The Presence of God in a Broken World

Sermon preached at St. Mark’s, Honey Brook, PA

by The Rev. Thomas C. Pumphrey, Priest-in-Charge, January 2, 2005

Second Sunday of Christmas, (year A): Matthew 2:13-23

Matthew 2:13-23 (NRSV): Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son." When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more." When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazorean."

Merry Christmas! This is the second Sunday of Christmas, among the last days of the season where we celebrate God with us—the coming of God’s presence to us in Jesus Christ, and abiding with us in God the Holy Spirit. We have prepared and prayed, and we seek, in the quiet holidays of our lives, a deeper sense of God’s presence, filling us with joy and hope and peace.

In today’s Gospel reading from the Gospel according to Matthew, however, we find Jesus in unlikely circumstances. After finding this great king in the stable, we now hear the story of God’s presence in the midst of murder and terror and disaster. Jesus begins life dodging the deadly politics of first century Judea, and he becomes a refugee in a foreign land. Even when he returns, Jesus is still a refugee from Judea. Such circumstances seem foreign to the one called prince of peace. We don’t expect to find God with us in such horrific stories.

Yet we see clearly how even in the midst of great tragedy, God is with us.

The center of danger for Jesus and the families of Bethlehem is the puppet king Herod. Herod was placed by Rome to rule over Israel, but he was a vicious king, ruthless to his opponents. Among his atrocities, Herod killed his wife, his mother in law, three of his sons and 300 of his court officers. Perhaps Herod was paranoid of danger from his rivals. The slaughter of 20 to 30 children in the tiny village of Bethlehem would seem a small event compared to the scale of his other slaughters. This is the world into which Jesus came, and the man from whom Jesus and his family fled into Egypt.

After Herod died, he divided his kingdom between his three sons, Phillip, Herod Antipas, who appears when Jesus is later on trial, and Archelaus who ruled over Judea. Archelaus was his fathers equal, murdering 3000 influential people when he took the throne, seeking his own protection. This was the king in Judea that Joseph and Mary and Jesus dodged when they went from Egypt to Galilee. This was the world into which Jesus came to be God with us.

Though we live in relative safety, stories of murderous despots and tyrants are not unfamiliar to us. In the last hundred years, between countless wars and men such as Hitler and Stalin, tens of millions have perished. Even where human evil is not at work, we have seen great disaster in floods, earthquakes, fire, tornado, hurricane, drought and plague. Now comes the news this week of a great earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and the breathtaking scale of tragedy.

Each day, the news seems so shocking, so foreign, so catastrophic. Nothing can erase the horror and suffering. No explanation can answer our great cry of “why?” for our cries do not seek explanation as much as consolation and nothing can console this tragedy.

I wonder if our horror comes from the scale of this event. This seems such an aberration from what we expect life to be. We don’t see death on a regular basis, and we certainly don’t see it all wrapped up in one day’s experience. Such news comes as a shock to our system because we are not used to being reminded of the frailty of life and the quiet catastrophes ongoing every day.

I exchanged emails with a friend of mine doing missions work in Uganda.¹ He acknowledged the catastrophe of the tsunami, but he also wrote about how moving from the U.S. to Uganda has given him a different perspective on such events. On the one hand, he sees how fragile third world life is, and how great a challenge it is for impoverished countries to recover from such a disaster. On the other hand, he watches every day as the slow motion tsunamis of AIDS and poverty overtakes Uganda and other African nations. Most people in the world live with the constant awareness of the fragility of life, whereas in the U.S., we somehow press sickness and death out of our regular lives and into nursing homes and hospitals.

The truth is that we are no strangers to hardship and catastrophe. The scale of the tsunami may seem small to a mother sitting by her newborn baby struggling for life in the NICU, or to any family who loses only one loved one. Each of us face our own tsunamis, whether in our own mortality or in our own personal sadness of broken relationships and broken hearts. Events such as the tsunami remind us of the frailty of our own lives—physical, emotional and spiritual, of the brokenness of our separation from God and from each other, and our own lack of wholeness.

Notice, however, of how we react to such events. Even at these times we seek the presence of God. We bring our sadness, certainly, and perhaps we bring anger, but in the face of brokenness and catastrophe, we seek God’s presence. Here, there is good news, for this broken world is the world to whom God came. Jesus came not in safety—not to a resort town with a good security system and all-you-can-eat buffets. Jesus came to a world of danger and sorrow, joining us in our vulnerabilities.

This is Jesus who started life as a refugee and a foreigner. This is God with us, whose cousin John was murdered by Herod Antipas; this is Jesus who wept at the grave of his friend. This is Jesus who escaped Herod’s murderers, living where others died, only to be crucified by Pilate, so that others may live. This is God with us, not an uncaring God or a distant ruler, dictating laws from safety. God, in Christ Jesus, suffered the frailties of human life to take away the finality of such frailty.

Even in disaster, we find God with us, mourning our loss with us in sadness over a broken world. But God is also with us offering impossible grace and mercy to us—offering to us healing from the sorrow and brokenness, offering to us joy amidst our fragile lives, showing us transformation to new life and new joy. For those whose lives have tasted that transformation, we hold fast to the confession of our hope in Jesus Christ. This is the healing that allows Ugandan Christians to sing with joy each day—people who in the midst of their hardships say “Praise the Lord” so much that it has become a common greeting in places.² From that hope and joy, from that gift of new life that transcends our hardships, God calls us to serve those in need or in danger, both in headline grabbing stories and in the quiet catastrophes of our own neighborhoods.

We cannot undo all of the world’s hardship, but we know that hardship does not have the last word. Jesus transforms the catastrophe of the cross by the victory of his resurrection. Life has the last word. God’s healing and restoration has the last word. Resurrection has the last word, not only in a distant hope of a renewed world, but in today’s gift of God’s presence with us, transforming our frail lives into abundant and joyful lives.

This is the gift of Christmas—not just that God’s presence can be felt in the quaint quiet moments of a holiday setting, but that God’s presence can be found even in tragedy and sadness.

In sorrows and in joys, God is with us.