First Sunday of Christmas
December 30, 2001
Year A
Title: Tarnished Tinsel
Theme: Beyond the sentimentality surrounding Christmas, we find stories
of forced moves, fear, and murder surrounding the Holy Family—
reminders that even “God with us” has experienced exile, only to find
God faithful in our new home.
I don’t know about you, but the Advent and Christmas season is a
wonderful, but challenging time for me—its time when you are allowed to
be a kid again, but its also a time when you and I can’t run from some of
the problems that have been haunting our lives, like we did when we
were kids. A lot of people experience the holidays as the toughest time
of the year, emotionally and otherwise. Estrangement from our families,
or feeling alone, or just the simple realization that you are exhausted
from demands of life—all of these issues seem to come out—and they
come out during a time when we feel forced to feel something we don’t.
After all, this is the season of joy, and for many of us, that experience of
joy is not a reality—all of the emotional battles we’ve been battling
become intensified during this time when you’re not supposed to feel
anything but happiness and joy. During the last week or so, I’ve talked
with many of you about what your holiday plans were and it was so
interesting to see the varied routes we were going—some of us were
going home to our biological families, some of us were staying here with
our families of choice, and some of us just gritted our teeth and hoped
the whole holiday thing would blow over as quickly as possible. And then
there is the Christmas tree, the tree that was once so beautiful, sitting
there with its grin and its taunt of work to come—my tree even now has
been whispering in my ear, put me up, put me up…I have done a
wonderful job of ignoring those whispers.
It’s a letdown, really, to have think about putting Christmas things back
up again, but its nothing like the experience that Jesus and his family are
going through in the passage that we get to hear for the First Sunday of
Christmas. But I love the fact that we get to hear this disturbing story
during the Christmas season, when everything is supposed to be sweet
and celebratory. And Christmas in the Christian tradition, that is, the
season that is 12 days between Christmas Day and Epiphany, which is
January 6, Christmas in the Christian tradition really is a time of
celebration for us as the church—Christ has been born! What the
universe has waited for is here, though the packaging of that gift for
many of us is odd and challenging—God coming to us as a helpless
child is startling thing, really. But amidst the sweetness and beauty of
this moment, come these stories we hear in this passage from Matthew—
stories of dreams and warnings, fear and flight, jealousy and murder—all
of it smacks us in the face in the midst of our celebration. But its real life
isn’t it? It’s a huge magnification of what some of us experience after
Christmas Day. There are shadows that even accompany joy, that even
haunt this moment of wonder that we find in the manger. Beyond the
sentimentality surrounding Christmas, beyond the sweetness, there lurks
the story of a family running for fear of their son’s life, a story of
murderous king whose solution to not finding that child is the murder of
ALL the children that fit his profile, and there is even the reminder,
perhaps that the birth of this Jesus, this Emmanuel, this “God with us”
experienced of a lifetime of exile, from his homeland, from his own
people, from his family, that he experienced this exile almost from the
very beginning. But most importantly, it’s a reminder that wherever we
are, whatever we are in, whatever moment and place fear has driven us
to, God is there. God meets us in our new home, even if that new home
is in temporary or permanent exile.
I had a conversation the other day with someone who just came out and
he was telling me of his own exile, his own struggle with the Christmas
season and how he had chosen to stay from his family home this year
because he did not feel as if he would be really welcomed any longer. I
think a lot of us have had that experience—sometime we choose to stay
away from our family home, others of us have been asked to stay away,
but either way it is an experience of exile. What was once safe no longer
feels safe, what was home no longer feels like home. On the other hand,
some of us during our holiday visits with family, we might as well have
been in physical exile, because it felt as if were in emotional exile—
forbidden to talk about the secret that is no secret. We become
refugees, exiled out of the emotional country we have grown up in. And
yet, there are others of us whose moments of exile have nothing to do
with our families—we don’t flee, we don’t run from our biological families
or even our families of choice—rather, it is ourselves that we run from—
we feel disconnected from our very self, we don’t feel real anymore, we
run away from the dreams we once had, we feel incredibly estranged
from our center—the exile is within and strangely enough, it is a fleeing,
a running away from our very core, from our very heart—we feel
disconnected from our very self, a stranger to our own selves. Others of
us feel exiled from the church of our pasts, that home that nurtured our
spirits and hearts, but now feels distance and death dealing. Still, home
is still home, whether or not its now become a place of spiritual death
and hopelessness—home is still home, even if madness is going on
within its borders.
Certainly for Mary and Joseph, Israel never stopped being home, despite
the horror of the massacre of those baby boys. “Get out of Bethlehem
as quickly as you can, the angel warns them, “don’t look behind you, and
go into exile, Herod is right behind you!” It must have been a terrifying
and sickening situation for Mary and Joseph, to flee from their homeland
out of fear—forced to move out of fear for their lives. Of course, there
are millions of people in this world who have had that same experience,
the most recent example being the influx of refugees in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Living in exile is living without the roots of the past to give you
strength for the future—home becomes a memory, sometimes for a short
while, sometimes for a lifetime. It is to be dislocated, not quite centered—
if we could ask those refugees in Afghanistan or Pakistan, I think they
would tell us that same truth. But it’s a truth we do know already, or at
least most of us do.
But I want to remind us of something, something I hope we already
know—I think, really, most of my job is to remind us of the truth we
already know deep in our hearts. I want to remind us that God really is in
the exile with us, God really is in those places in our lives where we are
not all together, when we feel emotionally or physically dislocated, when
we feel like we are in exile from our own selves—God is there, in our new
home, wherever that home may be. Fear may have driven us to that
new home, that home that doesn’t feel like home; terror of ourselves or
of others may have carved out a new address, but God has made that
move with us, into whatever place home has now become. Mary and
Joseph and Jesus, the Holy Family, they spend perhaps years in exile,
but God is faithful, God remains with them—God even sends them into
exile for their own safety, for their own growth, perhaps. So too with us—
being in exile, whether that exile be from our family or even ourselves—
exiles can be the place where safety is, where the potential for growth is.
Do I have a reason why such terrible things happen that force us from
our homes, terrible things like the massacre of baby boys in Bethlehem?
No, and to give a reason would fail to take seriously the loss of those
beautiful baby boys, or it would fail to take seriously the pain you and I
have experienced that has driven us into exile. Do I have an explanation
of why we can only learn some things far from our familiar home? No.
But wherever we are forced to go, to whatever land we find ourselves
laying down a new foundation, it is now home, but whether it becomes
permanent, I do not know. I do know this, however—God is with us, God
is faithful, God will make the present address of our lives a home worth
staying in, a place worth growing deep roots into. We have the moment,
whatever that moment is, and we are promised that the moment, the
place of exile, is surrounded by the loving grace of God. Mary, Joseph,
and certainly Jesus know about exile, they know about feeling dislocated
and far from home—but their dreams, their angel filled dreams, reminded
them of the truth that home ultimately becomes the place where God is—
and God, as you well know, God is everywhere. God was where Joseph
and Mary and Jesus laid their weary bodies those nights thousand of
years ago—and God is wherever we lay our tired bodies and spirits,
because God is faithful, God is present in whatever new home, in
whatever new address you and I find ourselves at. Amen and amen.
