Christmas 1 -   Year A - December 26, 2010 - The Rev. Dr. Robert G. Walker, Lutheran Pastor Associate

A number of years ago, Cecelia gave me a limited edition Bing & Grindal plate, as a Christmas present.    It is beautiful and it is moving.  It depicts Joseph leading a donkey, with Mary seated on it.  At first thought, that could be the night of Jesus’s birth when there was no room for them in the inn in Bethlehem.  But that’s not what it is.  Mary is holding the infant Jesus, and He is wrapped tightly in a blanket.  What this beautiful and moving plate depicts is the flight of the holy family into Egypt in accordance with the warning that Joseph had received in a dream. 

And what a terrible warning it was!  You will recall that when the Wise Men went to see Herod as they were looking for the Baby Jesus, he told them to let him know where the Child was, so that he too could go and worship Him.  But that was a lie.  What he really wanted was to be able to find the Child and kill Him, so that Jesus would never be a threat to Herod’s kingship.  Our lesson from Matthew points to one of the real atrocities of all time, the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents, whose remembrance day we observe on Tuesday of this week.  All male children who were as old as two years or less were killed in the land all around Bethlehem , taken from their parents who would be horrified and grieving for the rest of their lives.  That was something that would create a number of homeless refugees if they heard in advance that this was going to happen.  With great regrets, the only one we know of who was notified was Joseph. 

Following the warning from the angel, Joseph got up and took Mary and the Baby Jesus, and they departed westward toward Egypt, for that would be a safe place.  They left under cover of darkness, and immediately became refugees.  Joseph feared for the life of the child, and even though he was not the biological father, according to scripture, he was Jesus’s father in every human meaningful way.  He knew that it was his task to protect this Child Whose future was strange in what would take place.  I’m sure that Mary had told Joseph all that the Angel Gabriel had said to her when he announced that she would bear a child, and His Name would be “Jesus.”

The Holy Family became refugees.  That’s hard for us to imagine, because surely God would have protected this Child Who would be God’s Son.  But no, that was not to be, not at this time in the child’s early life, or later on a cross outside Jerusalem.  But that gets us ahead of ourselves, doesn’t it?

I had a sabbatical from my duties in the Lutheran Council in the USA in 1987.  For seven weeks, we were in Cambridge, England, staying at Westcott House, which is an Anglican seminary.  My sabbatical project was interviewing people who could enlighten me about the role of religion in the lives of highly motivated students.  We have to acknowledge that students at Cambridge (and I guess Oxford, too) would be considered “highly motivated.”   One of the people I interviewed was a man named David Armstrong.  David was a curate at Holy Trinity Church, but before that, he had been a priest in the Church of Ireland.  David and his family had had to leave Ireland under cover of darkness. David had had the audacity to go across the road from his parish in Northern Ireland on a Christmas Eve to wish the neighboring Roman Catholic congregation a Merry Christmas.  The Roman priest had reciprocated, and the  Catholic church was destroyed later by a bomb blast.  To make a long story short, David ultimately was on the national stage in the Protestant-Roman Catholic difficulties, not by his choice, but it just happened, and his ecumenical stance made him a target for the Orangemen.  He knew what it was like to be a refugee.  It was a frightening time when he brought his family across the water on a ferry to England, so that they might be safe.

I am confident that many of us here this morning have known people who were refugees.  And that is hard.  My professor of New Testament studies in seminary, Dr. Arthur Voobus, was a refugee from Latvia who had seen a Russian guard destroy 20 years of his research, just to be mean.  His daughter at age 8 had to be pushed in a perambulator because her legs were weak from malnutrition.  He knew what being a refugee was like.

There are countless refugees in the world today, although in theory the United Nations has an educated “guesstimate” of how many there are.  Many of them are members of churches that are a part of the Anglican Communion.  I am thinking at this time about the Sudan.  The Diocese of Southwestern Virginia has a relationship with the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, and we regularly have Sudanese church people at the Diocesan conventions.  The Sudan has undergone much stress through the years of the civil war and the religious persecutions by the government toward those who were Christians.  It is an amazing fact that the Episcopal Church of the Sudan has grown fourfold in membership during the persecution times of the last 30 years.  People have been killed, but by God’s Holy Spirit, people continue to become Christians and face those persecutions. 

I think that may in some way be related to the part of our Gospel narrative where the angel told Joseph that he would be told when it would be safe to return to Israel.  For the Holy Family, safety truly meant physical safety, because the Child had to grow to maturity to fulfill His saving task for all humanity.  For many of the world’s refugees today, that safety may be a spiritual safety where they feel the nurturing comfort and presence of God, even in their dire circumstances.  And it just may be that you and I can help refugees in many parts of the world to be aware of and know of God’s love for them, even in their current situations.  We have arms of the church, such as Episcopal Relief and Development, and Lutheran World Relief that can reach where you and I as individuals cannot.  We can proclaim God’s love through these agencies, or others, too.

The important thing for us right now is to be aware in more than a cerebral thought pattern that there are people who are refugees, people whose lives have been turned upside down because of political upheavals and repressions, or because of natural phenomena that force them from their former way of life.  These people hurt.  We can help.  A part of our saying “Thank you” to God for the gift of the Christ Child for our salvation is to do whatever we can to ease the plight of people whose life situations are not as fortunate as ours, because God loves them, too.  A way of saying that is, “God’s Work…Our Hands.”  We can be the means of sharing God’s love.  Maybe that can be our Christmas gift to the world.                                            AMEN.