After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. 2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”
3 When King Herod heard this, he was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. 4 He gathered all the chief priests and the legal experts and asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 They said, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for this is what the prophet wrote: 6 You, Bethlehem, land of Judah, by no means are you least among the rulers of Judah, because from you will come one who governs, who will shepherd my people Israel.”
7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search carefully for the child. When you’ve found him, report to me so that I too may go and honor him.” 9 When they heard the king, they went; and look, the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. 11 They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 Because they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route. (Common English Bible)
Epiphany 2018/ “From
Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week One
Do
you know someone, or are you such a person yourself, who only watches the Super
Bowl for the advertisements? Well, that’s how I’ve come to read airline
magazines.
Especially
after the disappearance of SkyMall (rest in peace, you entertainingly demented
market of assorted junk), I typically only read those airline magazines for the
ads, which can be just as funny as SkyMall was. Hats that grow your hair back.
Plastic surgery for body parts you didn’t know you had.
But
buried in United’s Hemispheres magazine as I was returning here from my
parents’ home in Kansas City was a story about a Torah scroll that was
originally from then-Czechoslovakia and had recently resurfaced. It was one of
hundreds of precious and monetarily valuable items looted by the Nazis from its
Jewish victims, and the retracing of such items has often taken decades—eight
in this case.
There
is the added dimension of the Torah’s financial worth. Unlike Bibles, which are
mass-produced and can be purchased by you or me for a few dollars, Torah
scrolls are painstakingly composed by hand by specialized professionals, using
highly specific components and ingredients. The scrolls take months, if not
years, to produce, and typically cost tens of thousands of dollars.
And
this particular scroll survived the war, and all the privations that would have
entailed. It got its own first-class seat back to the Czech Republic, where it
was reunited with the descendants of the community that was its original rightful
owners.
A
massacre of a scale never before seen had taken place. Yet God’s Word had
survived. There is something profound in that. And we should pay attention to
it.
This
is both a new sermon series and 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. It 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. 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?
So
let’s talk together today not so much about the actual Epiphany story—which I
imagine most of us know well enough—but about how we arrive at the Epiphany
story to begin with.
The
background of the whole journey by the Magi is fraught with palace intrigue and
politicking, as Herod demands to know who this boy king might be who could
possibly usurp him as monarch. He elects to send these Magi on a reconnaissance
mission of sorts, under the guise of good faith. The Magi, tradition says, were
not Israelites themselves but members of a nationality somewhere to the east,
but it would not have been uncommon for an ancient king to have foreign
advisors in his retinue, and Herod may well have felt that such faces might
have presented a friendlier face to Mary and Joseph than an Israelite guilty of
collaborating with Rome.
The
threat, though, was still very much real—though not due on any part to the Magi
themselves. Learning that they had been used, they elected to not report to
Herod what—and more importantly, who—they discovered, and basically quit
Herod’s court by deciding to return home instead.
Their
decision at least grants a reprieve to the Holy Family, which likely does not
know just how much danger it’s in at this point in the story unless the Magi
informed them. But that decision also does nothing for the other male babies
who will soon be massacred.
So…could
the Magi have done more? Should they have? I think that is an honest question
worth wrestling with when we consider the Epiphany story in its entirety
instead of just the nativity scene that we all know and love.
More
to the point, could God have done more? It’s a question that gets posed in the
face of all manner of tragedies, from the Massacre of the Innocents in
Bethlehem to the Holocaust in which six million Jews are murdered, yet one of
their Torah scrolls survived and is returned.
God
endures all our strife, all our struggle. God outlasts us, yet also grieves for
us. God eclipses us, yet also demands that we grow, and learn, and do better.
What
could the Magi have learned from this encounter?
What
have we learned from the Holocaust?
Or,
what have we learned from the dreamers and the families, the people who are the
very same souls Emma Lazarus speaks of in her poem The New Colossus that is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty,
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”
Have
we anything to learn from their plights and their experiences, or have we, too,
closed off our hearts to the pains they endured to get here, even as we claim
to honor the pains it took Mary, Joseph, and the newborn Christ to make it into
Egypt?
For
this is the fundamental truth that girds this sermon series, and I hope it
makes you at least a little bit uncomfortable: if ancient Egypt approached
outsiders the way we do today in the contemporary United States, there is a
very good chance that our religion would have literally died in the cradle.
Yet
God made provisions for something else to occur, just as God did in the Exodus
story, which fundamentally informs this one and which we will be talking about
next week. Then, as here, a king (Pharaoh, in Exodus) hears of a newborn threat
to his power and orders the male children murdered. And then, as here, God
finds a way using nobodies to create a way forward.
That
parallel, that common thread, from Pharaoh to Herod is no accident. Both are a
part of a continuous narrative that places God’s ways as beyond what we can
affect with all our violence and bloodlust. Quite simply, God is bigger than the
sins we do to one another.
We
should live, then, as though we really are children of so big and great a God,
in the reassurance that the cults of personality we build around sinful leaders
are temporary, but God remains permanent.
That
truth exists as a common thread throughout the Scriptures, from the Exodus to
the Epiphany and to Easter, where God’s permanency and love endures even what
we inflict upon Jesus on the cross during Good Friday.
And
that permanency extends beyond the Scriptures into our own experience, as
explained by the ordained pastor and homiletics professor Thomas G. Long in his commentary on Matthew:
If we have seen Herod’s
hatred before in Pharaoh, we know that we will see it again and again. Pharaoh,
Herod, Hitler, Stalin—the chronicles of human history are full of dictators who
believe they can secure their power through murder and genocide. This text
stands as a confident word that the despots of this world come and go, but that
God’s will outlasts and overrules them all. This theological conviction can be
seen in terse form in Matthew 2:19: “When Herod died, an angel of the Lord
suddenly appeared…” Herod is dead, but the Word of the Lord continues. Herod is
dead, but the messenger of the Lord is still appearing, speaking, guiding,
protecting. Herod is dead, but the mercy of God is everlasting.
Herod
is dead, but God still remains. God always remains.
May
that truth be ever on lips, and always in your actions, as we enter into a new
year of kingdom-building, doing church, and living the mission of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ to which we owe our salvation.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
January
7. 2018
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