When the magi had departed, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod will soon search for the child in order to kill him.” 14 Joseph got up and, during the night, took the child and his mother to Egypt. 15 He stayed there until Herod died. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I have called my son out of Egypt.
16 When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. 17 This fulfilled the word spoken through Jeremiah the prophet: 18 A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much grieving. Rachel weeping for her children, and she did not want to be comforted, because they were no more.
19 After King Herod died, an angel from the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. 20 “Get up,” the angel said, “and take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. Those who were trying to kill the child are dead.” 21 Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus ruled over Judea in place of his father Herod, Joseph was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he went to the area of Galilee. 23 He settled in a city called Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled: He will be called a Nazarene. (Common English Bible)
“From Slave State to
Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Four
Almost
two years ago, I got up here on a Sunday morning, like I almost always do, to give
to you my message for the week. It was April 24, the day set aside for
remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, which my mother’s family fled by
immigrating to the United States as olive-skinned, non-English-speaking
refugees.
They
did so after my great-grandfather’s brother, Madiros, was summarily executed in
one of the initial waves of purges in the genocide. Arriving at the family home
demanding the rest of our family, Ottoman soldiers then executed Madiros’s wife
Esther. Madiros’s father, my great-great grandfather Sarkis, committed suicide
out of grief just two days later.
My
great-grandfather Krikor immigrated to the United States, bereft of his father
and one of his brothers. He and his wife, my great-grandmother Satenig,
use fake passports to cross the border, and then eventually settle down in Detroit and raise two daughters and one son, my
great-uncle Albert. Albert would go on to serve the Marines in 1945, toward the
end of World War II, and that summer, he was KIA on Okinawa. According to family
legend, my great-grandpa Krikor never smiled between the death of his son and
the birth of his first grandchild, my mother, nine years later.
It
was the loud voice in Ramah, of Rachel refusing to be comforted because her
children were no more. Krikor could not be comforted, because his child was no
more.
That’s
who my family is. A family that came out of a tiny country in West Asia, but
was so American that it gave its only son to the most titanic conflict the
world has ever seen. Out of Armenia, my family was called, and out of America,
my great-uncle was called to live and to die in the service.
What
worlds do we call our children out of, and then into? And what can we do to
make those worlds new?
This
has been both a new sermon series and a new year for us. This series began on the
day after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is
Epiphany, the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus
with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Epiphany is the beginning of
a very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the
massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king
Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To
prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and
remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.
The
Holy Family’s flight into Egypt is what fundamentally informs this new sermon
series, which will last the entire month of January, because it is a flight
that we should be increasingly familiar with by dint of the news cycles
circulating around the immigration debate taking place in our country. As we’ll
see in later installments of this series, Egypt holds a terrifying legacy of
slavery and displacement for ancient Israel. Yet in the moment, it acts as a
refuge for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
There
is an obvious parallel for us in the United States today. For instance, how can
we be a place of safety and refuge for, say, the courageous people in Iran
protesting their regime today, if we have also banned them from entering our
country?
We began this series with the Epiphany
story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and then we dug into the person who is the
Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Last week, we arrived at a
passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls Egypt as a place of false promises, and
today, we end the series by returning to Matthew 2 to continue on the ghastly track
that his Epiphany story places us upon.
We’ve
discussed in past sermons within this series how Matthew situates his second
chapter adjacently to the Exodus narrative. For Matthew, Jesus acts as a direct
successor to Moses, and just as Moses had to be rescued from a mass infanticide
by his mother, so too did Jesus have to be rescued from a mass infanticide by
His parents.
Yet
the verse from Matthew from which this message draws its title actually has its
roots in one of the so-called “minor” prophets of the Hebrew Bible: Hosea, in
11:1. Matthew hearkens back to this particular verse, as he often does with
snippets of Hebrew Bible prophetic literature throughout his Gospel, as
supporting evidence for his contention that Jesus is the new Moses and thus a
reinterpretation of Hebrew Bible scripture and tradition. Matthew does this
three times in just the eleven verses of this passage, referring to Hosea here
as well as explicitly to Jeremiah’s prophecy of Rachel mourning in Ramah. And
again, this matters to Matthew because of the new Moses he sees Jesus as.
And
that suits us fine until that “reinterpretation” of Jesus as the new Moses
becomes Jesus as the “replacement” for Moses, and we begin erasing Jesus’s
fundamental Jewishness with our own Christianity.
Or
until we begin erasing the identity of, say, the Dreamers as Americans with our
own beliefs of what Americans should look like, which may or may not actually
comport to the inclusive ideals of Christianity. Or the identity of the
Indonesian Christians who are literally taking sanctuary in churches to avoid
ICE deportation raids that they fear would lead to their persecution for being
Christian.
Out
of America, then, what children shall God call? And in America, what children shall
Rachel mourn and lament for because they are no more, deported off to parts and
places unknown to us?
This
must be a component of the ongoing transition of the United States from slave state
to refuge and sanctuary. If we are to be a place for people who are fleeing
oppression, persecution, and violence, we cannot be that which further
compounds such sin.
So
what welcome are we prepared to give to people for whom their lives are of the
essence such that they fear they cannot simply throw themselves upon the mercy
of our often arbitrary immigration system? Are we prepared to allow in a family
fleeing violence in their hometown the way that ancient Egypt allows in the Holy
Family, or are we not?
I
realize that I have probably spent the last three weeks making at least some of
you a little (or potentially) a lot uncomfortable. I make no apologies for
that. Jesus did not come to earth to make us comfortable, or to teach us
comfortable things. I am utterly convinced that He would not be content, or
satisfied with, a church dedicated to being polite and chewing with your mouth
closed.
We
didn’t need for God to become flesh as our Messiah just to say that. It’s
selling Christ’s mission short, and it’s selling God short for thinking we
needed so drastic a step just to be taught things so surface-level and
relatively trivial.
Depth
can make us uncomfortable, though. Pressure increases the deeper you go—not just
emotionally or spiritually, but quite literally if you are in water. Pressure
increases as depth increases. In order to go deeper and deeper into the ocean
depths, humans require all sorts of specialized equipment and technology.
But
deeply we must go into these questions of welcome and hospitality, just as
deeply the Holy Family went into Egypt to flee a murderous Herod the Great, and
deeply they plunged right back into Israel once Herod had died, to Nazareth
where they would raise this child, both to avoid Herod’s heir to the throne and
so that, as Matthew says at the end of this passage and chapter, “He may be called
a Nazarene.”
I
make no claims to it being easy to take such a plunge into the deep, such a
leap of faith, such a walk into the unknown. But I will say this: at this point
in time in Matthew’s Gospel, the entirety of Jesus’s public ministry is yet to
come. The rest of His story was not yet written at the time of the Holy Family’s
flight into Egypt.
But
we know now that His story was, and is, written—in the pages of our Bibles,
across the contours of our hearts, and in the divine recesses of our souls. How
we elect to act upon those words that have been written to us, for us, and upon
us is up to us, and us alone.
So,
as I have continued to exhort us all throughout this sermon series—and will
continue to exhort you to in my remaining two-plus months as your pastor—may we
choose wisely. May we choose compassion. And, ultimately, may we choose well in
the sight of God, as God would have us do—not merely as we would have ourselves
do.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
January
28, 2018
