Sermon Preached by the Rev. Sam Frazier, Vicar

Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Haw River, NC

January 3, 2010

2nd Sunday after Christmas, Year C

The Gospel story today is about the Holy Family - Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus. But perhaps a better name would be the Refugee Family. For as soon as the night visitors laid their gifts at the

feet of the baby Jesus, Joseph received a command from God=s messenger: A Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt.@ Although Jesus has just arrived on this earth, he is being forced to flee for his life. The brutal murderer, Herod the Great, is trying to find him and kill him. After all, Herod the Great had already murdered many members of his own family, including his wife, and so he had no qualms about murdering a few dozen children in Bethlehem, if one of them posed a threat to his leadership. Isn=t this a familiar story? Isn=t this familiar? In the past few years there has been and continues to be a flood of refugees fleeing from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and any place on earth where evil men seek to eliminate all people who are a threat to their power and their control. Not much has changed in 2,000 years, has it?

Just the other day we were experiencing the beauty of the Christmas story: Jesus in the manger, angels, shepherds, wise men, the great star signaling the birth of the Messiah. But just a day or two later Joseph and Mary are now on the run. King Herod had heard about the birth of Jesus and was out to kill him. The wise men had been warned in a dream not to return to Herod to report on what they had found. So they left the manger in Bethlehem and went straight back to their own country far to the east. An angel told Joseph that the Child was in danger of death and commanded him to flee to Egypt that same night. Under the cover of darkness the little Infant must leave the land of His fathers and flee, flee because Herod threatened His life. Shortly after the Holy Family fled to Egypt, Herod=s soldiers came to Bethlehem and killed all the male children from two years old and under.

There are some bad people in the world, and one of our comforts is that we know they will not live forever. Herod will not be with us forever, either. But we should not get too comfortable with this realization, because Herod has a son or some kind of successor who may be as bad if not worse. So exit Herod and enter Archelaus, Herod=s son, who was even worse than Herod. So the death of a Herod, or a Stalin, or a mean unforgiving family member never finally solves our problem with people who allow evil to rule their actions.

We have all had bad times in our lives. And after those bad times, when the Herods in our lives die, we know that they get their just deserts. But our Herods are not always people. They can also be impersonal evils. A person may have been an alcoholic for many years and, by God’s grace, be delivered from that evil. But what if he or she becomes a self righteous Pharisee in sobriety? Alcoholism is an evil, but self righteousness is a greater evil. You see, the death or destruction of any evil calls for two responses: first, rejoicing. And second, girding up our loins to face the next one. For it will surely come, and it may be worse!

The Gospel reading for today is an echo of this cautionary message. In just a day or two after Jesus is born, trouble appears. No sooner did Christ come into their lives than they had to run for their lives! This is not a pleasure trip. It is no vacation. They are refugees, and like all refugees, they set out for an unknown place without any visible means of support.

We must ask: is THIS the Queen of Heaven riding on a donkey=s back for hundreds of miles with a newborn baby? Is THIS the son of God, the baby prince of peace running for his life from a two-bit dictator. Or is this more nearly a picture of everyday human frailty and human vulnerability? Is this a picture taken in one of the war ravaged countries of Africa? Or in Kosovo? Or is it in Afghanistan? Or is it in Iraq? Several years ago there was a photo in all the newspapers. It was taken in Kosovo and was the picture of an ethnic Albanian grandmother bent over the body of her five year old grandson, who had died the day before from exposure to cold as the family hid in the hill country to escape President Milosevic’s murdering henchmen. It was a photo that caused the world to weep over the horrors being committed in Kosovo.

Too often in our world today, as in Jesus= time, children are seen as expendable. When it comes to pressing adult priorities, young people often get the shaft. Holy innocents suffer and die every day. Who knows how Herod slew the innocents in Bethlehem. Perhaps it was by spear, or maybe by sword. In the centuries since then, children have been gassed in the Nazi concentration camps in Germany, burned to death with napalm bombs in Vietnam, and starved to death in Africa. And children continue to be the most vulnerable victims in current wartime activities. Even here at home we read every day about children left at home alone, dying in fires, being drowned, abandoned, left in hot cars to suffocate, or shot because they were too close to adult domestic violence. How we treat our littlest ones is a sign of how we understand the meaning of life that Jesus brought to us on that Christmas night so long ago. How we treat our littlest ones is our call to judgment.