Refugee Religion

Refugee Religion A Sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23
One of the very best things about being a pastor is the privilege of being invited, from time to time, to join other people in their own faith pilgrimage. At weddings, the birth of a child and so on, for just a little while, I occasionally get invited along. Even in the dark sadness of a funeral, there is fulfillment in sharing people's lives with them. It's a particular joy when someone sends back a report about how their journey has gone since I had the privilege of taking a few steps with them. I got one such report over the holidays from a young couple I married in 1988 when they were just finishing college. I'd not heard from them since. But, there they were in their Christmas picture - with five kids huddled around. Mandy with a smile that would make a Cheshire cat jealous and Paul, head slightly tilted and looking just a tad weary. Mandy says that she made Paul work in the church nursery when they were dating just to see if he liked babies. It's a good thing, don't you think? But, it was what Mandy wrote of their marriage since they walked the wedding aisle that I wanted to share with you this morning. Mandy writes, "Thank you for marrying us and setting us on the road that has led to the fulfillment of many hopes and dreams. Admittedly, we found out that neither of us were each other's ideal mate but fortunately we've also realized that neither of us are anyone's ideal. We are way too human to make someone else deliriously happy for a lifetime. So, after some disappointments it seems we've gained the maturity to stop holding each other to our original blissful expectations. God has kept us firm in our convictions and commitments. This brings us blessings daily. We aren't always nice to each other for sure. He's really aggravating, you know! But, I think we have a pretty harmonious household and we make good decisions together." From original blissful expectation to nothing less than God's blessings daily. It seems that if you can find some way, as Paul and Mandy have, of traversing that territory intact you're well on the way to whatever marital joy is yours to know. Mandy thanked me for setting them on the road. Though I'm certain she gave me way too much credit, I'm also certain that young couple either knew from the beginning or came to know that all that happens at the altar is just getting set on the road. It's merely the very first step on a long journey. And, along the way, whether you successfully traverse the territory from blissful expectation to gratitude for God's daily blessings in your less than blissfully perfect situation has a great deal to do with how, or if, you'll finish the journey. Something which Joseph, Mary's husband, had apparently learned, too. Looking at this guy's life from the time he first heard that Mary was going to have a baby that wasn't his until well after Jesus was out of the nursery is like watching a human pinball getting bounced from one place to the next by giant levers someone else is manipulating. If, to Joseph, getting married meant settling down, he learned in a hurry to change his expectations. If he'd ever had a stable life, life since the stable had been nothing less than that of a refugee. A life in which he was fast coming to learn that faith in God takes you on a journey, a pilgrimage, to somewhere else other than where God first finds you. If there had been such a thing as frequent mover miles available in Joseph's first-century world, he would have been set for life. First, while Jesus is still an infant, an angel appears to Joseph and tells him to get out of Dodge. Herod is stalking and the only safe place for the family is Egypt, of all places. So, by the dark of night, Joseph slips his family out of town and stays in Egypt until he gets word that Herod is dead. Then, just when he thinks its safe to go home because an angel told him so in a dream, he hears that Archelaus, Herod's son, is in charge. Perhaps fearing that a passion for infanticide is a genetically inherited trait, Joseph has another dream in which he is warned not to go back to Bethlehem. Before it's all over, they finally make their way to Nazareth, where Jesus would grow to adulthood. From the day he first set foot on the road on which God called him to travel, Joseph never did quite make it back home to Bethlehem. In some ways, he was a refugee until he died. The Family Man, a new movie, is the story of a wealthy investment banker played by Nicholas Cage. Years before, he'd passed up the chance at a relationship with a woman who loved him dearly to pursue his dream for what he loved most, money. Thirteen years later, he has all the money he ever dreamed of having but he's profoundly alone. At Christmas, he has a dream in which he fantasizes about what life could have been like had he kept his relationship with the woman who loved him. In the dream, he works in a tire store and she's an underpaid attorney for a non-profit organization. Their life is middle-class but it's full of love. And, in the dream, he asks his wife to leave their home of thirteen years so that he can pursue his dream of investment banking. At first, she balks. But, then, in a moment of reflection, she tells him she'll go wherever he wants because to her, their relationship is more about love than it is an address. To her it's who you love that matters more than where you live. Just in case you haven't seen the movie, I'll leave you to wonder where he finally ends up living. But, when I heard the wife pledge that kind of love to her husband, I couldn't help but wonder if we're willing to do the same with God. Joseph was. Joseph appears in the biblical record for only a few brief moments. He's practically overshadowed by the events swirling around him. But, for the few brief moments he does appear, this is the lesson his story teaches. More than a fixed set of ideas, faith is a relationship, a journey, a pilgrimage. If we choose faith in God as the road we will travel we will more likely than not find ourselves constantly on the move because faith, a relationship with God, is as much about about the journey we're on as it is the address at which we finally arrive. It's who we love more than where we live. Just in case you think I've overstated the case, this is the biblical record from the beginning to the end, is it not? All the way back to the beginning, the "Lord said to Abraham, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.'" (Genesis 12:1) So, the faith that Abraham fathered was, from the beginning, about a religion made more for refugees than for those who need a fixed place to call home. A faith made more for people whom the apostle Peter later called "exiles" (1 Peter 1:1) than for folks who only feel safe when they've built a permanent nest. For the record, I hate moving. In the last ten years, I've lived under seven different roofs, only one of which I've "owned." That's if you can legitimately call paying on a mortgage "owning" something rather than being owned by it. Anyway, I'm so ready to stay put for a while I've told Nancy that the next time I move it will be when someone carries me out feet-first. And, though I'm quietly hoping that's not certain with regard to my physical address, I'm especially hoping it's not true with some of the spiritual addresses I've established. This past week I heard from an older pastor for whom I worked as a youth minister in the mid-seventies. I had not talked to him in some twenty years, at least. I learned a great deal from him. And, he must have liked me because he asked me to work for him twice. But, honestly, I remember him as a rather rigid man in some ways. His preaching was always in very black and white terms; it wasn't difficult to pin him down on the theological map. But, when he called this week, I noticed a softer, more compassionate tone in his voice the inflection of which was about more than vocal chords modulated by his seventy-plus years. His oldest daughter had suffered through a terrible divorce. She remarried and her second husband was a very good man. But, eighteen months ago, in the middle of their marital bliss, brain cancer took him. Now, his youngest daughter is on the backside of an extremely ugly divorce, too. There's very little about the life of which he dreamed for his children that has come true. He's had to change the address of some of his ideas about God and people. Faith, biblical faith, the faith of Abraham, will do that to you. If you choose to stay on the road on which that faith first sets you, you will find yourself needing to move from time to time. Joseph learned that faith-moving is sometimes more about your spiritual ideas than your physical address long before he had to pack for Egypt. When most people would have been planning their honeymoon, Joseph had to figure out what to do with his pregnant fiancé. It wasn't his child, he knew. He planned to leave Mary, even if graciously, and move on down the road. But, God had other ideas in mind. He not only wanted Joseph to stick it out until the baby was born, he even told Joseph that he should name the baby "'Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.'" (Matthew 1:21) Joseph had to move from the blissful expectation that Mary would first bear his children to learning that she was pregnant in a way that would almost certainly be perceived as sinful so that she could give birth to someone who would personify the blessing of God by delivering the world from its sin. That's not an easy move. It's more like a leap. A leap in thinking about God and faith and relationships that only faith could make possible. Aren't you glad God set him on that road? And, what about the road of faith on which God has set you? Is there any chance there is a move on the horizon in this new year for you? Not so much from one place to another, perhaps, but from one way of thinking or living to another? One that might mean leaving behind some of your blissful expectations but take you to another place where you discover God's daily blessings? In your business? In your giving? In your marriage? In your life dreams? In your faith? Any moves on the horizon? Doing all the loving, forgiving and serving that faith in Jesus calls on us to do will almost certainly require that we all do some moving of some kind before this year it out. Moving from one place to another in what you think about yourself, your God and others. Do you remember when the apostle Peter came to learn that God loves Gentiles just as much as he does Jews? (Acts 10) Following Christ as your Lord may call on you to make a bigger leap from one spiritual address to another than that. You can stay put, if you choose. But, honestly, some of the most miserable people I know, and those most capable of making others miserable, are those who've arrived at one way of thinking about God and others and unpacked everything they own and started making mortgage payments so they never have to move again. About fifteen years ago, I went deep-sea fishing for the first and last time in my life. It still rates as one of the most miserable experiences of my life. We were on the boat for eight hours and got caught in a storm where the waves got so high that, when we went down into a swell, they were higher than the boat by ten or fifteen feet. To cap it off, we got lost on the way home after having caught only one fish. And, you guessed it, we all got sicker than any of us knew a human could and still live to tell the story. I visited realms of nausea just the other side of dry heaves I didn't know existed. About halfway through the day, while we were hanging on for dear life, one of my fellow-heavers turned to me and asked, "Are we there, yet?" Was he thinking there was some "place" we were headed? Didn't he know that, when you're deep-sea fishing, wherever you are any given moment, you're there? That the only permanency is in the moving? Jimmy Allen wrote a book about his experience of losing his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren to AIDS and then coming to learn that one of his sons was gay and also had AIDS. It is one of the most incredible stories of a person being blasted by one tragedy and then another only to wonder if it would ever end. It turns out that one of his dearest friends is Bruce McIver. Bruce asked him, "How on earth do you hold up?" Allen said, "I've stopped asking God for victory, and started asking him for strength." (Jimmy Allen, Burden of a Secret, Moorings, Nashville, p. 192) The closer I've looked at his story, the more I've realized it is not just the story of a person of faith learning to live with unending tragedy. It is the story of a man who started out thinking life would be one thing and who has spent nearly every day of his adult life since having to move from one place to the next in the way he thinks about God, the church and even gays and AIDS. And, he's finally come to the place where he's not expecting God to deliver him to a permanently blissful place. He's only asking God for the daily blessing of strength to take the next step as he travels on down the road on which his faith in God has set him. Martin Luther reportedly once said, "We are not what we shall be but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished but it is going on, this is not the end but it is the road." From Abraham to Joseph to Luther to Jimmy Allen to Mandy and Paul, this faith of our sounds more all the time like a religion fit only for refugees. Refugees of faith are nothing less than those who left home, never to return again, and who are only trusting God for his faithful presence as the never-ending road unfolds before them. It is my great privilege to invite you to join the rest of us on this wonderful journey. The first step, in Christ, God has already taken toward you. Won't you take the next one by choosing to walk, by faith, with that little boy whom Joseph named Jesus who grew up to the man who is your savior?
Glen Schmucker, Pastor	January 7, 2001
Copyright © 2001, Glen Schmucker