including General Secretary Roy Medley attended the 200th Anniversary of the arrival of Adoniram and Ann Judson who sailed from Salem, Massachusetts in 1812 and began their phenomenal work among the Burmese in 1813. At one point, it was reported that close to 50,000 people were present to mark this historic and happy occasion. The story of the Judsons was told over and over again by one leader after another. They highlighted particular incidents of their gifts of translating the Bible into Burmese and a dictionary that all third graders still use today. The stories were repeated over and over again.
But one of the meetings that we had prior to the main convention was with over 800 Kachin Baptists who were from the state at the farthest northern part of Myanmar. Many have traveled over days by foot, on animals or in busses to attend the celebration. But what made this particular group so unique was that the government has caused them to be IDPs, Internal Displaced Persons. The Burmese government has taken their homes, fields and even knocked down their churches because they want to build a hydroelectric plant and a fuel pipeline on their land. We heard that these contracts were signed with China. Today’s tyrants still have their ways and get away with murder.
As the ABC delegation, we sat in front of these 800 people and one after another the Kachin people came up to the microphone to share what has happened to them. One man told how his sister was killed and now he has responsibility for her children beside his own. Many cried sharing their stories and thanked us for speaking to the US State Department to apply any pressure we can to protect their land and families. We thought we were going to an anniversary celebration but what touched our hearts the most was the hearing of these people’s stories over and over again of how innocent people suffered and tyrants get away with murder. It was a repeating sound of deep sadness.
It’s enough to make you long for God to throw out thunderbolts, or light some avenging fire, or send a few plagues in the direction of our enemies. Or at least, throw up an invisible shield and protect innocent people.
But God doesn’t oppose violence with violence. God doesn’t protect us from the consequences of human freedom. So innocent people suffer and die, as this world’s tyrants rage on. But terror is not the last word, not for Herod, not for us. While we read and tell the rest of the Christmas story including the terror and violence we see, it is not the only story that we remembered.
Terror is not the last story worth repeating. Sometimes, that is hard to believe. Sometimes, it seems like there is no limit to the evil human beings will visit on one another; no limit to the evil on the suffering of God’s holy innocents.
Today, we are saying, “no” to evil. Today we are saying that terror will not be the last story worth repeating. God keeps bringing Jesus back to us, after the tyrants think he’s been destroyed. Herod rages, but Jesus comes back from Egypt to Galilee. The Roman authorities execute him, but God brings Jesus back through death into new life.
Terror is not the last story worth repeating for God. And therefore, it is not the last story for us.
Repeating the Story
Many of us preachers try to avoid this passage from Matthew especially on the fist Sunday after Christmas. We would rather change it to be more pleasant and may even suggest that nothing like the massacre of the innocents really happened. But if I tried to do that, you may say to me that I have changed the familiar stories.
Matthew chapter 2 is still a part of the whole Christmas story even if we would never depict this story on our Christmas cards. But we only repeat that which is very, very important. “Tell us the story again just like the way it happened,” we might say.
Today the story that is worth repeating with joy is that terror is not the last word for God and so it is not the last word for us.
Jesus goes into the darkness with us, enters the violence of our world. Christ is there with every father afraid of his children’s safety; with every refugee seeking a safe haven, with every Kachin Baptist person who has become an internal displaced person. God is at work in violent places, at work in the witness of peacemakers, in prison ministries, in congregations that bring hope and light into troubled neighborhoods including Chinatown.
Today, God calls each one of us to join that work of love, to stand for peace in our world, our country, our neighborhoods, our schools, our households, and in our own hearts.
Thanks be to God, terror is not the last story worth repeating because the Word made flesh, the first and the last, Jesus the Christ is with us.
On this first Sunday after Christmas, we repeat the sounding of joy—this old, old story that holds truth contrary to what the world stands for. This is good news that stays as front-page news year after year, day after day, something so novel and wonderful that we couldn’t have thought this up ourselves.
Let us go out and repeat the sounding of joy for Jesus Christ is born and the last word from God is a joy to the world.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, in this grand season of the Incarnation we praise you for your determination to save us, to come close to us, and for your loving insistence that you would not be God without us. Teach us to repeat the sounding of joy that you, O Lord is light in darkness, is love in terror, is life in death, and all of this is worth repeating all the time. In your precious name, we pray. Amen.