Grant us always to seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.
You probably know that Christmas is the shortest liturgical season of the year. You may know this because you pay attention or from the Twelve Days of Christmas song, or Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night play; but so, it is. Now because it is very short, we don’t often get a Christmas 2 Sunday with its readings, but we have one this year. Some of you may also know we had a choice of three different Gospel passages. I figured we probably haven’t heard this story very often. I also know that Episcopalians are unlikely to read their bibles. We tend to trust that we have read the most important parts.
As we look at this somewhat obscure Gospel, a bit of explanation feels necessary. Because we read the nativity story of Luke each year and it is enshrined in our Christmas memories, I feel like I need to say that Luke’s nativity is probably not any truer than narratives we don’t read often. (e.g. Jesus was probably born in a house, not a manger, perhaps the lower story where the animals stayed, but a family house of the house of David.) I mention this because if the Gospel writer of Luke stretches a story a little bit, then we can also say without flinching that Matthew is not the best historian – because he is not trying to be a historian. He is, like all the gospel writers, trying to make sense of the meaning of Jesus. So he is less a historian than an interpreter. As I have mentioned in other sermons, Matthew is concerned with Jesus’ genealogy, and he’s also very concerned with Jesus being the new Moses.
In today’s Gospel, there are three prophecies that the writer of Matthew holds up as truth fulfilled by Jesus. What we can say about those prophecies is that Matthew wiggles a bit to make them work. The first is the holy family fleeing from Egypt, which is prophesied in the OT book Hosea, but in Hosea the prophesy applies to all of Israel. Matthew makes it only apply to Jesus and his family. For the second prophecy, nowhere else is there any historical indication of the slaughter of the Innocents, only in Matthew’s Gospel, but again you can see the parallels with Moses and Pharaoh, yes? And the Nazarite prophesy, Matthew seems to be eliding a difference between Nazirite, ‘an Israelite consecrated to the service of God, under vows to abstain from alcohol, let the hair grow, and avoid defilement by contact with corpses and Nazarene, someone from Nazareth.
The Matthean text is not nearly as familiar to us as Luke’s nativity, but the truth that Matthew is saying is that Jesus’ birth is a really big deal, and most importantly it is against all probability. Matthew’s truths are that Jesus embodies Israel, that he is the new Moses, and that he is from Nazareth; in other words, the Gospel writer of Matthew is saying that Jesus was born to be a holy man, even if the writer is a little confused.
So, let us shift gears a little then, when we look at the readings for today as a collection. The Gospel reading for the second Sunday in Christmas offers us a very different tone for the season; it dramatically leads us away from Advent anticipation and Christmas festivities, and into tenuous and dark days. Potential doom looms in these early chapters of Matthew. Jesus’s welcome to the world is not unanimous acclamation but fear that this child would subvert the order of the world. Threats abound, but according to Matthew, God carefully orchestrates Jesus’ earliest days. Jesus was born into a world in which it feels that the powerful will dominate forever. We too live in such a world. Yet, instead, God shows up. God will dominate (you know in a positive sort of way); God’s will be done.
Across all of today’s readings, God shows up. God shows up no matter what mess we make or are in. Let me rephrase this. God shows up regardless; however, when we follow God’s ways, we manage to actually SEE God showing up.
It is somewhat akin to the principle that prayer works for those who pray. If you don’t pray, you are in no position to say whether or not prayer works. In my own experience, prayer rarely works as a telephone line to God or a wish list. Prayer works most often because it changes the one praying. God has relationship with us, and we see God who shows up because we make room for God; if we look for God, then we can see God.
In Paul’s words to the Ephesians, we see this with “the eyes of your heart enlightened.” This is the hope to which we have been called, in a more majestic sense, these are the “riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.”
The psalmist says it this way: “O Lord of hosts, happy are they who put their trust in you,” as we heard in our antiphon of the psalm today.
The reading from Jeremiah looks like it might have been written after the Babylonian exile, but it wasn’t. Israel is still in exile and Israel looks to see God showing up. They know they have a covenant, a relationship with God. The covenant doesn’t make everything peachy. What it does is change their view. Despite things still going to hell in the proverbial hand basket in exile, there is room for dancing and merry making.
The psalm and Jeremiah give voice to joy, even when there was little reason to be joyful, and in the Gospel there is joy from a turn of events from a “would have, could have” tragedy. The actors all trust in God’s providence, which emerges not from an overly active credulity but from a faith that expects God to reign in a world despite all else.
In the midst of the joys of the Christmas season, these passages are a ripe reminder that things ‘might have been, could have been’ otherwise. Tragedy and disappointment are too often the orders of the day. Still there is consolation, there is God, who unlikely enough came to dwell with us, dwells with us still, has never left, even in the most unlikely times and places. God takes on our mess ups, takes flesh, shows up, and works the mission of bringing us to God, despite us. That’s good news. We see God’s work in the world when we follow and are part of God’s mission. To be part of God’s mission, or at least to want to be, makes life richer and draws our lives closer to God’s heart.