Exile and Return (Second Sunday after Christmas--January 4, 2009)

[Our lessons are Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a; and Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23.]

Our Gospel reading today, unusually, focuses on Joseph, and hints at horror. Joseph, in response to an angel’s warning in a dream to flee to Egypt, acts without hesitation and takes Mary and the infant Jesus to safety.

What the Holy Family was fleeing was a hideous evil. Herod “the Great” did not hold on to power by being merciful and gentle. If you were seen as a threat, you were eliminated, ruthlessly, without mercy, and without concern as to your guilt or innocence.

So when Herod learned that people were saying that a newborn boy in Bethlehem was being called the King of the Jews, he decided to take no chances. No one could tell him which child was the King? No problem at all, just kill all the children!

This evil, this violence and fear, is as much a part of the Christmas story as the manger and the shepherds and the wise men. Palestine was a violent place where the poor were systematically brutalized and this simple peasant family was vulnerable enough that they had to go into exile to save their infant son’s life. We don’t know how many children were less fortunate and were killed.

Jesus’ family knew the experience of exile, of the need to flee their country because someone wanted them dead. While most of us here in America haven’t known that experience, unfortunately, it’s far too familiar to many people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and we don’t have to go back more than a few years to see it in Europe. Some have been in exile for many years and have little hope of returning home. The story of the Holy Family’s exile in Egypt should help us identify with the plight of all refugees.

In our Collect for this day, we praise God for creating and restoring the “dignity of human nature” and, in our Baptismal Covenant, we promise to “strive for justice and peace… and respect the dignity of every human being.” Anything we do, from contributing to the feeding and clothing of the homeless to advocating humane care and repatriation of refugees, is a mandate of our covenant with Jesus in Baptism.

We hear the theme of exile and return in our reading from Jeremiah. Jeremiah is writing about the return of the remnant of Israel from many years’ exile in Babylon. God will turn the mourning of the exiles into joy. The Church proclaims hope to the exiled—a hope of returning to their homes one day.

For we too are exiles, exiled in a world that promises great material wealth while it fails to satisfy our deepest desire to be in our spiritual home with God. We have not yet reached our true home and the refugee experience of the Holy Family reminds us that even Jesus, who began life as a homeless person in a stable, could lack a true home on earth.