Dec 29, 2013 1st Sunday of Christmas

Matt.2:13-23

   13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
   14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
   16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
   18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
   weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
   and refusing to be comforted,
   because they are no more.”

    19 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”
   21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Seems too soon - to face the real world again; the real world which can so often destroy our moments of peace and ridicule our believing a Savior was born.  The Matthew story is “a turn toward lowliness and humility rather than grandeur and greatness....Jesus is to be identified, not with the powerful, but with the helpless, vulnerable people of this world.”

As the writer of Hebrews says he was “one of the dispossessed”.

And as Nelson Trout - first Lutheran African American Bishop in America - puts it:  “In Jesus Christ, God stoops down very low.”

This is the greatness of Christianity - it’s lowliness.  There is no place too unimportant, no event too insignificant that God has not been there and will not be there again.  God has become penetratingly human - nothing is beyond his reach.  This is what Christmas is all about!

Joseph makes real for us the struggle of God coming to us - and asking us to do something we would never do by ourselves.  God touches us in ways which require risk.  It is when we risk that we discover God’s will for us.

Often this means that we follow our feelings; that deep urging from within.
Faith, as P.T. Forsythe defined it, “is a power and passion in authority among the powers and passions of life”...among the strongest of feelings in our lives.  It turns us on to the spirit of God who is trying to get us to ‘go to Egypt’...to risk our lives in order that we might really find them, and really live!