Sunday, January 28, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Out of Egypt, I Called My Son," Matthew 2:13-23

Matthew 2:13-23

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

Sunday, January 21, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Idols of Silver and Gold," Isaiah 31:1-7

Isaiah 31:1-7

Doom to those going down to Egypt for help! They rely on horses, trust in chariots because they are many, and on riders because they are very strong. But they don’t look to the holy one of Israel; they don’t seek the Lord. 2 But God also knows how to bring disaster; he has not taken back his words. God will rise up against the house of evildoers and against the help of those who do wrong.

3 Egypt is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit. The Lord will extend his hand; the helper will stumble, those helped will fall, and they will all die together. 4 The Lord has said to me: When the lion growls, the young lion, over its prey, though a band of shepherds is summoned against it, isn’t scared off by their noise or frightened by their roar. So the Lord of heavenly forces will go down to fight on Mount Zion and on her hill. 5 Like birds flying aloft, so the Lord of heavenly forces will shield Jerusalem: shielding and saving, sparing and rescuing. 6 People of Israel, return to the one whom you have deeply betrayed! 7 On that day, you will each reject the idols of silver and the idols of gold, which you have sinfully made for yourselves. (Common English Bible)



“From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Three



Juan Carlos Coronilla Guerrero was, by almost all appearances, living the American dream, so much so that you couldn’t tell him from Adam. He had found work as a carpenter, he and his wife were raising three kids, he had settled down, life was good.



Then he had to appear in court on a misdemeanor possession charge for carrying a quarter-ounce of marijuana on his person. And he had immigrated here illegally from Mexico into Texas after being deported once before. While the county of the courtroom he appeared in had previously not, as a matter of policy, turned over illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nonviolent misdemeanors, things were different last year with Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities and counties ordered a year ago yesterday. And there at the courtroom to greet Coronilla were a pair of ICE agents to arrest him for reentry after deportation, a felony. I’ll let Sarah Stillman for the New Yorker pick up Coronilla’s story from here:



Coronilla’s wife begged a federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his home town in Mexico, and deportees were prime targets for crime, since they were presumed to have money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three months later (in September), gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young son. According to the Austin American-Statesman, he tried to soothe the boy, saying, “Don’t worry, my love.” His body was found about forty miles away, filled with bullets. When I spoke to Coronilla’s wife shortly after his death, she told me that she’d returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own life. “He was a good man,” she said. “Now I have to prepare for his funeral.”



Whatever your beliefs are about marijuana—and I have my own—holding a quarter-ounce of it should not merit a cascade of dominoes that results in your deportation and, three months later, subsequent murder by a cartel while telling your terrified child not to worry. But that is the death we have wrought, all in the name of “they took our jobs,” and all while somehow claiming to be “pro-life.” And the reckoning for such masquerades is fast becoming due.



This is 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?



Last week, we began this series with the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and last week, we dug into the person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Today, we arrive at a passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls the Israelites’ time in Egypt as chattel slaves.



The Hebrew Bible professor William L. Holladay sums up Isaiah 31 as a “message…of the hopelessness of relying on Egypt,” and it is easy to see why, even just by glancing at the first line of verse one: “Doom to those going down to Egypt for help!” But the prophet goes on to explain why, exactly such doom is to be expected in verse three: “Egypt is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit.”



Egypt, in other words, may represent a temporary and temporal solution to the question that faced eighth-century BCE prophets like Isaiah of what to do about the perpetual existential threat that an Assyrian conquest of the land represented, but Egypt did not represent a spiritual solution.



Egypt, then, to turn a phrase from Isaiah himself at the end of this passage, represents an idol of silver and gold, such idols that we have made for ourselves and which Isaiah says we must and will eventually reject.



Such idols can be made of silver and gold, but not necessarily. The key ingredient is that they are made by us, not by God, just like the original idol of silver and gold: the golden calf formed by Aaron at the peoples’ behest at Mount Sinai.



And ultimately, that is what things like our borders are. We drew them. Humans drew them. Not God. Our border with Mexico was drawn via the Gadsden Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.



To treat those borders as idols, as gods, is not what God expects or demands. We can argue for border security, but not in the name of God, or God as revealed through Jesus Christ. And we cannot use our love of borders to say that God wants us to act with such cruelty and wanton indifference to Dreamers brought here as children for whom the United States is home.



What other things of ours that we have made, what idols of silver of gold, have we elevated to graven image status, to godhood in our own selfish spheres of existence?



In what ways have we—and you—become like the ancient Egypt of old, the ancient Egypt that cannot be relied upon except for its own selfishness and self-centeredness?



And what can you then do to melt those idols of silver and gold into something different, something that can be a gift rather than an empty gesture, a blessing rather than a curse, and a God-image rather than a graven image?



This past Friday marked the March for Life on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. But it also marked the day of a willingness to shut down the government over the lives of people who want and need only what we already have and are far too stingy with—the identity of being American.



In the face of life, in the face of identity, our own objections to them become idols, and that is not pro-life.



Those objections, those idols, create and cause death, like that of Juan Carlos Coronilla Guerrero, murdered as he was desperately trying to comfort his terrified son, because we have decided over the past decade that being American means being white, and that is the most sinful of graven images.



That is what Isaiah, and Jesus, would condemn today—our unreliability to people who aren’t us.



Jesus, on the other hand, was the rock not just for His Jewish followers, but for His Gentile followers. Beseeched by Romans and Canaanites alike, He performed miracles. Confronted with a Samaritan woman held in disgrace, He exalted her, so much so that she returned home singing His praises and bringing other Samaritans into the fold.



We can be the imago Christi—the image of Christ—or we can be the graven image of idols in the world.



Which will it be?



What way will we choose?



And what will that choice say to others about our ultimate priorities?



May we choose wisely and compassionately, then, as God would have us do, so that we may do what is right not by our idols, but by our God.



May it be so. Amen.



Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 
January 21, 2018