The Dark Side of the Christmas Story (January 1, 2023) Mt. 2.13-23

The night is calm and cool. The sky is clear with an abundance of stars and a moon that is waning half full. In the little village of about 600 there is little moving this night, as is normal. Animals are tucked away and humans are asleep in their beds. Off in the distance, a dog is barking.

In one little house away from the village center, a family sleeps peacefully. Well, two out of three sleep. The third, the man, is tossing in his sleep. He seems to be having some kind of dream that is making him restless. Suddenly he sits bolt upright, drenched in a cold sweat. He looks around wildly, then gets up off the pallet upon which he has been sleeping to peer out through the windows. Seeing nothing, he takes a deep breath to calm himself. Maybe it was just a dream, a bit of something caused by overindulging in some rich food that he had had that evening. But…it seemed so real and the last time this kind of thing happened, it had all come true. And so the man begins to move around the house, quickly gathering some supplies and not being at all quiet about what he is doing.

His wife stirs with the noise and in the irritated voice of one whose sleep has been disturbed asks, “What ARE you doing?” The husband’s reply is urgent, “Get up! Get dressed and do it quickly! Get Joshua and get ready to leave, we have to get out of here now!!” His wife hearing the panic in his voice is now awake, “What?! Why? What is happening?” “I don’t know. All I do know is that a messenger from God came to me in a dream and told me to get us out of here and to do it now. So, move!” The wife again asks, “But why?” His reply, “I was told that the ruler is going to try to kill Joshua. I don’t know why he would want to kill a toddler, but a messenger from God told me, so I am following that order. Are you and the boy ready?” She looks at him with a bit of fear and incredulity, “Don’t you think this might be a bit hasty? It takes some time to get things ready and besides it was a dream. Come back to bed and get some rest.” But the look in her husband’s eyes causes her to reconsider those words. He is still packing and leaving things all over the place. She realizes that he really is ready to go. So, she gets dressed and starts to put some things together. But again, her husband begins to rush her. She tells him that it takes some time to go somewhere and besides, he needs to get his tools ready if they are to be able to live. Then the other shoe drops: he tells her that he is only taking a few tools, enough to do some work but not nearly enough to make a living, because they have to leave NOW and he has no time to get packed. She suddenly realizes the urgency of their situation. If he is willing to leave all the tools of his livelihood behind, then this is a very serious business indeed. So, she hurries and grabs their child, their Joshua, and thanks heaven he sleeps so well. After grabbing a few things, she hurries out and meets her husband who has the donkey ready to go for the sudden journey that they now have to take. And so, in the middle of the night, they leave. As they travel to the south, their nerves are on edge. At every noise that they hear they tense and stop, hoping that it is not a patrol looking for them. They continue and begin to wonder just what is going to happen to them. They have no friends or family in the land to which they are heading, they are going to be refugees in a land they do not know. Not only that, the land to which they are heading is one which they have been taught was a place to not go. It was the land of slavery, a land of oppression, a land from which nothing good came. What were they going to do there? How would they survive? But they trusted God would take care of them and they went as the messenger had told them.

Once they were in the land, they looked for a place to stay, a place to settle down. At first, they were rebuffed, spending many a night in the open and looking for work and a somewhere to stay during the days. Finally, they found a place where they were accepted (or at least tolerated) due to others of their faith living there and they made a small life there. As they continued to reside there, they tried to get news from the village from which they had fled. Finally, a person who knew the village told them about what had happened after they had fled: The morning after they had left, soldiers of the ruling king had arrived. They took all the male children ages 2 and under (about 20) and killed them. “Orders” was the reason given and horrible as this was, it was not anything unusual for this ruler. In fact, the report of what happened barely made a blip on the news. The wife, looking at her Joshua, is grief stricken. She knew many of the mothers of the children who were killed. They were her friends and she knew how crushed they would have been at the loss of their children, how she would have felt at the loss of her son. And she looks at her child and wonders just what God is doing in all of this.

This is the week in the lectionary that pastors will take a vacation or that they will find another text from which to preach. It is a text that seems so out of place with the Christmas story that we have just celebrated. In a time of joy, peace and tranquility comes a story of horror and pain. A story that even today, in our world where bad things happen on a massive scale, makes us flinch and cringe. Why is this story here? What is the purpose of this narrative?

It is to show us that God is willing to play by the rules when it comes to the incarnation. Jesus with his family was not immune to the dangers and hardships of this world. This is a story of oppression, of refugees, of terror and uncertainty. It is a story that would be just as easily be told today as it would be then. The story that I told, while it is the story of the text, is the story that happens every day in places all around the world: in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Honduras, in Indonesia, in more places than we care to admit to ourselves in our comfortable homes. Just a few numbers to give some context to all of this: in the world today, there are nearly 26 million refugees, 14 million are at risk of starvation, and in the U. S. there is a record number of migrant children in detention (69,500). In a world where we here daily of people fleeing war and terror, who will do anything to make sure their families are out of harm’s way, who will get in a leaky boat that is sure to sink because with that boat there is a bit of hope and behind them there is not. In this story we find a family who is also fleeing that terror of the authorities, who are going to a place that is full of risk but that risk is better than the one they face at home. And in this story, we find Immanuel, God with Us. It is here that we find the oneness, the radical solidarity that God had made with humanity, by becoming human with those who suffered and grieved, with those who fled oppression to a place where they did not know what would happen to them. It is here that God truly walks the earth.

We would prefer a God who is immutable, inviolable, immortal, immovable, who makes sure things that run the way that they should be run, where babies are not killed because of a paranoid ruler who is so concerned with his power that he is willing to do such a thing. We would prefer to remember the Christmas story of the baby in the manger with shepherds and angels. Instead, in the dark side of the story, we get a God who is willing to come to earth and become, as Hebrews 2 says “…. like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God (Heb 2:17 NRSV)” In this story we find a God who is with us in our lives, in the hurt and despair, in the ordinary comings and goings of our lives, a God who is willing to suffer the same kinds of things that we suffer so that we may know God. We see a God who is willing to enter into this world and come to us in the nitty gritty, not afraid to get dirty and to suffer the same things that we suffer. Here we have, instead of a God who is way off in the yonder watching over us and staying off in the safe distance, a God who is with us right here, who understands what we go through, who weeps, laughs, mourns, and celebrates with us. A God who is truly with us. In the dark side of the story there is still the light that will never be overcome by the darkness. Thanks be to God. Amen.