"JESUS WAS A PALESTINIAN REFUGEE"

 “JESUS WAS A PALESTINIAN REFUGEE”

We have begun the Advent season, with all its promise and peril and demanding qualities and danger of being sentimentalized.  When we were preaching, Caroline and I rarely ever used the lectionary passages for the Advent season, because they were so disconnected with the season itself.  We preferred to concentrate on the Biblical stories about Advent and Christmas, and there are two main ones in Matthew and Luke, though John has a spiritualized  one also.  Not using the Biblical Christmas stories in Advent allows the culture to take them over, which we obviously have allowed.

The first Christmas story in the Bible comes in Matthew’s gospel, in which the author begins with a genealogy of Jesus – dull reading until you notice that Matthew infuses the usual “male begetting” genealogy with 5 women – and what five women they are!  If you haven’t encountered their stories, take time to do so in this Advent season:  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (also known as Bathsheba), and Mary.  All of them “tainted” in one way or another, but Matthew wants them in the genealogy of Jesus – why?  

Then, Matthew moves to Joseph and his struggles over his fiancé Mary telling him that she was pregnant by someone other than him.  She indicates that God did it, using an excuse for the ages.  Joseph is a decent man, so instead of dragging Mary out in front of the elders to have her admonished (or stoned to death), he decides to  send her back quietly to her family to have the baby in shame.  Yet, his name is powerful – Joseph the dreamer from Genesis – and this Joseph too begins to hear God speak to him through dreams.  He is told to take Mary as his wife and to adopt the baby as his own, which he does.

Matthew’s account continues with the story of the magi coming to visit the baby.  On the way, they stop in to see King Herod, who is mightily disturbed to hear of a rival king being born.  After their visit, the magi return to their home by another way – a whole sermon in itself.  Herod is threatened and is furious and sends soldiers to Bethlehem to kill the baby.  In the meantime, Joseph has another dream message from God, telling him to take his family to Egypt, for Herod is coming to kill them.  The baby Jesus becomes a Palestinian refugee, and the family is blessed that Egypt is willing to accept them as refugees – no razor wire, no wall, no armed guards to keep them out.  

    The family is blessed because Herod’s soldiers do arrive in Bethlehem and slaughter all the baby boys in an attempt to stop this new baby from rising to power.  And, though the story of the slaughter is horrific, I do appreciate Matthew’s keeping it in the narrative, because it is a mitigating but realistic factor which should keep us from sentimentalizing the Christmas story.  It helps to prevent us from concentrating on “sweet, little Jesus boy.”  The baby Jesus comes into the real world, our world.  He is on the run from his earliest days.

The bombs dropping on the Palestinians in these days remind us also of the cost of this story and its horrific consequences.  Jesus was a Palestinian refugee also, and he too weeps for this ongoing struggle of terror and murder.  Yet, into these horrible events comes a possibility of hope and even visions and dreamers.  Let us be among those dreamers in these days and listen for God’s voice speaking to us, even as we welcome Jesus the Palestinian refugee.