Today's Sermon - Compassionate Joy - 12/29/19

Compassionate Joy

(based on Isaiah 63:7-9, Matthew 2:13-23)

It would be easy for me to concentrate this morning on the lectionary passage from Matthew which skips over a significant portion of the Christmas story and name all the “herods” of our own time and culture.  But we still need to remember that we’ve learned much about joy this season. We learned about Hopeful Joy as we began Advent, Loving Joy as we embraced the call of God, Unabashed Joy as we make no excuses for the joy we have in our lives, Peaceful Joy as it comes to us in difficult times, and Incarnate Joy as it manifests itself in our lives through the power of the gift of Jesus Christ.  Joy abides, it runs deep and wide, despite the “herods” that seek to destroy it.

In today’s Gospel reading we are still reminded, though, that threats abound even in the midst of joy.  However, we must be reminded that God will still carefully break into those moments and orchestrate our safety.  God's steady protection and Joseph's faithful obedience combine to ensure the baby’s safety in a world of danger.  Even as potential disaster threatens Jesus, ancient prophecies come to life and guarantee his future mission.

Herod's reputation for brutality was well known in antiquity.  Neither his spouses nor his children could escape the effects of his paranoia.  Herod had most of them killed believing that they were out to usurp his power.  For some reason the lectionary skips over the news of the wisemen this week in order to hold it until we celebrate Epiphany next Sunday.  So, we have a bit of a chronological disruption this morning. 

The message the wisemen brought to Herod about Jesus, the newborn king of the Jews, played into his paranoia.  So, an angel tells Joseph to flee his home and head into exile. For Matthew, this escape is not simply an expedient move or an accident of history.  Instead, scripture foresaw this geographical detour on the way to Jesus' true hometown.  For whatever reason, God chose this path in the distant past.  Citing Hosea 11:1, Matthew appeals to a prophecy originally focused on the people of Israel but it now refers to Jesus alone.  Matthew's claim then is that Jesus, in some significant sense, embodies the people of Israel.  He is the recipient, the bearer, and the fulfillment of the promises made to Israel by God.  Which was important for those who read Matthew’s account of the Good News because Matthew was writing for and to a Jewish audience.  In later years when the time is right, Joseph, Mary and Jesus “coming out of Egypt” also evokes the story of Moses and the liberation of Israel from the tyranny of slavery.

Herod’s instinct to preserve his power at all costs kicks in when he realizes that the magi have left the country by another way without coming to inform him about the new baby’s whereabouts.  And so he orders the extermination of all children born "in and around Bethlehem."  Herod will not take the chance that this child has slipped out of the city.  According to Matthew, Jeremiah 31:15 had already prophesied this event where the cries of anguish would arise in Israel over such grievous oppression.

The parallels to the execution of Jewish male infants at the hands of Pharaoh are striking.  Herod is a new Pharaoh.  Feeling his political power slipping away, he lashes out with great malice but also in vain.  Both Pharaoh and Herod order devastating losses of life yet ultimately fail to prevent the birth of a powerful leader of Israel.  Both Moses and Jesus are born under the threat of death; yet both are guided by God's protective hand. 

After an angel announces the death of Herod to Joseph, the coast is clear for the family to return home to Bethlehem of Judea.  However, after learning that Herod's son Archelaus now ruled Judea, the family makes a new home in Nazareth in Galilee.  And for the third time, another ancient prophetic promise is fulfilled: "He will be called a Nazarite or a Nazarene."

Although angels sang, shepherds gathered and wisemen traveled to see this joyful wonder, Jesus' welcome to the world is not a unanimous acclamation but rather fear from those in power that this child would subvert the order of the world, that a mere child would weaken the powerful.  The arbitrariness of Herod’s cruelty would have been entirely familiar to ancient people living under Roman rule.  Most of us in modern day America have a difficult time relating to this kind of behavior; most of us tend to trust that authorities are required to act in order to protect all human life.  No such trust existed in ancient Rome and its all-encompassing and unending power.

Therefore, Matthew's trust in the prophetic promises is the foundation of his faith.  Matthew's trust in God's providence emerges from a faith that expects God to reign in a world where the dominance of the powerful seems unchangeable.

Switching back to our Old Testament reading, oddly enough, it is this reading from Isaiah that invites us to consider the kindness, compassion and empathy of God.  This reminder from Isaiah is set against the story of Mary, Joseph and the baby fleeing to Egypt as Herod orders the slaughter of innocent children. 

The world is full of people and systems, driven by fear and vengeance, who will do all they can to extinguish joy, light, and love.  The world can be heartbreakingly cruel; the world desperately needs these elements of kindness, compassion, and empathy.

Rather than focusing solely on what cruelty Herod wrought on the world upon Jesus’ birth, we can instead focus on God’s and Humanity’s Compassionate Joy.  It might be helpful to define what compassion is.  Professor and psychologist Kristin Neff writes, “Compassion, then, involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering.  It also involves feelings of kindness for people who are suffering, so that the desire to help—to (help alleviate) suffering—emerges.  Finally, compassion involves recognizing our shared human condition, flawed and fragile as it is.”

This understanding of compassion is so consistent with an understanding of who God is and what God calls us to be.  God recognizes and sees our suffering.  As Isaiah writes, “In all their distress God too was distressed.”  And over and over again we see God’s desire to help us, to save us from our trials.  In Jesus Christ God comes to us, enters into our shared human condition.  We are called to do the same for others.  We respond to the cruelty in our world with kindness, compassion, and empathy.  We respond to the cruelty of our world with joy; that’s what this Advent and Christmas Season’s theme was all about.

Against the evils of the world we shout, we cry out, we overcome.  We join our voices with God’s voice, with the angels’ voices, and with the saint’s voices who have gone before us to usher in the kingdom of God.  It would be easy this week to only focus on the cruelty in the world given what Herod had done.

In the midst of the joys of the Christmas season, these passages are a ripe reminder that things might have taken a different course, that tragedy and disappointment are too often the orders of the day.  As the poet Jane Kenyon once wrote, "It might have been otherwise."  But God breaks through in Joy, even in the midst of tragedy, heartbreak, sorrow, and difficulty.