Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

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.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 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.”

When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “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.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 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. 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.”

Winter, a book by petroleum geologist and short story writer Rick Bass, tells the story of a time in the late 1980’s when Bass was the caretaker of a homestead along the Yaak River in Montana. Bass and his friend, artist Elizabeth Hughes, spent the winter there taking in the natural beauty of the Yaak and drawing on the seclusion it afforded them for their writing and painting.

Yaak, Montana, isn’t really a town. It’s a portion of a road that runs along the Yaak River as it works its way through a small Montana valley. Downtown, if you could call it that, consists of a general store that sits across from the local watering hole called “The Dirty Shame Saloon.” “The Dirty Shame” as locals call it, was a gathering place where folks ate, drank beer, watched football games, and bet on when the first snowfall of the season would occur. But more than this, The Dirty Shame, like the community of Yaak, itself, was a magnet for people running from their lives.

“We’re all on the run from something,” Bass says of the people of Yaak and the patrons of the The Dirty Shame Saloon, “And it makes us feel safe, this isolation.”

When I read this years ago—I immediately identified with Bass’s observation, not because I lived in a remote area at the time, but because I knew what it was like to run from something in my life. And so I believe that we don’t have to live in the Yaak or sit on a barstool at the Dirty Shame to be on the run. We can be almost any place and be on the run. We can, in fact, be right here in church this morning in Seattle and be running from something in our lives.

Many of us know, then, what it’s like to be running from our lives. Few of us know what it’s like to be running for our lives.

Running for our lives is what our gospel is about this morning--our vulnerable little holy family having to run for their lives. Scarcely has the umbilical cord been cut, scarcely have the angels’ songs dissolved into the air, scarcely have the kings departed, before it’s time for the Holy Family to run for their lives, to escape Herod who seeks to kill the infant savior.

And so from the very beginning the Holy One is at risk and needs to be spirited away, the savior, himself, needs to be saved, emphasizing that Emmanuel, God with us, does not just mean God beside us but God living under the conditions of our lives.

And more specifically, with this story, God becomes identified with those who are running for their lives. God becomes identified with those running from political or religious oppression; God becomes identified with those fleeing their homes on account of natural disaster; God becomes identified with those fleeing their homes for fear of violence within those homes.

And, I believe, there’s more, God becomes identified with other kinds of forced moves—not just in which people are fleeing a life-threatening situation, but those in which people are in a sense running toward something that can mean life for them or their families—forced moves on account of the need to find work, forced moves on account of the need to find care, forced moves on account of the hope of finding a better life.

And so, it seems to me, that displacement on account of danger or the hope of a better life inspires a special compassion on God’s part and a special desire to protect. Our gospel’s dream messages, angel instigators, and paternal protectors, all acting together to orchestrate the Holy Family’s safe displacement, say this to me.

Our gospel also says or rather suggests something to us about our compassion

It suggests that when we look at the faces of those fleeing their countries with nothing on their backs or in their hands, there, in the middle of them is Joseph, guiding the donkey that bears the exhausted Mary who holds the baby in her arms.

It suggests that when we look into the disoriented faces of some of our visitors here at St. Paul’s who have had to move West for new jobs or have shown up here as religious refugees, suspicious and terrified on account of the punishing religious life they grew up in, that the faces we are looking into are those of the disoriented parents of the Holy One.

It suggests that when we look into the confused eyes of our own elderly family members as they try to adjust to the next smaller room they will be living in, we are in fact looking into the beleaguered eyes of Joseph and Mary, wondering where they will bed down next.

This, then, is one important dimension of our story—God’s compassion and our compassion and care for refugees and displaced persons of all kinds.

But this isn’t all there is to the story.

For the story is not just about the flight of the Holy Family to safety in the face of a threat to the infant savior’s life. It’s also about return, about the infant being saved for a life that will spend itself under the same conditions of risk, reward and relationship of our own lives.

Another way of saying this is that while in a sense this is a story of our incarnate Lord running for his life, this is not a story of our incarnate Lord running from his life. He, like we, have been given life as a gift and as a gift to be given—a life to be protected, received, owned, understood, and given away not by running away from it, but, with God’s help, finding a way to step into it

For me, this is a special challenge as the New Year begins, a time that has, of course, never come before but to which we bring selves that are still at work on familiar issues that we would like to run from. Come out of the Egypt, you must come out of Egypt, our Gospel also whispers to us: “Walk back into your life. Your God will walk the path with you.”

And so whether we’re sitting on a barstool in The Dirty Shame Saloon in Yaak, Montana, or sitting in a pew in Seattle, Washington, or sitting surrounded by boxes in a new place, God is always inviting us to return—not necessarily to the city of our birth or even to the place we have left. God is always inviting us to return to the working out and through the life we’ve been given and the call to give it in some form to those around us right now, to create a life, our life, wherever we are and whatever has happened to us.

Esther de Waal speaks about this when she describes the Benedictine value of stability: Quoting Metropolitan Anthony Bloom: “What is it then to be stable?...You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek (God) elsewhere, that God is here and if you do not need to find God here it is useless to go and search for God elsewhere because it is not God absent from us, it is we who are absent from God…it is important to recognize that it is useless to seek God somewhere else. If you cannot find God here you will not find God anywhere else. This is important because it is only at the moment that you recognize this that you can truly find the fullness of the kingdom of God in all its richness within you; that God is present in every situation and every place, that you will be able to say: ‘So then I will stay where I am.’”

Works Cited or Consulted

Rick Bass: Winter

Esther de Waal: Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

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