Sermon: The Cosmic Drama
Text: Matthew 2: 12-23
Date: December 26, 2004
By: Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook page 38
Of all the Sunday’s of the year, this Sunday, the one between Christmas and New Years, is the Sunday with which I have had the least pulpit experience. For many years, I took as a vacation week the time starting on Christmas Day and ending the Day after New Years. This Sunday was always a Sunday off. A well-established tradition in our household was to be on the road between our home in Massachusetts and my parents’ home in Maine on Christmas day. I always enjoyed this quiet Sunday at the end of the year as a Sunday off.
I appreciated having today off for several reasons. Throughout the Christmas season including today we are in the presence of the greatest story ever told. The question, “How do you elaborate on, how can you embellish, how do you add something to what is already the greatest story ever told?!
I have come to appreciate this struggle as a spiritual opportunity that is a privilege granted to preachers. Faced with the challenge of proclaiming the greatest story ever told, a preacher is forced to face his or her inadequacies, weaknesses, limitations, pride or perhaps better said – false pride. In the presence of the greatest story and the task of making interesting the greatest story ever told – now isn’t that a ridiculous absurdity - the preacher is required to go to a place where he or she doesn’t want to go – and where most people don’t really want to go. That place is to face the limitations of one’s humanity. And it is only as I face and accept those limitations that I come to realize how the greatest story indeed makes me whole and frees me from my weaknesses, inadequacies and limitations.
The Christmas story is the greatest story ever told because it is cosmic drama. It is the story of heaven and earth meeting. It is the story of God moving, and more importantly moving among us. It is the story of world’s crashing as the forces of evil represented by Herod try to intercept and demolish the work of heaven, angels and lovers of the good and true. The drama easily lends itself to dramatic presentation in the playfulness of pageant, the divine sounds of music and the captivating atmosphere of twinkling candle light services.
The drama, like all good drama, sweeps us off our feet and carries us away. Today begins a less dramatic time – a time for us to get back on our feet and back to earth. My 6 or 7 year old daughter used to run around under my feet and shout up to her father, whose ears were six feet above her, “Earth to Daddy, Earth to Daddy.” Her call not only referenced my height but also bespoke her experience of my head being in the clouds. Today is a time for us to get our heads out of the clouds and back to earth.
To get back to earth, the Christmas story must become our stories. The Christmas drama must not only carry us away but also requires our carrying the story within us. The story must become more than something that momentarily mesmerizes us. We are also called to take part in the drama. The sub story about Joseph gives us some clues as to how we get out of the audience and onto the stage.
In Mathew’s depiction of the cosmic drama, Joseph, being warned of Herod’s evil intent, took the baby Jesus down into Egypt that the prophecy be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” Let us use our imaginations for a moment and place our selves with or even in the place of Joseph. What a fearsome thing it must have been for Joseph to go into Egypt. Egypt was the land where his ancestors had been enslaved. Egypt was not a vacation destination for Israelites in Joseph’s time. For hundreds of years, Egypt had stood as a threat to the security and well being of Israel. Joseph could not have made that trek south without recalling the story of his namesake. Joseph of the multicolored coat fame was sold into slavery in Egypt. The first Joseph had endured years of hardship and grief in Egypt. How could Jesus’ father go into Egypt without recalling the stories of the first Joseph? Without a doubt, Egypt was not a place where Jesus’ father really wanted to go. For him it was a place to be avoided. Yet that trip into Egypt, that trip to a place where he did not want to go, was the passageway for him to participate in the divine drama and story.
Joseph is not the only character in this story who discovered that worshipping the Lord and following Jesus required going another way. Herod and the wise men seem like oversized, mythical beings when we read this story. So much so that they are almost unbelievable! The miraculous in the story of the wise men pushes the borders of believing. Herod is so evil that his meanness is almost beyond comprehension, too. Yet in these figures there are some very up to date and very important themes. The difference between the wise men and Herod is the difference between keeping confidence and keeping secrets. The wise men kept God’s confidence and went home another way, not returning to Herod to let him know where Jesus was. Herod was deep into the business of keeping secrets. He had a whole system of spies keeping their ears open for the most recent secret and his system of government was one large rumor mill. The difference between Herod and the wise men is the difference between evil and good, between keeping secrets and feeding on secretive rumors and keeping confidence. Secrets work to destroy another person and to raise havoc in the community where they are circulated. Wasn’t Herod out to destroy Jesus? Keeping confidence works to protect another person and to build up the good of the community in which the confidentiality works. Not everyone has a call to keep confidence every day. But hardly a day goes by without the opportunity to participate in the rumor mill and the generation of destructive secrets.
Here is a very practical place in life where today’s story leads us to go where we don’t want to go in order to participate in the new life of Christ. People often complain about all the secrets others dump on them. That can easily be stopped. One does not have to listen. All one has to do is go someplace where we seem incredibly hesitant to go. No one likes saying “NO” to others. But that is all that has been done to stop the destructive spread of secrets. Just tell the secret sharer, “I don’t want to hear.” Or “If you haven’t shared what you are talking about with the person you are talking about, what you have to say isn’t worth listening to – I don’t want to hear it.” End of secret! Beginning of community building and the establishing of trust-filled relationships!
For us to get out of the audience and onto the stage, we must often go where we don’t want to go and be where we don’t want to be.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus called others to follow him. To follow him required going somewhere where the one being called would rather not go. Sometimes Jesus was quite abrupt about this. In Luke 9:59ff, Jesus said, “Follow me,” to one man, who replied, “Great, Jesus, but hold the train for a bit, first I must go to my father’s funeral.” Jesus answered, “Let the dead bury the dead.” The man didn’t want to go where Jesus called and went back to the funeral instead. In the process, he did not get to participate in the divine drama and be on stage with the very person who could raise the dead and who conquered the grave and removed the sting of death. When we drag our feet, we miss out on big things.
Jesus told the parable about two brothers and a forgiving father. The older brother simply didn’t want to go where his father was going and be where his father was in spirit. The father called the elder brother to join him in the extension of hospitality and forgiveness. Like the older brother, many drag their feet when it comes to the offer of forgiveness and hospitality. Only by going where he didn’t want to go could the older brother participate in the new life, which is what the drama is all about. He condemned himself to the outer darkness, which is what is done when we refuse to go down the paths of forgiveness.
This week one of our families has returned to their home in El Salvador for the holiday. Heling shared with all of us how the mission trip last summer impacted her spiritually and personally. When she lived in El Salvador she had the security and the well being of an education and a government job as a nurse. All around her were the invisible poor. Last summer, on the mission trip she went with an intentional purpose to allow those, who formerly were invisible to her, to become visible. For the first time, she saw and entered the world of the invisible poor. That trip opened new places of the spirit for her and a new understanding of the need for those who have to help those who have not.
That experience has been repeated in many ways among us. Many of you have worked as volunteers in the local kitchens providing meals to the hungry and homeless. That experience takes us somewhere where we don’t want to be and at the same time brings us onto the stage of the cosmic drama that the Christmas story tells. Perhaps at the heart of that story is a God who would just stay at home in Heaven. Earth is no place for a God. What God in his right mind would want to go there? Yet God does go there in Jesus and becomes Immanuel, God with us. So at the heart of the cosmic drama is a journey – a journey from comfort to discomfort, from the known to the unknown, for the security of a heavenly throne to the vulnerability of a manger. Following Jesus means going into the unknown, and unwanted. Following Jesus means going down into Egypt with Joseph and in those places finding everything we really need to become participants in the Christmas’ cosmic drama.
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