RefuJesus

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Marshall, Texas on Sunday December 26, 2010, the 1st Sunday after Christmas.

Isaiah 63:7-9

Psalm 148

Hebrews 2:10-18

Matthew 2:13-23

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Zlatko Haveric[1] came to the United States about 15 years ago when he was 35 years old from Sarajevo. He graduated from medical school in Sarajevo in 1984 and began to practice medicine immediately. This was the same year Yugoslavia hosted the Winter Olympic Games. And if you remember these games, they were a sight to see.

The war in what we used to call Yugoslavia began in April 1992, but Haveric had heard talk and rumors of war before the first military hostilities began. He writes, “It started gradually. I mean something was in the air for many months.” Information wasn’t necessarily hard to come by, it was difficult to find an unbiased source of information though. [Sigh] The more things change…

He wrote, “There was a complete confrontation of the opposing parties in the conflict, the ethnic factions. The propaganda spread by the media was fierce. Every program talked about the opposing parties; different versions of the news were coming from Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo from the three ethnic groups. So by the time the conflict started, the confusion and the division of ethnic groups was complete. Everything was ready for the war.”

As the hostilities evolved, he said that at first, he thought that it wasn’t all that obvious that the war would begin. Then when it began, he didn’t figure it would become like a “conflict between nations.” Then there was the hope that the “madness” as he called it wouldn’t last long, months seemed longer than he expected. Then he thought the international community would come in and fend off the madness that was taking over the nation. This was when he sent his wife and toddler daughter to London.

Haveric stayed in Sarajevo for patriotic reasons, not so much for any specific faction of his splintering country, but for his country in general. Perhaps it was more for the idea of his country at this point. A year after sending his family to safety, he decided it was time for him to go too. It wasn’t a sudden decision. There wasn’t a single event, a specific straw that broke his camel’s back. In his words the situation in his country was becoming absurd and it was time to rejoin his family in England, even if his own parents would not come with him.

By the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, in the news they are called the UNHCR, he was able to get on a flight to Italy and secure the permits to join his family.

Even after practicing medicine in Sarajevo for several years, this didn’t matter as much in England, but Haveric was able to secure a residency in London. In 1995 the family moved to Chicago where Haveric’s sister-in-law lives. His wife was able to secure work as a secretary in the US because she was fluent in English and Arabic, but Haveric had to pass US medical exams and secure another residency. He had the skills, but his paperwork just wasn’t in line with either the British or American Medical Associations.

Where he lives now there is no Bosnian community, but at least it’s an American suburb and not downtown Sarajevo or some American migrant picker slum. Also, he’s doing better than his sister whose family lives in a German town on the Swiss border where things are not so good for refugees.

Here’s a harrowing if somewhat more anonymously presented story. Imagine if you will, a man whose wife has just given birth. The last week of her pregnancy had been difficult. During that week they all had traveled a long way and when they arrived, medical services she needed were not available. Services were available, but they were denied, for no special reason at all they were sent packing.

Nearly the moment they got settled in what passes for a place, she gives birth, at least it seemed like an easy delivery. Maybe it was easier than most births, but then again he’s a guy; what do guys really know about the physical and emotional trauma of childbirth? In any event, it was the birth of a child without a doctor or even a midwife. It had to be harrowing for her no matter how easy it seemed.

This was followed by a great commotion. Visitors bringing gifts present them to the child, not the father, not the parents, to the child. There’s enough drama for an entire Broadway season happening in the ramshackle place he found for his family. Finally the visitors leave and there is what will pass for peace and quiet. He’s finally able to get some shut eye.

His rest is anything but peaceful though. His dreams are racked by violent images. He is warned by his dreams to leave and leave quickly.

So his wife has just given birth, she was the “hostess with the mostest,” and she finally got the baby to sleep; now he is going to wake her up so they can pack up and to take the family across the border to a place that isn’t particularly friendly to immigrants from his neck of the woods because “The Man” is coming to get him. How long will they have to stay? The dream only says to stay until the next dream tells him to return, so God only knows.

On the other side of the sea, he’s a refugee, or worse an illegal immigrant. He has professional skills, skills that give him respect at home, but he isn’t at home anymore. He’ll be lucky if he can find a place where he might luck into day labor.

His skin is the wrong color. His religion isn’t the right religion. He goes and he is displaced from all that he has and all that he knows. There may be camps for displaced persons when they get there. There might be a community of people like them. They probably live in ethnic ghettos but at least it’s a place. It’s better than the alternative; it’s better than having no place, being completely homeless. All he has is his family, and that’s enough. That and the faith he has in his dreams. Well, the faith he has in the source of his dreams.

He thanks God his family is safe. He knows if he stayed where they were it would be bad for them, and he knows that where he is going it will be bad for them. Like the old song goes: “If I go there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double.”[2] Going is a horrible decision but staying is even worse. The choice between “a rock and a hard place” would be better than this.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a retelling of Matthew 2:1-13 with special emphasis on verse 13. But there is something I did that was unusual; I took more time to elaborately narrate the historical context of the flight to Egypt than scripture did. Sure, we have often heard that Egypt was a treacherous place for an Israelite, but have we ever considered what that meant? We know going to Egypt was dangerous then, as if it’s any better today, but have we ever really taken a hard look at what that meant to Joseph’s young family?

I did one more thing, again quite intentionally; I loaded the language of this story with images that mean something to us today. Using words like refugee, illegal alien, ghetto, displaced person’s camp, and things like that. These words mean a lot to us as Christians and as Americans. But have we ever associated this experience with our Lord and his family? I know for one that I hadn’t before earlier this week.

Our Lord was a refugee, the RefuJesus.

There’s an internet meme, an internet sensation that can help us understand this political and social situation in our time. The meme is that if you log onto Google Maps and ask directions from Japan to China you’ll get them. You can get Google Maps directions from Japan to China. What makes this an internet sensation is instruction number 42, “Jet ski across the Pacific Ocean, 782 km.” This is just stupid funny. Add to the funny that these two nations haven’t always been friendly and “Jet ski across the Pacific Ocean, 782 km” reaches a brand new level of silly.

Where this meme ties into our reading today—and our lives today—is that Google Maps doesn’t give directions from Israel to Egypt. Not even “head to the desert and turn right when you get to Sinai.” Google Maps doesn’t say “Tick off your brothers, it worked for Joseph in Genesis.” Trying to calculate it from the opposite direction, from Egypt to Israel, it doesn’t say “Really it doesn’t matter what route you take; it will take 40 years no matter what.” That’s how strained relations are after 5,000 years; Google Maps won’t even give ridiculous directions.

This is the situation Joseph was told to take his family into almost immediately after the birth of Jesus, get up and take the family to Egypt. Scripture then quickly takes us through a two verse narrative which moves us from “God says go” to “Joseph says ‘Let’s go’” to “Herod is dead and this fulfills prophecy.” Only then does the text tell the story of Herod becoming very upset because he was outwitted by the Magi leading to what we call The Slaughter of the Innocents. Then we are reminded Herod died and learn about Joseph’s next dream telling him to return to his nation.

Except for the Slaughter which includes narrative, prophecy, and poetry from Jeremiah, the text of our reading is the briefest of the brief. You could compose more narrative on Twitter.

On the whole though, we don’t dwell on the baby Jesus’ stay in Egypt probably because scripture doesn’t dwell on the baby Jesus’ stay in Egypt. It’s just one of those things, no big deal so we don’t take the time to unpack it. This is probably the reason we don’t dwell on the issue.

But I have another idea why we don’t think much about Jesus’ stay in Egypt. It’s just a germ of an idea and I am really speaking for myself, but maybe it applies to you too: No one ever asked me to think of it that way before. Honestly, not until I read the words of Yale Divinity School’s Thomas Troeger, “According to Matthew then, Jesus starts his childhood as a refugee: fleeing from Judea to Egypt, and finally from Judea to Galilee”[3] did this start to come together for me.

This opened me to think of Jesus as a refugee. This opened me up to think of refugee children. Like the children of Darfur who are crowed into camps displaced by civil war in the Sudan. It allowed me to think of the refugees who survived World War II, particularly the Jews. It allowed me to think of the Vietnamese from the 1970’s. It allowed me to think of Mexican and Central Americans since the 1980’s.

This opened me to think of Joseph as an illegal immigrant. It allowed me to see him as the dishwasher or busboy in restaurants all over America. It allowed me to see into the face of the Mexican men who wait outside Home Depot like it’s the public marketplace of scriptural times where men waited for work. It allowed me to think of Zlatko Haveric. This allowed me to think about the racial and ethnic lines that were crossed with the simple words “So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.”

These words allowed me to unpack the scripture in a bold and perhaps unorthodox way, a way that I do not see as unbiblical at all. This is one of the things we can take from this reading this morning, there is more to scripture than a quick casual glance provides.

There are two things we can do to move beyond this quick casual glance.

The first thing we are to do is be grounded in the word, and the only way to do that is to be in the word. We need to read scripture and pray on it daily. If you have never read the bible through, I guarantee it will change your life. It will surely change the way you see life around you. In the back of the sanctuary, there are two different plans for reading the bible in one year. One of them is straight through. The other offers one day of the week for different motifs of scripture, a weekly journey of torah, history, prophecy, poetry, gospel, and epistle. I invite you to take one or both. Give it a try. In late January when you’ve fallen behind and don’t want to continue, don’t do it! Keep plugging away.

As you read, take a moment to reflect on what you’ve read too. A friend of ours always says that every time he reads scripture he finds something new. He says it’s like “reading it again for the first time.” There is a glorious moment when you read something and can say, “My, that’s new.”

The other thing that this scripture calls us to do is look at the face of the immigrant. Jesus was a refugee. It is too easy to see the refugee around us, the immigrant around us, and presume something crude. We can presume they have no skill. We can presume since they do not know the local language or customs, or keep to their own language or customs, that they are up to something. We can think all sorts of bad things about the immigrant, some of which may actually be valid, but when lumped into a single heap we paint with a brush that is far too broad for a delicate coat.

If we believe that God is the creator of all, if we believe that God is the sovereign over all, we have to believe that the light of God shines on all God’s children. In all of us, especially the powerless immigrant, we can find the face of the baby Jesus staring back at us. What we need to be is the face of Jesus staring back.

What a glorious couple of days we have enjoyed. On Friday night we read the story of our dear Savior’s birth and celebrated it in Lessons and Carols. We brought the babe into our lives on that “Silent Night” but that is not where we stopped, oh no, we proclaimed his birth as the “Joy to the World!” We carried our little lights into the world and celebrated the wonder and the glory of the power that a small child brings into our lives.

Some of you know what that means better than others.

Then in a quick reversal of fortune, the joy leaves as terror comes to the door and the Holy Family pulls up stakes moving quickly and quietly, without a trace to a place where they could as easily be “gone tomorrow.” In the 1990’s in Chile they called these people “the Disappeared.” In Egypt Joseph and his family easily could have become “the Disappeared.”

The nightmare doesn’t end either with the return to Israel as Joseph can’t return to the home of his fathers in Bethlehem. Herod is dead, but Archelaus isn’t a ray of sunshine. So Joseph moves his family to a backwater town in Galilee called Nazareth which is the butt of jokes.

If there is a point Matthew is strong on it is this, the life of Jesus is the blessing of prophecy fulfilled. He is the long awaited Messiah. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He tells us that there is nothing we can face that our Lord hasn’t faced himself. There is no pain or suffering he himself hasn’t faced. In these trials and tribulations he is God and God is with us; even when he was a refugee himself. Being in scripture helps us to see this and be prepared to respond to God in every time and place.

So be alert because even in the face of the refugee, especially in the face of the refugee, as our Lord was once a refugee, God is with us.

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[1] Zlatko Haveric’s full story can be found at the United States for UNHCR (the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) website, http://www.unrefugees.org/site/c.lfIQKSOwFqG/b.4803767/k.9859/Zlatko_Haveric.htm, retrieved December 24, 2010. I adjusted ages and time spans to fit 2010.

[2] The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

[3] Troeger, Thomas H., Feasting n the Word, Year A, Volume 1, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010, page 167.