Faith and Fear - Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Having Christmas Day and New Year’s Day fall on a Saturday can be a strange and disorienting phenomenon. For those who have holiday breaks, or whose children have holiday breaks, you know the struggle of having five or six or seven days at home staring at gifts under the tree and waiting very impatiently to open them. And you know the struggle of having to return to your regular routine before anyone has recovered from staying up late on New Year’s Eve. Luckily, we have a couple days left before school starts back, but it’s still a quick turn around, and the emotional whiplash is real. 

I get the same kind of emotional whiplash from today’s readings. We’re not out of the official Christmas season in our liturgical year, but our lectionary has definitely moved on from the celebration. It’s certainly strange and disorienting, although I imagine our experience is nothing compared to that of Mary and Joseph. They just had a baby, which can be a magical experience for new parents. Plus, their child also happened to be the Light of the World, so the joy was compounded. But it feels like they barely got to savor this joy before word got to them that King Herod the Great was looking for them, with an eye for doing away with their child.

After being warned of the danger in a dream, Joseph took his family to Egypt. I was surprised to learn this week that the Flight to Egypt, which is only in Matthew’s Gospel, has inspired dozens and dozens of quite incredible works of art over the centuries. I wondered what it is about this brief interlude in the narrative that has inspired such passion and creativity. Perhaps it’s the abrupt switch from celebration to life-threatening danger that is so heart wrenching.  In many depictions, Mary is riding a donkey, just as she did on her journey to Bethlehem, as though the birth of the Savior of all mankind made little difference to her circumstances.

Or perhaps what strikes artists is the way the Flight to Egypt harkens back to the Exodus story, though in reverse. It draws together our history of faith, highlighting the ever-present and ever-risky journey with God to a foreign land. The thought of yet another uphill journey for Mary, and for us, can be draining. What the Flight to Egypt reminds us all, in no uncertain terms, is that the reality of the Incarnation is inescapable, both in its holy uplifting of creation and in its messy, human rawness. 

Yes, our Savior has been born, but the road to salvation is long and sometimes frightening. After almost two years of living with Covid-19 all around us, I feel similarly about this new year. Yes, 2021 is finally over, but we’re not out of this pandemic yet. Some days, I’m frankly at a loss. How can we respond to this deep truth of the Incarnation: that new life and human brokenness continue to coexist? I think we take a lesson from what happened to the Holy Family after the birth of Christ.

Jesus was born into a brutal social and political climate, in which only those with the utmost wealth and power were ever safe. His birth signaled the coming overturn of the status quo, something acknowledged even by those who did not understand his relationship to God. But such upheaval, even when for the best, can be terrifying. In today’s Gospel passage, we see two different responses to Jesus’ birth and to everything it represents: we see Herod’s fear, and we see Mary and Joseph’s faith.

In the few verses that the lectionary omits from Matthew’s story, Herod responds to the news of Jesus’ birth by ordering the deaths of all children in Bethlehem under 2 years of age. This is one of the most extraordinary tragedies in all of scripture. At first, we might have trouble relating to Herod’s behavior, because political leaders do not order the deaths of children in our culture, and if they did, we wouldn’t stand by and let it happen. But I will say this. In 2021, over 22% of children in Arkansas aged 17 and under lived in below the poverty line, and I absolutely stood by and let that happen. The truth is that often, we share Herod’s fear that an upheaval of the status quo will require too much of us, or leave us worse off than we are now. So we hold tight to what we have, even at the expense of those suffering truly horrible circumstances.

But Mary and Joseph, paradigms of bravery and faith that they are, chose a different road. They uprooted their lives yet again and followed where God led them, knowingly becoming refugees in the process. They seemed to understand a fundamental aspect of life with God: there is often sacred space between a promise and it’s fulfillment. It’s a space which might be harrowing, or might ask much of us, a space in which we become fully dependent on God, a space which requires deep faith. Once again, Mary and Joseph risked everything they had to journey into that sacred space with God, that space between incarnation and salvation, remaining faithful all the way, refusing to live in fear that God would not provide for them.

In cosmic terms, we live our entire lives in the space between incarnation and ultimate salvation, and must choose whether faith or fear will be our guiding principle. But more concretely, we often find ourselves in smaller versions of that space, like at the edge of two full years of a pandemic, at the beginning of a new year, or in the last few moments before we return to normal life after the holidays. These are spaces where we find our celebrations cut short and tough decisions lying around the corner.

And when we find ourselves face to face with that long road to salvation, that sacred gap between the promise of the Kingdom and its fulfillment, we have a choice. We can prioritize our current place in the status quo, at the sometimes violent expense of the least of these. Or, like Mary, we can climb back on our donkeys. We can choose to continue on the road God has laid out for us. Inevitably, we will choose fear from time to time. We will forget how much God loves us, be close-fisted with our resources, and hesitate to give up power, even over little things. And so these moments of emotional whiplash can be a gift, a chance to make a different choice. 

I’m usually not much for New Year’s resolutions, but after spending time meditating on Mary’s faith in this Gospel story, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to find and let go of something I’ve held on to out of fear. I’m going to start small, and loosen my tight grip on the copy machine in our office. It may sound trite, but I’m promising my coworkers to be less territorial and more easygoing about printing. As inconsequential as it may seem, I’m committed to taking this step towards being less like Herod and more like Mary and Joseph. As you enter this new year, where might you begin to do the same? How might you practice responding to tough choices out of faith and not fear? I look forward to a new year with all of you, because I know that when we’re on the road of faith together, God will always see us through. Amen.