Matthew 2: 1 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” 7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.13 Now after they 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.”14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 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.”
16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
18 “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
Next to my desk, on the bulletin board, is a copy of an ancient Christian prayer which has often been put to music and sung in worship and concerts, most often in Latin: “Ecce Ancillae Domini; fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.” This prayer was first uttered in the First Century AD, in the language of Aramaic, by a young Galilean Jewish woman, who was talking with an angel at the time. Her name was Mary. In English, she was saying: “Behold the servant of the Lord; may it be to me according to your word.” With that prayer, Mary welcomed a Stranger into the world, even into her womb.
Which brings us to the first point in the message outline: “How Mary and Joseph welcomed…..The Stranger.” That stranger, of course, was Jesus. And here’s why I call Jesus the stranger: In the law of Moses, God commanded the Israelites to never oppress the foreigner or the sojourner among them, but to welcome them, host them, graciously, “for such were you in Egypt,” the law said. God may also take the treatment of the Stranger and the sojourner personally, for such is even God in this fallen world: a stranger. God’s first appearance on earth, in the Bible, was to come walk the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day, only one day to find his friends, Adam and Eve, hiding from him among the trees, in shame. And so it still is, that, “light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil,” says John the Evangelist.
Abraham and Sarah welcomed three strangers into their tent one day, only to find that in them they were hosting Almighty God. As the Word Incarnate, the human face of God, Jesus “came to his own,” said John the Evangelist, “and his own received him not.” Even after several years on the road together, Jesus had to ask Thomas, “Have you been so long with me and still you don’t know that whoever has seen me has seen the Father?”
Even those who would welcome Jesus and do good don’t always recognize the Stranger when he appears. “‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’” people ask at the last judgment, in the parable of the sheep and the goats. And Jesus “will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
Like all parents, Mary would learn the hard way, again and again, that her son was not just an extension of herself into the world, not “a mini-me,” as common parlance puts it. Her process of bewilderment and discovery began when other complete strangers, the shepherds, came to greet the newborn son, and later, even greater, more surprising strangers, the wise men from the east, came bearing gifts. Luke tells us that “Mary marveled and pondered these things in her heart.” That’s one way to say, “She often wondered, ‘Just who is this child?’”
Then there was the time when Jesus went missing, at age 12, and turned up still in the temple, while all the family was traveling home from pilgrimage. “How could you treat us like this?” Mom asked. And when Jesus replied, “Didn’t you know that I must be in my father’s house?” again, she had to wonder, not only “Who is he?” but “Whose is he?” and “What have I gotten myself into?” Twenty years later, when Jesus, in his ministry, was beset by needy, desperate people on the right hand and left, Mary came down from Nazareth with the rest of her family to take him home, thinking, He must have gone bonkers. But her first-born son replied, “Who are my mother, my brothers and my sisters, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven?”
And then she bore witness to his death on the cross. Had she known that raising the Messiah would have been like that, would she so readily have said, “Behold the Lord’s servant; may it be to me according to your word?”
The same, and then some, for Joseph, Mary’s husband and the man taking the mother and child to Egypt. This babe in her arms is not technically his son. Many men, when told that their fiancée was pregnant with a child not theirs, would just turn and walk away. The Law of Moses permitted worse. Fortunately, Joseph had a dream which told him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Were Joseph not, as Matthew puts it, “a righteous man,” by which is meant, a God-fearing, spiritually sensitive and obedient man, he might have chalked that dream up to indigestion, or wishful thinking.
So again, to complete the first question in the outline: Mary welcomed… the stranger, Jesus, when she said, “Behold the Lord’s servant; may it be to me as you have said.” So did Joseph welcome the Stranger by taking on the care and protection of Mary and her baby Jesus, treating him as his son, as well as hers. Joseph is a hero all-too-often overlooked in our telling of the Christmas story.
To complete the second question in the message outline: For welcoming and hosting Jesus the Stranger, Mary and Joseph also… became strangers and sojourners in the earth. Surely Mary’s pregnancy before marriage would have estranged her from many people in her home community. Then Herod’s effort to kill their son sent them into exile, along with thousands of other people in that part of the world, where Roman and Persian armies regularly clashed, and common people got caught in the crossfire of political rivalries. As the African proverb puts it, “When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” When Joseph took Mary and Jesus into Egypt, they joined a community of Jewish exiles, refugees and immigrants bigger than the population of Jerusalem. So was the Jewish community in what is now Baghdad, in the Persian Empire. That’s probably how the wise men from the East knew about a coming, expected, King of the Jews: because of all the Jewish rabbis and scholars there with whom they rubbed shoulders.
Which brings me to the third question with three parts, Will we, A) welcome the Stranger, Jesus? Like a wayfarer seeking shelter for the night, John’s Revelation records Jesus saying to every soul in this world, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone opens the door to me, I will enter and dine with you, and you with me.” That’s ancient language of hospitality. The paradox and mystery of Christmas is that the One who created this world as a home for us has come to it in Jesus, seeking a home with us. “And the Word became flesh and sojourned among us.” The whole of the Christian life is to be host and friend to Jesus so that he might live with us, indeed, that he might live within us, that he might live through us.
If we have not yet begun a life of friendship and hospitality with Jesus, we could do like Mary and say, “Behold the Lord’s servant; may it be to me according to your word.” If we have begun a life of faith and friendship with Jesus, it continues the same way it began, by welcoming him with the same spirit of willing, joyful hospitality: “Behold the Lord’s servant; may it be to me as you have said.”
But it never stops there. The Stranger and the Sojourner who showed up as a babe needing shelter on Christmas keeps showing up today, especially, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta often put it, “in his most distressing disguise of the poor.” That brings me to the second part, part B, of the third question in the message outline: I asked a moment ago, Will we welcome God the Stranger, the Sojourner, who shows up in Jesus? Now I ask: Will we welcome Jesus when he shows up as the Stranger, the Sojourner? By welcoming and aiding the strangers and sojourners around us and among us? According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, over sixty million strangers have been set loose upon the earth, uprooted by violence from the lands where they grew up and where their ancestors are buried. They wander either to live elsewhere in their own countries, or they cross at least one international border in search of food, safety and shelter. Never since 1945 and the end of the World War 2, have so many people been set afoot, like Joseph, Mary and Jesus two millennia ago.
Refugees fleeing Syria are getting all the press lately, not just in the news but also in political campaign debates. But war is also driving people from their homes in places like Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Sudan. Some of our ancestors fled compulsory, universal military draft in France, Germany and Ukraine for reasons of conscience. Now young men are fleeing Eritrea in East Africa for the same reason. And while our eyes have been fixed on the Middle East, another wave of children and teenagers, some with their mothers, many orphaned or unaccompanied, from Central America, are now crossing into the United States. Most are not sneaking in; they often surrender themselves immediately to Border Control Agents. For even in the crowded, substandard detention centers where they live in legal limbo for months going on years, they are safer than they were at home in Guatemala or Honduras, where drug lords and warlords have pushed the murder rate into the stratosphere.
Many of these strangers from Eritrea, Central America and Syria, are fellow Christians. But even if they aren’t, when I stand before the Great White Throne for a review of my actions, I don’t think that it will cut any ice for me to say, “But Jesus, when I turned a cold shoulder to you in your hour of need, I thought it was just a Muslim, or a Communist.” I’m not about to tell Jesus which stranger he can show up as, and not.
Today’s refugee crisis is going to bring big changes for everyone, including ourselves; changes in politics, culture, economy and our mission. We can either fear and lament these looming changes, or we can embrace them for the wonderful opportunities they present to grow and show the kingdom of God.
Welcome the Stranger who comes to us as Jesus, and welcome Jesus when he comes to us as the Stranger, and we’ll have to face another question, part C in Question three of the message outline: Will we…Become strangers? For welcoming and aiding the stranger can sometimes shake or even break our connections to our home communities. Like the social workers, lawyers and paralegals who have given volunteer time to help the Central American detainees, most of them children, at a detention center in Arizona. When the federal government recently relocated them to another center in Texas, and these volunteers went with them, the mayor of that Arizona town issued a statement celebrating their departure. By helping and hosting the stranger, those Americans had also become strangers in their own land.
From what I hear on the campaign trail and what I read in some of the letters to the editor, I suspect that we here at Zion Mennonite Church are about to do something that might seem strange to some of our friends, family and neighbors. We are about to take an offering, of all we might have saved, sacrificed or collected over the Advent-Christmas season, on behalf of the stranger and the sojourner, the Stranger who came as Jesus, and the stranger in whom Jesus comes. This offering will go to them through the Mennonite Central Committee, which is addressing the needs of Syrian and Iraqi refugees who wish to stay closer to the homes they have left and lost, to help them pay rent, buy food, educate their children, and find work in Jordan and Lebanon. Like the vast majority of the world’s refugees, they simply want to go back home someday, when it’s safe.
But to me, the most important question is not, Where is the Stranger, the refugee, the sojourner from Syria or Central America? Here? Or closer to home, over there? The most important question to me is, Where now is the Stranger, Jesus, the One who was born a refugee, in conditions similar to most refugee camps today, and who was put on the road, for fear of his life, like some sixty million people currently? Now that I know something of the sweetness and peace of hosting this Jesus in my heart, what can I do to welcome him, host him, help him, even in his most distressing disguise of the poor, the persecuted and the stateless? What treasure can I, like the wise men from the east, bring him to help him on his journey? And will we do so even if that makes us strangers and sojourners, like the Wise Men from the East?
If it does make us strangers in our own land, we mustn’t be surprised, we should be used to it, because, as Christians, “we seek a city whose founder and builder is God,” and “our citizenship is in heaven, from where we await our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ (Philippians 3: 20).”