The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
December 30, 2007
The 1^st Sunday after Christmas
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 63: 7-9¹

⁷ I will recount the gracious deeds of the LORD, the praiseworthy acts of the LORD,

because of all that the LORD has done for us, and the great favor to the house of Israel that he

has shown them according to his mercy, according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

⁸ For he said, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely;” and he became

their savior ⁹ in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them;

in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of

old.

Gospel – Matthew 2: 13-23²

¹³ Now after [the wise men] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

¹⁶ When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. ¹⁷ Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

¹⁸ “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

¹⁹ When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ²⁰ “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” ²¹ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. ²³ There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazorean.”

“Life Is Saved by the Singing of Angels.”

In almost any bookstore today there are all sorts of books about angels. It’s as if there were a great hunger – psychological as well as spiritual – for the kind of guidance that Joseph was given in Matthew’s story here of how he protected his family after Jesus’ birth. 21^st century skeptics, of course, easily dismiss the possibility of such angelic guidance, but the playwright, George Bernard Shaw, affirmed not only its reality but that it was the mark of a saint. In his play St. Joan, Shaw has one of Joan’s English guards challenge the voices that directed her to take up arms for France. He scoffs that her voices are nothing more than her imagination. Without hesitation, though, Joan answers, “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.” Virtue may involve being able, like Joseph and Joan, to accept such messages when they come to us – and they will come.

Besides receiving messages from angels, this is a time of year when we are deeply grateful for family. Some would even say that families exist for a divine purpose. The family isn’t just a social construct to be tossed back and forth between politicians arguing about whose values best represent those of the family. Today’s story ought to remind us of the unbelievable preciousness of families, because our culture does too little to value or protect the family.

This is also a day to remember those for whom the holidays are times of real anguish – a day to remember those for whom family life is wounding or oppressive. It’s a day for us to reconsider our vocation to protect and nurture the children in families – or as we say to the parents of their baptized children:

With God’s help we will surround [this child] with steadfast love… thankful that God has given us the privilege to join [with this] family in the creation of [this child’s] personality and spirit. We join with [them] in promising to make choices in our own lives that will express new life, new birth and forgiving love….³

Today is a day reminding us that Jesus was a refugee – every bit as vulnerable and dependent upon justice and the resources of the community as children are today. If there is an incarnation of God, then, it’s as all of us work together to build institutions as well as a culture that will protect the Child.

Sadly, innocents are slaughtered every single day – worse, even within families themselves. A society massacres its children when it doesn’t provide them with food, housing, education and healthcare. What’s the church’s role, witness or work in all of this? With the voice of a prophet, the poet, W. H. Auden, signals an answer:

To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

We live in the “time being,” the in-between time, the time between Advents. It’s a time of mission, a time to try to do more than simply be entertained, a time for peace with justice, a time to live and a time to make a reality out of the vision.

“Do not be afraid.” These words of angels – past and present – echo through the celebrations of Christmas. There are very few sentences in the English language, in literature, in poetry, in sacred writings or anywhere else that aren’t greeted with greater relief and joy in our time and culture than that one. Because we live in fear. Fear is our dominating force. Fear controls our economy. Fear controls our obsessive need for military solutions to much of the world’s problems. Fear all too often determines who gets elected to public office. We fear for our jobs, for our families, for our possessions, for our future. Fear determines so much of what we do, both personally and collectively, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that it is fear with whom we walk and talk and from whom we take our very being.⁴

We fear the person next door and we fear to be without a person next door. We fear the police and we fear to not have the police. We fear that we will be plunged deeper into war and we fear that we won’t have the strength to go to war. We fear to live and we fear to die. We fear for our environment and some fear their environment. We find fear in the classroom and in the workroom. We’re afraid of animals on the street and now even animals at the zoo. Fear stalks us at every turn. The truest and greatest freedom of our time, then, would be our freedom from fear – for as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”⁵

“Do not be afraid.” If only the angels would sing their comforting command to us today! If only we could hear it sung to us in our darkest hour and in our darkest days. There’s a reason why light and angels go together and why it holds such power for us at this time of year. I understand that there’s a mysterious gravesite at New Grange in Ireland that was built, maybe, even before the time of Abraham. Once a year, at the time of the winter solstice – the longest night of the year – a ray of sunlight appears through a slit in the stone and illuminates the deep, dark burial chamber. What an apt symbol for the light of Christ, born to live, love, die and be reborn in us so that we might be filled with the same illumination ourselves! It’s as the poet’s words from our bulletin give us a glimpse of its power:

God will enter into your night,
as the ray of the sun enters
into the dark, hard earth,
driving right down
to the roots of the tree,
and there…
filling the tree with life,
a sap of fire
will suddenly break out,
high above that darkness,
into living leaf and flame.⁶

It’s true, instead of listening to the voices of angels, all too often we find ourselves expending our physical, mental and spiritual energies in conflicts – conflicts that are all the more draining because none of them seem to have anything at all to do with the “kingdom of God,” but instead with issues of personal, political or economic power. What’s more, paradoxically enough, we find that we’re either powerless to participate in these issues or we simply can’t get away from them – let alone challenge or transform them. We do know enough, now (Don’t we?), of the vision that Jesus has set before us, but year after year we seem incapable of implementing the reality behind his vision.

It’s much like the story that was told of St. Francis wandering through the Umbrian forests with the wolves and the birds – who were his intimate friends. But he lost his way (so the story goes) and in his wandering he grew hungry. Emerging from a grove in the forest he came upon a little house and in the window of the house was a sign that read, “FRESH BREAD BAKED HERE DAILY!” So he knocked on the door of the cottage and was greeted by a kindly old woman. He asked her, “Would you give me some of your bread?” The woman smiled and answered, “Oh, we don’t make the bread here, we only make the signs.”

As we proclaim with passion and conviction in this coming new year that we are a Progressive Christian congregation – that we believe in those eight points of welcome printed on the back of our bulletin⁷ – will that vision of good news simply be a sign hanging out front or from the railing in our Fellowship Hall, or will we begin to embody the reality behind that vision? As someone has reminded us, it’s one thing to say it, but another thing to really mean it.

At Christmas we have been given nothing less than messages from angels. It’s a mood that we need to carry over into the new year. As a wonderful theologian that I met once said:

There must be always
remaining in every life,
some place for the singing of angels.
….
Old burdens become lighter
deep and ancient wounds
lose much of their old hurting.
….
life is saved by
the singing of angels.⁸

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