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Sermon Archive - December 27, 1998
Pastor Gazzolo
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Matthew 2: 13-23
Once upon a time a baby was born to be an agent of God's deliverance for his people. The
powerful king of the land was threatened by the birth of this child.....the powerful king
believed the child would one day challenge his power, and so the king ordered the death of
the boy babies to be sure he got the right one. But the baby was spared from the carnage
to grow up and to deliver his people Israel from bondage in Egypt. His name was, of
course, Moses, and once upon a time was about 3200 years ago.
When Herod the Great learned that Wise Men from the East had come inquiring about the
infant king of the Jews, Herod, like Pharaoh before him, was troubled. After all Herod the
Great was king of the Jews, and Herod the Great was hardly a man to brook rivals,
especially a baby whose birth brought wise men looking for him from the East. So Herod
had a plan for the baby and asked the wise men to come back his way and tell him where
the baby was to be found so he could, as he told the wise men, worship him.
But the magi were not called wise men for nothing, and they didn't return home by way of
Herod's house as Herod had requested. The king was furious and took things into his
own hands as kings will do. He ordered the slaughter of the boy babies two and under
who lived in and around Bethlehem.
It seems there is no historic record of this particular action of Herod's...his brutality was
commonplace enough, and what were a few boy babies who once lived in and around Bethlehem?
Yet this occasion of Herod's brutality has found its place in Christian tradition, for one of
those boy babies could well have been Jesus, the one who would become our Lord and
Master. And Christian tradition further records that God intervened in Herod's plan as
God once intervened to save baby Moses. God sent a dream to Joseph warning him to
take his young wife and new born son and escape to Egypt.
Now Joseph knew that God could speak to him in his dreams. Scriptures record Joseph's
dream assuring him that he could still wed Mary even though she was pregnant, that it was
all part of God's plan, and wed her he did.
The couple was resting in Bethlehem following Jesus birth. It would be a long hard
journey back to Nazareth and mother and child needed to get stronger. And that's when
the angel of the Lord once more appeared to Joseph in a dream, this time with an urgent
message: "Leave the country and don't return until further notice."
So whether mother and child were ready to travel or not, the holy family set out from
Bethlehem for Egypt where they spent the first two unrecorded years of Jesus life. Now
the next time you visit an art museum, watch for a painting of the slaughter of the
innocents...some of them huge and filling a wall. They show in gross detail the carnage
that followed Joseph and Mary's departure for Egypt...paintings of soldiers wielding huge
swords and children crying and mothers helpless. Yes, what followed their departure was
indeed the slaughter of the innocents.....a slaughter perpetrated by a power hungry king.
And the mothers of Bethlehem wept for their infant sons.
This story contains one of the stickiest questions there is about the nature of God....a
question that has found no satisfactory answer though many have been given.
Certainly God saved his servant Moses from the Pharaoh so Moses could live to lead his
people Israel from bondage in Egypt. Certainly God spared Jesus from Herod's wrath so
Jesus might lead us from bondage to sin.
But what about all the other little boy babies? Did God have no plan for their lives?
What do we do with the question of innocent suffering and death, because it keeps coming
up in human history? The Holocaust museum Yad Vashim in Jerusalem has a stunning
memorial to the children. You enter a space that is altogether dark except for tiny
star-like lights in the very high ceiling...a star for each child killed...and as you hold on to
the rail and make your sightless way through the darkened chamber, a voice names one
child's name after another...Joshua...Emil...Eli....Anna...names of children lost in the camps.
The boy babies of Egypt.
The boy babies of Bethlehem.
The children of Auschwitz...And we must, if we are to be honest, ask what about them?
Those little ones for whom God's plan may have been less specific....And I have no
satisfactory answer...have found none. We must choose to believe in God in the face of
unanswerable questions...or live our lives in the vacuum that is unbelief. I have a
longing for God in my being, and I have no choice but to live with questions unanswered.
Yes, God had special plans for Moses.
God had special plans for Jesus.
God had special plans for Victor Frankel and Eli Weisel...little boys who were delivered
from the camps and lived to write about it.
Young or old, innocent or knowing we live on a battlefield where sin and grace fight to
prevail. Each day we live, it is by the grace of God. Sometimes we think that life should
be fair. That's the child in us. We have a design in our heads of how life really should
be...a father and mother, a dog and an SUV in the garage, a warm home and a peaceful
community. Our culture and the prosperity and peace in which we happen to have been
born and reared has produced a notion of an ideal life to which we are entitled.
Movies and advertisements nurture this fantasy and when life is not fair or good to us we
may feel some indignation. This is the thinking of a sheltered child perpetuated by the
favorable circumstances and fortunes of being born in the United States in the late 20th
century. It is a delusion. Our peace, our prosperity are not entitlements. They are gifts
from God. And they are challenges as well, challenging us to maintain a spiritual balance
amidst plenty.
It is when we realize that we are not entitled to a perfect life that we begin to mature
emotionally and spiritually. That we begin to depend most truly on the grace and wisdom
of God.
We would never grow up in the Garden of Eden...that place may grow apple trees fifteen
feet high, but not emotionally and spiritually mature human beings. Or as Robert Johnson,
Jungian thinker, says: "Life is not meant to work. It is meant to develop consciousness."
And it is in our adversity that our consciousness deepens.
Human life is transient. Human life is unpredictable. We do not live very long before we
experience personal sorrow and loss or see it in the life of those we know and love.
Job's trials were mythical in proportion, and when someone wants to describe big trouble
they usually refer to Job. Now Job's friends were struggling to explain why so much
misery had befallen Job, and probably trying to assure themselves it wouldn't happen
to them as well. They explained Job's troubles by saying Job must have done something
that ticked God off. God was punishing him. But what would Job's friends have said
about Jesus?
Being good enough is not some magical solution to escaping pain in our lives. It can even
invite persecution. Nor does being innocent promise any safeguard as the boy babies of
Egypt and Bethlehem attest.
Human adversity, like good fortune, falls on the just and the unjust. It is part of being
human, part of still being alive. For we live in a world which is often a battlefield between
good and evil forces, and even our hearts are a battlefield between good and evil. We
can't escape the power of evil in our lives.
As Christians we have Jesus resurrection to help us hope that beyond any human evil the
love of God prevails. And as human beings we have lived with experiences of pain and
loss, but find that in time there is healing, and even new life beyond the once so awful
pain.
There is no way of understanding as a human how goodness and innocence fall victim to
evil. It violates our sense of fair play. But there is something in the changing seasons
where fall yields to winter, and winter to spring that shows me how insistently life renews
itself, even over death. The experience of healing from grief has shown me a glimpse of
the insistent power of life to renew itself, proclaim itself. These renewals of life and hope
proclaim the presence of something grander than any individual life span...a glimpse of a
benevolent, loving, healing order that underlies us all in our pain as in our blessing. And
here, parenthetically, I commend to you the Cannes award winning "Life is Beautiful".
After all Job's questions of God...why...why...why me...Job had an overwhelming
experience of the presence of God...an epiphany that stole his little questions from his
heart and filled him with awe.
It is the belief in the power and providence of God...a God that is larger than life..a God
that holds us in his hand, living or dead, that ultimately sustains me and quiets my noisy
questions.
St. Paul's letter to the Romans comes to mind where Paul writes: "Neither life nor death,
nor things present or things to come can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus."
All of us have been put here with work to do...work big and work small, and when that
work is done, we are called home...some sooner, some later. Living or dead, we belong to
God ...to the one that gave us life in the first place.
This is most certainly true.
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