Seeking Asylum
Matthew 2:13-23
Dec. 29, 2019
Christmas 1
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

Over the holidays, my family has watched a lot of Disney+, particularly the reality series Encore in which former high school drama groups reunite 15-25 years later for an encore performance of their best remembered high school production of a musical, now in their 30s and 40s.

As we’ve watched these shows together, I realized my children have somehow never seen one of my childhood favorites, The Sound of Music. My grandmother bought the two VHS box set for me when I had the chicken pox, and I watched it over and over again. As I was the only one singing along to Encore, I stopped to explain the plot of the musical and that it was based on a real story. As Mother Superior sang “Climb Every Mountain,” we talked about the sisters of the abbey stealing car parts from the nazis’ engines to give the Von Trapp family more time to escape on foot, heading for safety and away from their home with only what little they could carry.

It’s a sanitized version of a ghastly and not-too-long-ago period in history that seems to repeat in different forms over and over again. A family friend has just moved to the Gulf Coast from Cuba and was with us a couple of weeks ago as our house guest. One night she spoke of her grandparents’ farm in the countryside beyond Havana and how they were spared during the revolution. But a decade later, the government showed up one day and said the land was Cuba’s now and not the family’s. This family that had only known a rural life and living in rhythm with the land was abruptly sent to a concrete, multi-story apartment building where they still live today.

Political upheaval, climate change, economic instability, gang violence; there are all kinds of reasons people are forced to relocate and walk away from their homes. Our Welcoming the Stranger team has been intimately involved in stories of asylum seeking, particularly in supporting the work of NOLA Grannies, and links us to this reality today. Peggy McCormick, who surely has the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known, has spent a lot of time at bus stations welcoming some of the “lucky" ones who have made it past the border and are on their way to connect with friends and family already in the U.S. I say “lucky” only because they didn’t end up in detention facilities and weren’t separated from their families. They are still traveling only with what they can carry, and the NOLA Grannies quickly discovered they didn’t have a bag for their meager belongings, adequate personal care items, much less any kind of luxury items. NOLA Grannies began meeting them with these gifts at the bus station until the border was closed altogether. Now the Grannies are going to Mexico and working with a partner organization in a Texas border town to help meet needs of families who have traveled across Central America only to find themselves stuck at the Mexico-U.S. border.

The Jesus Stories are set in this context—a world in which lives are threatened, governments make rash decisions that threaten the lives of innocents, and families flee their homes for safety and hope of a better life in an unknown future. The Jesus Stories are not all in once place, and there are plenty of others outside of our canon that I don’t know as much about. They were told and documented, and different gospel writers latched on to the ones they felt were most important or best supported the thesis of their writing, but we tell them all together in this season as though they are one, singular narrative. 

Act One of the Christmas story is God being born into our world in human form, not as a prince to the powerful king and queen but in a position of little honor among animals and outsider shepherds, people widely distrusted as unscrupulous and dirty. God chooses this place of raw simplicity and these people of little influence and poor reputation as the setting and audience into which the Divine plan will be born. 

Act Two is this same God born into human form fleeing the country of his birth because word has spread to the king that a child has been born who will one day threaten the king’s power and influence. And so God born into human form becomes a refugee in Egypt, warned and protected by angels and hidden away across a foreign border until the time comes for him to return home. The angelic “Do not be afraid” voice of Advent becomes a “get moving now” voice of Christmas as the holy family leaves the country.

These are the foundational stories of our gospel and become the lens through which we understand the stories of Christ. Somewhere between his birth and dedication at the temple and his adolescent years arguing and speaking with the rabbis, Jesus is hidden away and raised in Egypt for a time—days? months? years? Melissa Bane Sevier invites us to imagine what influential lessons those intervening years might hold. Consider along with her as she imagines for us, “that these early life experiences, and the stories recounted by his parents, help to shape Jesus’ later ministry to the people on the margins – those who are set aside or who by illness or race are ostracized. [As an adult, w]e see him warmly accepting people from other places, religions, and races. He eats with them, laughs with them, and welcomes the outsider. This is true incarnation.”

So many questions to consider as we study the Jesus Stores of his birth and earliest years. What are the consequences of a story that begins with God born into human form becoming intimately familiar with those who struggle, those who suffer, those who are cast out, those who wait, those who are afraid, those who have very little power and even less influence? And what does it mean, on this fifth day of the Christmas season and this final Sunday of the decade, for us to align our lives the Jesus Stories?

When the gospel tells us, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it,” the gospel then immediately gives us some darkness to put that light into context. Incarnation—God with us in the flesh—means God present in the very worst and not just the best. And where does God go and what does God show us in these very first years of a divinely human life? Not throne rooms but margins. A holy family on the run. An infant life unsafe and threatened by the powerful king. Our tradition tells us that the life of Christ is good news—God with us. What is good in this narrative before us?

The good news is that God is not distant and unable to connect with our complex and layered world. Instead, God is intimately present to us in our darkness because God is intimately familiar with the darkness of this world. There is no need for us to hide our brokenness from God or from each other. This is good news because we are freed from shame and invited into vulnerability and truth-telling. God in Christ welcomes all just exactly as they are, and that includes us. You are welcome in the presence of God.

The good news is that the path of God isn’t always straight. In fact, according to the early narratives of Jesus’ life, the path of God is particularly crooked before it’s ever straight, and sometimes everything looks dark and strange before any light and love shines. This is particularly good news as we look ahead at a new year with equal parts hope and uncertainty. For many of us, those actually aren’t equal parts—there’s considerable uncertainty as we look around our world and imagine what the next twelve months will bring. Perhaps the gospel reading offers us a glimmer of hope as we affirm God present to us and with us and then God hidden deeply within the landscape of oppression and suffering. God is in the darkness. God is moving and active even when the story is bleak. God is still Emmanuel, with us.

The good news is that God uses us to be intimately present to the darkness in our world, too, and to partner with God in the holy work of shining light everywhere we possibly can. You are invited to be present in the same ways God is present in Christ Jesus—paying attention to the margins, looking toward what goes unnoticed, seeing God in a strange land, among the forgotten and ignored and going into those places as light shining in darkness. 

At St. Charles in 2020, what will it look like for us to embody the Jesus Stories? How will we love and welcome and work together on the margins and in the threatened, vulnerable places? The good news is also the great challenge because these are the stories and the settings written into our gospel. 

It is good news and great challenge that you are welcome as a partner in God’s work in this world. On this very final Sunday of the decade with a freshly born year just days away, this invitation of partnership with God in the far-from-home, threatened places is how the gospel begins. God is already present and at work, even if hiddenly. In the Jesus Stories, hear an invitation to remember the image of God marked within you that you might also remember you are part of the story of making the crooked path straight not just in your own life but in our world. May you boldly step into the story in this new year. May you know the good news of God deep in your bones. May you embrace your part in God’s story in ways you’ve never before imagined. May this year be one of gospel, incarnation, and rebirth for the church at St. Charles and Broadway. Lord, may it be so. Amen.