Merry Christmas!! It is still Christmastide! This is very unusual, to get to the second Sunday of Christmas, and so while some of my colleagues decided to jump ahead today to Epiphany, which is tomorrow on January 6, I thought it might be nice to linger with Christmas for the full 12 days of it. If you took down your Christmas tree already, well shame on you :)
Tomorrow is the day of the Epiphany, the visit of the wise men and the official end of Christmas. Which means tonight is the twelfth night of Christmas. In some parts of the English speaking world, Twelfth Night is well known, and celebrated with all sorts of antics, pranks and unexpected reversals. At traditional Twelfth Night parties the poor dress up like kings, rich men wear rags, little kids pretend to be priests or even the pope, and all sorts of silliness ensues—helped along no doubt by ample amounts of mulled wine. No dry January for the revelers of Twelfth Night!
Seen in that light, of unexpected reversals, our Gospel reading for today kind of fits. I’ll come to that, in a moment.
This is still part of the cycle of the infancy stories of Christ that make up our Christmas readings. It’s called the flight into Egypt - a very short passage in the Gospel of Matthew, yet somehow this seemingly minor event has become among the most popular moments in Christian tradition and art, with reams of early Christian and medieval legend built up around it.
In Matthew, after the visit of the wise men, Herod, king of Israel, decrees that all infants and toddlers under two be killed. This was to get rid of any threat to his kingship after he’d heard about the birth of Jesus. We call this the Slaughter of the Innocents and it's remembered in the church every year on December 28. We’re not sure it really happened that way, or on the scale described in the Bible; there's no account of it outside the gospel of Matthew. Although one preacher I read notes that Herod was widely known for rash deeds and murder, even killing his own sons. It’s possible things like this happened so often under his rule that they weren't even worth recording, especially if they took place in remote villages like Bethlehem. That tells you a lot about the world Jesus was born into and the need for the hope that he brought.
It’s this event that Mary and Joseph sneak away from Israel into Egypt to avoid. And here’s something we often overlook but that is central to the identity of the Holy Family: for three years they found refuge in Egypt. They were refugees, they were people without a home who relied for their life on the hospitality and acceptance of others in a place they weren’t born into and didn’t belong in. In all our rhetoric about people coming into this country, let’s not forget that we’re talking about people as sacred to God as this holy family, and above all, whatever policies you’re in favor of or against, compassion is called for. These are children of God, and like Mary Joseph and Jesus, many of them are afraid and just trying to survive. Here endeth that sermon.
But this is the Twelfth-Night reversal in this story: Egypt, in the larger Biblical narrative, is a place of captivity. A place to run from, not towards.
In Egypt the people of Israel were cruelly mistreated, and enslaved. In Egypt the Pharaoh demanded they work without pay, issuing petty vindictive punishments to make their work harder, like making bricks without straw. In Egypt this same Pharaoh played games with the slaves of Israel and with Moses, promising freedom then no sooner withdrawing it, his heart hardened against them time and again. This is all in the book of Exodus in the Bible. The Israelites were enslaved there for four hundred years.
Yet under Herod, Egypt, a symbol of oppression, becomes the Holy Family’s refuge. It saves Jesus' life when his own King, his own country, was seeking to end it. How’s that for a reversal?
No nation, no individual, is fixed in character for good or bad. Nations that once oppressed can become safe harbors of freedom and security, just as those that once were safe can become places of oppression. When I look at Israel today, I have a hard time seeing it as a place of freedom and safety for many of its Arab inhabitants, or even Jewish ones. Strict adherence to the ancient Biblical narrative of which nations are righteous and virtuous and which are not, can mask the reality of oppression happening there today. Of course it’s not just Israel; it’s everywhere. Our narrative in this country of being a haven for the huddled masses takes us only so far. We have to keep working at it. Or conversely, our history of being a place of enslavement and oppression thankfully hasn’t defined us. We’ve begun to create a new story.
So Egypt, over the course of the Bible’s history and beyond, is many things. Here, it’s a refuge, where Jesus’ home country, was not. (And here endeth that sermon!)
In finding refuge in Egypt, Jesus turns on its head these old fixed notions of who’s in the right and who isn’t, reminding us that salvation can come from the unlikeliest of places and people.
Epiphany, which begins tomorrow, is often celebrated as the opening up of the promise of Israel to all nations, Jew and Gentile both. The extension of God's love to all, a reordering of the world and the belief that everyone in any nation--even Egypt--is capable of showing, and receiving, God's love: these are the promises of Epiphany.
Some of the medieval legends about the Flight into Egypt--as I said, for some reason this has been one of the most embellished stories in the Gospel--describe old statues falling from their pedestals as Mary and Joseph walk by on their journey. With this laborious trip, they demolish all old hatreds and enmities. With this trip, hearts open, and people see each other not as enemies, but friends, united in our love of and from God. Amen.