Christmas II sermon

The Second Sunday after Christmas Year C
January 3, 2010
Today’s gospel reading may seem like a strange choice for the second Sunday after Christmas. The wise men have come and gone and then Joseph has a dream in which God’s angel (or God’s messenger --for that’s what angel means) appears and tells him to take Jesus and Mary and flee to Egypt where they will be safe from the wrath of Herod. So Joseph does as he is told, and the Holy Family flees to Egypt. In the meantime, in a part that we don’t read today, Herod discovers that the wise men have not come back to tell him the whereabouts of the Christ child, as they had promised, but they have, instead, sneaked out of town using an alternate route, and Herod is enraged. And he orders his soldiers to kill all male children ages two and under in Bethlehem. This is what our tradition calls the slaughter of the innocents, and it is definitely a dark chapter in the story of the birth of Jesus, that so many other boys were killed because of one tyrant’s rage and fear. Then our reading picks back up after Herod dies and Joseph has another dream where God’s messenger tells him that it is safe to return to Israel. There are many echoes in this reading that harken back to Israel’s history and sacred story. Once again, we have a Joseph who is favored by God and who receives messages from God through dreams. We have young male children slaughtered by a power-crazy king, just like how Pharaoh ordered all the male babies born to the Israelites enslaved in Egypt to be killed upon birth, but Moses was spared. We have a flight to Egypt when things become difficult in Israel, and then a return to the promised land after a few years of exile in Egypt.
But I think that this somewhat disturbing story has even more to offer us in these last days of the Christmas season. It serves as a reminder to us that through the gift of Christ’s birth, God remains with us, and that God continues to speak to us in many different forms and fashions.
A few years ago, I read a wonderful book called Natural Spirituality by a woman named Joyce Rockwood Hudson, and in this book, Hudson writes about all the different ways that God still speaks to us, ways that we are invited by God to grow more deeply in our spirituality: through our dreams, through music, through seemingly random conversations…all of these can be God’s messengers to us in our lives. Even that mindless tune that you catch yourself humming inexplicably at some point in your day, that can be a messenger of God. I will never forget when I had an experience that verified this, just after I finished reading Hudson’s book. I had taken Mary Margaret to pre-school that morning, and our brief time in the car had been a delightful time for us, as we talked and laughed and inter-acted with one another. Then I got to the office, and things just started to go downhill…you know what I’m taking about….when a perfectly good day just inexplicable goes South. I was frustrated and irritable, and I was walking from my office back to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, and I caught myself humming a tune. I focused my attention on what the tune was and discovered that it was the “Itsy, bitsy Spider”;for a moment, I was puzzled as to why I would be humming that song, and then I remembered that MM and I had been singing that on our way to school. In that one, brief, message, that one revelation, God helped me to reconnect with my joy, and everything else that was going on became much more insignificant.

“There is a story of a child who was taught a sacred tune in his native village. When he grew up and went out into the world, the rabbi said to him, ‘Don’t forget the tune. But if you do forget it, then come right back home and learn it all over again’…Our whole world shines with sacredness and we have forgotten how to see it; we have to learn from children, artists, and primitive peoples for whom it has not yet become necessary to put God into a sort of isolation hospital” (Monica Furlong)

This Christmas season, may we remember that our whole world shines with sacredness….all around us are God’s messengers who whisper to us or even proclaim boldly the message of God’s love for us, if we will but listen and trust and follow…