OK. Good morning everyone.
Areas I get settled, put this down there, we don't need it.
Alright, well, another good morning.
We're very happy to have you here this morning.
For those of you who may not know me or I am a new face, my
name is Lindsey. I get to be a slightly more than
occasional teacher here. This is one of the ways that I
serve my husband. Is he still behind me?
There he is that guy. I'm married to him and I am.
I'm always so excited whenever I get the chance and the
opportunity to share as a church community or with you as a
church community. And this morning we are in our
4th week of Advent. So we already mentioned that
that is the candle of love. And we are really getting to
that place where we are preparing to move into Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day. And we've been in Matthews
Gospel for this Advent season. We've been using the writings
from the Gospel of Matthew as we prepare ourselves to move
towards the story and the celebration of Christ's birth.
And as we've gone through this series, we have been looking
about how the Christmas story, essentially how God's story
through Christ intersects with humanity and then with our own
stories. So in the first week, we talked
about this, this idea of God interrupting the story,
particularly the stories of of Joseph and Mary through the
announcement of Jesus. But God is really interrupting
the way things were in the world.
And we asked the question, how might God be interrupting our
stories? How are we opening ourselves up
to the interruption God might be bringing to our life so that we
can move closer to Christ? After that, we looked at this
invitation to trust, to trust in what God is doing, to trust in
the story that he is writing, even when the story he is
writing might go against the plans that we have for
ourselves, the plans that we want, the plans that of the
things that we think we want to see happen.
And we talked about how there is peace found in that place of, of
moving towards trust, of trusting the story.
And then last week by looking at the story of the Magi, we talked
about taking steps of obedience towards Christ, moving towards
Christ in obedience even when there is opposition and the joy
that is found in that place of moving closer to him.
And I want to be completely honest, I cannot promise that
today is going to feel like a completely natural progression
of where we have gone in previous weeks.
Our passage today is very different and very challenging
in some ways, even though it is the very next piece of the
Christmas story as it is shared in Matthew.
So I don't know that everything is going to feel like it is
neatly wrapped up. Excuse the Christmas pun, but my
hope today as we move through this passage is that we leave
this place with confidence that God, the God who loves us, the
God who is love is at work in the story that we're gonna tell
today in in our own stories. So if you have your Bibles with
you, we are in Matthew 2, verses 13 to 23.
You're welcome to look that up on a phone.
If you have a physical Bible, great.
There are Bibles are at the back.
If you prefer a physical Bible, please get up and grab one.
Will not bother me. I'd love to see that happen.
I promise it will be on the screens behind me as well.
So last week we left off with the story of the Magi, who are
often referred to as wise men. And these are outsiders who come
from another place. They come from a country with
different gods and different traditions, and they come from
afar to see Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, and they draw near
to honor him. And they know that King Herod,
they're warned in a dream that King Herod was king of Jerusalem
at the time, that he has not good intentions towards Jesus.
So they in a dream are warned not to go back to Herod, not to
say where Jesus is located, and instead go home another way.
And our story picks up literally right after that.
So Matthew 2 verses 13 to 23, when they had gone, when the
Magi had gone, an Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a
dream and said, get up, take the child and his mother and escape
to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for
Herod is going to search for the child and kill him.
So he, Joseph, got up, took the child and his mother during the
night, and left for Egypt, where they stayed until the death of
Herod. And so was fulfilled what the
Lord had said through the prophet out of Egypt I called my
son. When Herod realized that he had
been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders
to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who
were two years old and under, in accordance with the time that he
had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the
prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled. A voice is heard in Rama
weeping. And great morning, Rachel,
weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because
they are no more. After Herod died, an Angel of
the Lord 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 trying to
take the child's life are dead. So he, Joseph, got up, took the
child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.
But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in the
place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there.
Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of
Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.
So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that He
would be called a Nazarene. So like I said, this passage is
a little bit harder to sit with to see as part of the hope and
the joy and the peace of Christmas.
And I just want to state that at the beginning when I was praying
about this passage, when I was discerning where I should go,
when I was trying to find the ways that God was speaking me
through this so that I would know a direction of where to to
share with you. This morning I had to stop
several times and just sit with the writing.
I am a problem solver, solver by nature.
I immediately go to how do I analyze?
How do I make this easy? How do I make this clean and
simple? And how do I share this?
And I had to resist that urge inside of me to try to figure
out a way through this. I felt a sense that I had to sit
with the difficulty and the uncomfortableness of this
passage. And it is good when Scripture
does that to us. It's certainly good when it does
it to me. We start off with this passage,
seeing the Angel bring another message in a dream.
It's another moment of interruption.
And generally when an Angel brings a message in a dream or a
brain Angel brings a message, it means something is about to
shift in the story. And that's what we see here.
This is a story, a passage that is full of dualities.
On the one hand, you see the tangible action and the
protection of God. We see him intervene to ensure
that His plan and his purposes cannot be thwarted.
We see the obedience of Joseph, of Mary.
They're continuing to come into alignment with God's will, not
being afraid to just get up and go into a new country.
They take this immediate action to save their family and to
become an even greater part of the work that God is doing.
It's amazing in so many ways. And yet we also see this
opposition. We talked about Herod last week
as an oppositional force, but it's more than that this week,
right? Like, this is pure evil.
This is a king that is so paranoid and so desperate that
he would do such an unspeakable thing.
He would kill innocent children, all to protect position and
authority. That was always going to be
temporary because Herod is human and he is going to die.
And at this point in our story, he's actually fairly advanced in
years already. It's an evilness that's really,
really hard to read about and and to juxtapose to all the good
that we see. It's hard to think of this as
part of the Christmas story. Stanley Howard Ross In his
writing on this passage, he talks about how nothing
challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas more in
the Gospels than this interjection right here.
It is a stark reminder that Jesus is born into a world in
which children are killed and continue to be killed to protect
the power of tyrants. That is a heavy statement, and
yet maybe the awful truth of this piece of Scripture.
It's a profound reminder of just how deeply we need Jesus.
Maybe this painful and challenging passage in this
bigger story shows us how desperately the world needs and
continues to need Jesus, a different king and a different
Kingdom, and how immense the love of God is in sending Jesus
to a world that could look like this, a world that's so
desperately needs him. And that's really where I want
to start this morning. And I'm gonna be clear this,
this sermon has two main points. That's it.
And I'm not even gonna make you wait.
I'm gonna show you what they are right now.
So if you leave with nothing else, I hope that this resonates
deeply inside of you. The 1st is that God is present.
That is the first truth. The second is that God is at
work. Those are where I want to ground
ourselves this morning. God is present and God is at
work. One of the things that strikes
me about this passage is that God does not wait for the danger
to pass before sending his son into this world.
He doesn't move his birth to a different place.
He isn't afraid to use the signs and wonders like stars that the
magic I would follow. God places Jesus in the shadow
of Jerusalem. The literal shadow.
There's only about 5 miles between them.
He places Jesus in the shadow of Jerusalem, where a cruel king
sits on a throne whose power is preserved through violence.
The Christmas story does not avoid suffering.
It names it. It contains it.
It is not separate from the weeping in the morning that this
world goes through. Brokenness is part of the world,
and brokenness is part of our Christmas story.
This passage shows the full range of human experience.
Fear and hope and grief and obedience and violence and trust
in all of these things are woven into the birth of our Savior.
And it is precisely this time and this place when God chooses
to come near. This is the moment where God is
not just close to His people as a feeling or as unknowing.
He takes on human flesh. He steps down onto this earth.
God is not just watching over the earth.
God is on the earth. Throughout the scriptures there
are moments where heaven and earth, where the divine and the
earth intersect. Burning bushes, pillars of
clouds and fire, dreams, visions, prophetic words, places
where the divine and the human meat.
But Jesus is something more than another intersection, point,
event. He is the intersection.
He is the embodiment, literally, of the human and the divine
meeting. God does not remain apart from
the world. He becomes part of it through
Jesus. When we speak the name Emmanuel,
it's introduced to us in Matthew 1, God with us.
It is not a comforting slogan. It is not meant to be a
sentimental phrase. It is meant to be a radical
claim we are naming a reality that reshapes how we understand
God's presence. God chose to live as a human
within human vulnerability, to live within a place that is
dangerous, to live with suffering, to live with fear and
fragility, to live a life where there is some level of
uncertainty. RT France writes about God's
saving work, that it unfolds within history's beauty and
violence, that God does not remove himself from the
brokenness of the world in order to redeem it.
Christmas does not announce that everything is fine.
It announces that Jesus, the Christ God Incarnate, He has
come anyways, that he is here, that he has entered this world.
We do not worship a God that we cannot see or who rescues us
from a distance. We worship a God who draws close
enough to be affected, to be wounded, and ultimately to save.
And the power of the incarnation does not end when Jesus leaves
the the earth. The incarnation changes
everything about how we understand God's relates to the
world. God continues to meet with us in
the realities of our everyday lives, our fear, our
uncertainty, our joy, our suffering, our hope.
The incarnation tells us that God's presence meets us exactly
where we are at. That God is still moving towards
his people. He's not moving away.
God is not intimidated by our circumstances.
He is not unsettled by what is going on in the world.
The same God who took flesh. And Jesus is the God who is
still present with us now through his Spirit.
He's faithful, moving, compassionate and loving.
God is present then and now Emmanuel.
I love how that Advent devotional, if you're doing the
the Daryl Johnson one that we've been doing as a church, he talks
about how the word Emmanuel, which we often say is God with
us, is more literally translated as the with us God.
The God that is not only here in the soft picture perfect
Christmas card moments. He is here with us through every
moment God is present. God is also at work now.
God is always been an active God.
He is always creating and speaking and guiding and
intervening this. The scriptures are full of
stories that that do this or that show this.
And yet we see God's divine plan in new ways.
When we look at the Christmas story.
If we return to the text and pay attention to how the story
unfolds, we notice something really important.
Joseph is warned in a dream of what here it is going to do
before that threat is actually ever realized.
Hair doesn't even know where Jesus is at this point, and
Joseph is warned before Herod can even think to act.
God has already acted first. God provides a way to protect
Mary and Joseph in Jesus before the threat is ever realized.
God warns. He guides forward.
He shows the next step in the journey this little family has
to make. He protects not by removing the
danger, but by providing a way through it.
At the very place where human power seeks to destroy, God was
already working to save. The NIV translation we read
earlier, it says in verse verse 13 that Herod wants to kill
Jesus. But the word here is actually
better translated as the word destroy.
Yes, the word can mean kill, but it carries with it more weight
than that. It points to the total ruin, to
the complete loss of life and purpose.
Herod doesn't just want Jesus gone, he wants what Jesus
represents gone. He wants what Jesus represents A
raced from the world when the Magi, when the Magi come to see
a Messiah, A savior. Herod wants that very idea, the
idea of deliverance or saving to be not even a possibility of
what could happen. And his opposition leads is
violent and it's furious and it's loud and you can almost
feel the tantrum like force of hair.
It's paranoia spilling over into complete cruelty.
And yet in these moments, God is already at work, and God is at
work in really cool ways. I think sometimes we forget when
we read the Bible how often God is relying on us to do things,
to be part of this work. He puts his trust in Joseph.
For Joseph to be obedient. God could have waved his hand
and made the danger disappear. He doesn't.
The evil remains real. The threat remains real.
And yet God speaks and Joseph listens.
And once again, Mary and Joseph are called into this act of
obedience. They are asked to leave their
homeland, to become refugees in a foreign place, to live among
strangers. They are removed from the
familiarity of extended family and from stability.
And they are called to a life. I mean his.
Their life right now very much is a life on the move, and they
just go again. We see the same pattern running
through the Christmas story that we've seen in other weeks.
The leap of faith, the willingness to trust the
opening, to put their lives in God's hands and to be part of
this strange and costly work that is unfolding around them.
And yet God's blessing goes with them as they do this.
I think so often I will only speak for me, but I'm gonna say
it's probably pretty true of everyone.
We so often imagine that God's protection looks like safety and
comfort and certainty and ease. The Christmas story tells us
otherwise. Jesus is saved through flight,
through displacement, through obscurity.
The very things the world often despises, God uses for his
purposes. And there's even this kind of
quiet reversal happening in this story.
We talked last week about how the Magi, these outsiders, they
moved towards Jesus. And now we see Jesus is moving
outward. He's moving more into the
margins. He is moving into exile.
From the very beginning, God's saving work is not confined to
what is easy or what is familiar or what is comfortable or what
is even expected. And I want us to ask ourselves
this question this morning. Where are we being invited to
partner with the work that God is already doing?
Where are we invited into being or into having lives that are on
the move? Lives don't that don't cling too
closely to certainty and familiarity, but lives that are
willing to go into new places and new spaces.
I'm talking about brand new countries though.
Maybe for some that is your calling, but where?
Is there a new place or a space that you could move into to be
part of the work that God is doing?
Where is God calling us into obedience that feels
inconvenient and unsettling, and yet might be the exact place
that we need to be. The Christmas story reminds us
that God is still at work, often quietly, often unexpectedly,
often happening in ways that we will not see and do not
understand. And it is inviting ordinary
people to to take a step forward into obedience, to be part of
something bigger than we could have ever imagined.
God is present and God is at work.
There's one more way in this passage.
I wanna show how these two ideas come together.
And I really think that Matthew wants us to see it, which is why
I couldn't let it remain unsaid. From the very beginning of his
gospel, starting in verses or starting, starting in chapters
both 1 and 2, Matthew is trying to tell us that Jesus is not
just another figure in Israel's story.
He has the he is the one that God's people have been waiting
for. And you see this in the use of
scriptures. Now this might be a podcast
topic or for a later date, but I will admit.
Matthew loses uses his scriptures a little fast and
loose. He does that.
But he is doing this to tell a bigger story.
He is showing that God has always been at work in history
and that he has brought his people to this very moment where
Jesus has intersected with this world.
More specifically, in the passage that we're reading,
Matthew is shaping this story so that his audience, both ancient
and present, will see that Jesus acts as a new and a greater
Moses, one who is chosen to save his people and deliver them.
The parallels are intentional. Pharaoh orders the death of the
Hebrew children and Moses is spared.
Herod orders the death of the children in Bethlehem, and Jesus
is spared. Israel goes to Egypt for refuge
and then comes out of Egypt for deliverance.
Jesus goes into Egypt and is going to come out of Egypt.
Matthew is narrating a new exodus.
He is showing us that God has been bringing His people to this
moment, a new and ultimate deliverance.
Just as God once delivered his people through a from oppression
through Moses, God is now bringing a deeper and greater
deliverance through the person of Jesus Christ.
And this is not simply the rescue from one tyrant or one
empire that that God's Kingdom is being made real in this world
through Jesus Christ. He is the deliverer, the
ultimate Messiah. He is the one who will save.
God's salvific work takes flesh. God.
God's promises to his people are fulfilled in the birth of a
child, God's Son, God Incarnate. What was once hoped for and
anticipated and longed for is now embodied in Jesus.
God is not inventing a new story out of thin air.
He is bringing this story to fulfillment right here, right
now, in the midst of the world as it is.
At the end of this passage, we are told that Herod dies.
Very simply, history will say that Herod died a very painful
death of a mystery illness. They don't really know what it
was at the time. And Joseph and Mary are told
once again by an Angel to move, to return home.
And we could linger here once again on, oh, there's an Angel
and there's an interruption. And Mary and Joseph are obedient
and they go home. And it's, it's lovely.
But I think that we've nailed this point home in the last few
weeks. So I want us to draw our
attention to another thing, and I want us to notice the
complete, nonchalant way that Herod's story simply just ends
here. Herod.
Despite all his paranoia and his wealth and his cruelty and his
security, he doesn't last. He does not endure.
He, like every mortal and finite thing, he dies.
And for all the awful things that Herod was, Herod, through
history, is remembered as a great builder, an innovator of
his time. He built cities, he engineered
mountains where none existed. He used waterways and systems
and pipes to move water between places that it had never
reached. He surrounded himself with
education and beauty and power and excess, and yet his Kingdom
did not last. And many people don't know
Herod's legacy outside of his just complete and utter cruelty.
This is a quiet reminder at the end of our story that the
kingdoms of this world, no matter how impressive, no matter
how powerful, no matter how they try to cling to power, they will
not endure. Matthew's gospel from the very
beginning places 2 kingdoms and he puts them side by side.
One is the Kingdom of a very rich and powerful man, one of
empire, one that is clothed in splendor and security, and the
other one. The other Kingdom is ruled by
the king of Kings, who was born poor to a family that no one
would make room for in a tiny town.
He was born in a place that's meant for animals.
His arrival is attended and announced by shepherds, and the
opposition to His Kingdom and His kingship start right from
the beginning. As we saw today, He comes into
the world's in danger, and when that immediate danger is passed,
He is raised in a small rural community, Nazareth.
We see this at the end of our text.
It is a tale of two kingdoms. One Kingdom is built on power
and control and fear, and it is the Kingdom of this world, and
the other is the Kingdom of God. It is marked by Shalom, by
wholeness, by peace and hope and love, and it is built on and
realized in the person of Jesus Christ.
We have spent this whole year looking at the Gospel of
Matthew. Sorry for those who thought you
were gonna get a Luke reference. Sorry, Not Matthew.
We've look at Luke. I said the wrong word, book.
We've been looking at Luke. Sorry for anyone who thought we
were gonna break from Luke. You're not.
Here it is. We have spent our whole church
year looking at the Gospel of Luke, and we have been looking
at what the Kingdom of God looks like.
It does not avoid the messiness. It moves into it.
It meets people where they're at.
It rejects the values of this world and shows us a new way to
live. It is a Kingdom that invades and
persists. It welcomes and it loves, but
more than anything it endures, and not because it is protected
by force, but because it is rooted in God's love and is
enduring faithfulness. Heritage Kingdom ends with
death, but the Kingdom of God does not.
In fact, death cannot stop it. Death could not hold Christ.
His death does not end this Kingdom, it unleashes it.
The Kingdom of God endures, it does not rise and fall with the
tides of this world. Two kingdoms.
The story of two kingdoms, but only one, is marked by the
presence and the work of God. The words that we use during
Advent Love, joy, hope, peace. They aren't abstract concepts or
seasonal decorations. They are embodied in the person
of Jesus Christ who entered a messy, messy world and continues
to enter the messy world and our messy stories.
He continues to work and be present in those circumstances.
So wherever you are coming from today, whether this year held
the highest of highs for you or the lowest of lows or something
in between, whether or not you are joyful and full of peace and
gratitude, or whether you're just not and this season looks a
little bit different for you, I pray that you hold on to this
truth. God is present and God is at
work. We rejoice in the love and the
peace and the hope of God, not because all is well.
We rejoice because we know that God is here and we know that He
is doing something even when we cannot see the outcome.
God's love born in Jesus Christ is still alive and well, and it
goes with us and calls us into live call, sorry, calls us into
living as God's people. And my prayer for you, for me,
for my family, for your family, for the greater world out there,
is that this presence and this love will be our confidence and
our comfort and our hope this season.
Will you bow your heads in prayer with me?
God, we thank you that you are not, you are not a distant God,
that you are a God that is working and active and has come
close. And let us see you through the
person of Jesus. God, we live in a world that
often feels very heavy and very uncertain.
And will you remind us this morning, deep in our souls, that
you are here with us, that you are working and moving even when
it doesn't make sense, even when we can't see it or understand
God? Would you meet us in the middle
of our very real lives, in the middle of our our questions and
our worries and our joys and our grief?
Would you help us give us the courage to trust that you are at
work? And as we leave this place and
we go into this week, as we celebrate Christmas, in just a
few short days, God, would you shape us into people who reflect
your love, who can live lives of peace and hope and joy in the
places that you put us and where we need to step into new places?
God, that you would give us the calling and the courage to do
that. We pray all these things in your
Son's name, Amen.