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 from Sarajevo about 20 years ago when he was 35 years old. In 1984 while in Sarajevo he graduated from medical school and began practicing medicine. It was the same year Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics. And if you remember those games, they were a sight to see.
The war in what we used to call Yugoslavia began eight years later 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 hard to come by; but it was difficult to find an unbiased source of information.
[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 completely obvious that war would break out. Then when it began, he figured it wouldn’t be like a “conflict between nations.” Then there was the hope that the “madness” as he called it wouldn’t last long, but the months dragged on 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. 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 specific event, a single 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.
Through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, the UNHCR, he was able to get on a flight to Italy and secure the permits to join his family in London.
Even though he had been a doctor in Sarajevo for several years, Haveric had to secure a residency before he could practice medicine in England. 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 before he could practice medicine again. He had the skills, but his paperwork wasn’t in line with the American Medical Association.
Where he lives now there is no Bosnian community, but at least it’s an American suburb and not downtown Sarajevo or some 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 with his wife who’s pregnant. They’ve spent the last week on the road. It’s chilly, it’s windy, there may be a hint of frost whipping in the air and for the most part they’re in the elements.
At the end of the week they’ve traveled a long way and when they arrive, the medical services she needs aren’t accessible. Services are available, but they’re denied; for no special reason they’re sent packing.
Nearly the moment they settle in what passes for a place, she gives birth. It seems like an easy delivery. Maybe it is easier than most births, but then again this narrative is being told by a guy and what do guys really know about the physical and emotional trauma of childbirth? In any event, the child is born without a doctor or a midwife. It had to be harrowing for her no matter how easy it seemed.
This was followed by a great commotion. Visitors bring gifts 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 in what passes for peace and quiet. He’s finally able to get some sleep.
His rest is anything but peaceful though. His dreams are racked by violent images. His dreams warn him to leave and leave quickly for a place that isn’t friendly to his kind of people. So his wife has just given birth, she was the “hostess with the mostest,” and she gets the baby to sleep; now he is going to wake everyone up so they can pack up and take the family across the border to a place that isn’t particularly friendly to immigrants from their neck of the woods because “The Man” is coming to get them.
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. Literally, God only knows.
On the other side of the border, he’s a refugee, or worse an illegal alien. He has professional skills, skills that got him respect at home, but he isn’t 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 faith 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, barrios, but at least it’s a place. It’s better than the alternative; it’s better than having no place, being homeless. He has his family, and that’s enough. That and the faith he has in his dreams. The faith he has in the source of his dreams.
He thanks God his family is safe. He knows where they are going it will be bad, and he knows if they stay where they are it will be worse. Like the old song goes: “If I go there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double.”[2] The choice between “a rock and a hard place” would be better than this.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s my retelling of the Manger story, the Wise Men story, and the first part of our reading today with some unusual emphases. First, I took time to elaborately narrate the historical context of the flight to Egypt. 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 for the Jews, 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, barrio, displaced person’s camp; things like that. These words mean a lot to us as Christians and as Americans. But have we ever associated these experiences with our Lord and his family? I know that as for me, I hadn’t thought of them in this context before I started work on this sermon.
Our Lord was a refugee, the RefuJesus.
So, does this make you feel uneasy? It makes me feel uneasy and I’m the one sharing it with you. Famed American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick once said the purpose of the gospel is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I think Fosdick would say RefuJesus certainly qualifies.
A few years ago there was an internet meme floating around that can help us understand this political and social situation. The meme is that if you went to Google Maps and asked for directions from Japan to China you’d get them. What made this an internet sensation was 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. This doesn’t even answer the question about getting gas after the first couple of klicks.
Now you can get directions from Nazareth to Cairo using Google Maps, but it doesn’t tell you how many checkpoints you will pass through along the way. It doesn’t tell you if you will encounter difficulties crossing the Sinai, which has the only navigable highway from Israel to Egypt. It doesn’t tell you if you will be detained at the border if you have an Israeli passport or an Israeli stamp in any other passport. So like in Joseph’s time, you can get there from here, but our time is nothing like Joseph’s.
So almost immediately after the birth of Jesus, Joseph was told to take his family to Egypt. In scripture it’s a two verse narrative which moves us from “God says go” to “Joseph says ‘Let’s go’” to “Herod’s 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 then 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 probably don’t dwell on the flight to Egypt because scripture doesn’t dwell on the flight to Egypt. It’s just one of those things, no big deal so we don’t take the time to unpack it.
But I have another idea why we don’t think much about the Holy Family’s stay in Egypt. It’s just a germ of an idea and I am speaking for myself, but maybe it applies to you too. No one ever asked me to think about this before. Honestly, not until I read the words of Yale Divinity School’s Thomas Troeger did this start to come together for me. He wrote, “According to Matthew, Jesus starts his childhood as a refugee: fleeing from Judea to Egypt, and finally from Judea to Galilee”[3]
This opened me to think of Jesus as a refugee. This opened me up to think of other 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 Vietnamese children from the 1970’s. It allowed me to think of Mexican and Central American children since the 1980’s; and Cambodians in the 1990’s.
This opened me to think of Joseph as an undocumented worker. It allowed me to see him as a 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 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.”
This scripture invites us to look into the face of the immigrant and see the face of Christ. It is too easy to see the refugee around us, the immigrant around us, and presume something crude, presume they have no skill. We can assume since they do not know our language and customs, or keep their own language and 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 sovereign over all; we get to believe that the light of God shines on all God’s children. In each of us, especially the powerless immigrant, we can find the face of the baby Jesus staring back at us. We need to see the face of Jesus staring back.
These words allowed me to unpack the scripture in a bold and perhaps unorthodox way. It’s unsettling, it’s disturbing, but it’s not unbiblical. If you feel “afflicted” by my words Fosdick would say it’s because in this world you feel comfortable.
What a glorious week we have enjoyed. On Tuesday night we read the story of our dear Savior’s birth and celebrated in song. We brought the babe into our lives on that “Silent Night” and that is not where we stopped. We proclaimed his birth as the “Joy to the World!” We carried the light into the world and celebrated the wonder and the glory of the power that this small child brings all creation.
Then today we see a quick reversal of fortune. 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 easily be “gone tomorrow.” In the 1990’s in Chile they called those 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, the next ruler, isn’t a ray of sunshine either. So Joseph moves his family to a backwater town in Galilee called Nazareth.
As is often so true, the words of Isaiah’s prophecy, words of God’s mercy remembered, foreshadow the acts or Christ to come:
I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord,
the praiseworthy acts of the Lord,
because of all that the Lord has done for us,
and the great favor to the house of Israel
that he has shown them according to his mercy,
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
For he said, “Surely they are my people,
children who will not deal falsely”;
and he became their savior
in all their distress.
It was no messenger or angel
but his presence that saved them;
in his love and in his pity he redeemed them;
he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
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; and in God alone is our hope.
Remember always, God is with us and by God’s presence through the Son we are saved. So be alert because in the face of the weak, the poor, the infirm, the imprisoned and yes, as we see in today’s reading the refugee; in these people too we see the face of Christ.
[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 2013.
[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.
