Late the next day, after several friends became worried that Norma was not answering her phone, Juan went by to check on her and found her sitting in that same chair where she had died sometime several hours before, not long after she waved goodbye.  Juan was choking back tears as he told me this story.  He couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she knew something when he left that day, like it was time to wave goodbye.  We never know, do we?

What we believe, is that those who follow the risen Lord Christ will be raised to new life after they die.  However, what actually happens that first instant on the other side of our last heartbeat is a mystery to those of us on this side.  None of us have ever been there, yet.  We’ve never actually experienced it.  Yet, we live with this conviction that when followers of Jesus die, they go to what we call “a better place,” what Jesus himself seems to have referred to as “‘paradise’” (Luke 23:43).  The scripture gives us precious little information about what we believe to be heavenly paradise.  What information we are given leads us to believe that it is a place of healing, of no more tears or pain and of new life beyond the grave.  That’s what we believe about those who go from this place to the next, like Norma.

But, what if someone were coming back the other way, from heaven to earth?  What could they expect to find in this world?  And, if it were you, would you even care to make the journey?  If it were your child you were sending, wouldn’t you cancel the trip until you knew for certain that where you were sending them was absolutely safe?

What we are celebrating this weekend is our belief that God did exactly that.  He sent his son from heaven to earth.  What we don’t often enough reflect on is the kind of world to which God was sending Jesus.  From even these few verses of scripture recorded in Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus, it was not a safe, comfortable world.

In Matthew’s version, there are two very significant issues shaping this story.  Joseph and Mary are trying to start a family.  And, the world in which this new family is taking shape is hardly an ideal place.  It is chaotic, unsafe, unpredictable, even frightening. 

Matthew also records that angels and dreams play a huge role in this unfolding drama.  There are two appearances of angels with a third one implied and three dreams.  In this case, angels had not come to celebrate the birth of a new baby.  They had come for another foreboding reason.  In the first dream, just after Jesus’ birth, an angel appears and warns Joseph to flee Bethlehem all the way to Egypt because of Herod’s intentions to kill Jesus.  Overnight, Joseph, Mary and Jesus become refugees.

As an aside, I’ve thought that if I were ever asked to preach the gospel to today’s Palestinian refugees, this might be a good place to start the gospel story.  It seems that they would be able to relate more easily to a God whose only son was a refugee from their very homeland 2,000 years ago, just like they are today.

In the meantime, back to the Jesus story, genocide is taking place in and around Bethlehem.  Herod had ordered the murder of all males two years of age and under, trying to rid the land of this boy he believed could grow to dethrone him. 

The second dream where an angel appears to Joseph takes place in Egypt.  The angel tells Joseph it’s time to go home, back to Bethlehem.  The third dream takes place when Joseph, Mary and Jesus have almost made it home.  Joseph is warned that it might not be as safe as first thought back in Bethlehem.  Herod’s son has taken his late father’s place.  Joseph can’t be sure that but that Archelaus might try his father’s dirty work and takes his family instead to Nazareth, where Jesus would grow to adulthood.

So, here is the setting for God’s divine plan.  The stage is not one on which all the props are neatly ordered with a stage manager making certain every character is in his place and on cue.  I have memories of neatly ordered stages.  In Jr. High and High School I took drama classes.  We would rehearse our scenes over and over and over until every prop was in its place and every actor knew his or her cues to perfection.  By the time of the performance, we acted from rote memory. 

What is presented here in scripture is quite the opposite.  The scene is chaotic, out of control.  There are refugees and a maniacal, sociopathic, Middle Eastern dictator with ruthless armies carrying out his genocidal commands.  Sound familiar?  I find it the most curious thing that God did not send his angels to clean off the stage and set everything up just right before he sent Jesus.  He just sent Jesus into that chaotic world and, the scripture records, “there he made his home.”  That truth recorded in scriptural history both offers us hope and demands something of us at one and the same time. 

For one thing, when people ask how we can reconcile faith in an all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing God with the presence of evil this is part of the answer.  Though we cannot ever fully resolve all of the questions about that mystery that has plagued people of faith sine before Jesus was born, because of Jesus’ birth, we can know that God, in the person of Christ, has not abandoned us to live in this world alone.  Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus promised his disciples, “‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever’” (John 14:16).  The word, “‘Comforter,’” means one called to walk alongside.  In the person of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit afterwards, God has come to walk alongside us in this world. 

During the holocaust of World War II, the Nazis decided to punish some indiscretion in one Jewish camp by hanging a twelve year-old boy in a particularly slow and brutal way.  All the prisoners were forced to watch the horror.  As the boy was dying, one Jew turned to another and asked, “Where is your God now?”  He was right.  The man replied, “He’s up there, on the gallows.”  This world will always be chaotic.  We will never be able to make it safe enough or rid it of evil completely.  But, the coming of Christ is God’s promise to us that we will never awaken to any sunrise or find ourselves in any night so dark that we will not have the presence of God with us in it.  That is our hope.  Our hope also gives us a mandate, a mission.

God’s sending of his son into this world when he did and the way he did, even knowing what was awaiting him, was evidence of the way in which God intends to accomplish his purposes, in redemptive kinds of ways.  It now becomes, for us, the model of the way in which we are to live our lives in this world.  Scripture mandates, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness . . . he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).  Just as Christ moved from the reality of his paradise to the reality of the world we live in, so we are now to move from the safety and comfort of our own making into the real, unsafe and uncomfortable places where others live and make ourselves their servants.

My late friend and spiritual mentor Glen Edwards once told me that there would always be a distance between the biblical ideal of what the church should be and the institutional reality of what it is.  This was back when I was much younger and very idealistic.  I was having a hard time with how institutionalized the church could be, how hard and rigid it could be.  Glen was trying to help me understand how my ministry would be lived out navigating that gray area between the ideal and the real.  His words have kept me going more than once. 

We don’t get to minister in a perfect world where everything is to our liking.  We are called, like Jesus, to move from the ideal to the real and make a redemptive difference there every day.  Even in the church, especially in the church, people ought to be nice, forgiving, not seeking vengeance or to make their personal agenda’s everyone else.  That would be ideal.  In reality, even in the church, people are not always nice, forgiving, unveangeful or unselfish.  We have two choices.  We can forever make ourselves refugees from reality or, just as God has made his presence known in this chaotic world, we can move into the real world as it is and become the presence of Christ there in whatever ways we’re given opportunity to do so.

Interspersed with words about his children and grandchildren and how wonderful their lives are, Weston and Charlotte Ware included these words in their Christmas letter this year.  “Our church is showing the presence of the Spirit and a dedication to its role in being the presence of Christ in its community in new and exciting ways.  The Texas Legislature, by the efforts of a few and to the relief of Weston, was able to reject concerted efforts to bring major casino gambling to Texas.  Weston talks to reporters, occasionally visits Austin for a hearing and works as a volunteer with both Texans Against Gambling and the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling.”  They went on to write, “Peace is our major hope and prayer for 2005.  We regretted the president’s decision to go tot war in Iraq, but the war is a reality.  Now America must envision new ways to make and win peace.”  Their prayer, quite simply, is not that the world will always be to their liking, but that God will find our work in this world to his liking.

I have a grave concern that many modern religious leaders are turning to politics as the primary means of achieving their spiritual agendas.  San Antonio pastor John Hagee solicits funds over the television for sending Russian Jews back to Israel because he believes that the sooner all Jews return to Israel, the sooner Jesus will return.  As though the timing of God’s eternal purposes could be reset as we accomplish our political agendas! 

What is particularly frightening is that many of these religious leaders have the ear of our president.  Yet, even if they are successful in manipulating the political world to their liking, two things will be true.  The world will not be a safer place for those most vulnerable and the purposes of God will not have been accomplished. 

If we will pursue the mind of Christ in our own world then we must also be willing to go into the unsafe places, not to reshape it according to our world view, but to befriend the lonely and become the presence of Christ as we are given opportunity and leave the reshaping of this world to the Christ who is present in it with us and who does his reshaping from the inside of men’s hearts outward, not the other way around.  Listen to these words from Isaiah the prophet, referring to the Jesus yet to be born centuries later.  “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever.  The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this” (Isaiah 9:6-7, KJV). 

I also have a grave concern as I see more and more parents seeking to cocoon their children away from the real world.  If we choose to do that, we are not only failing to do our children any favors by cloistering them away from reality but we are also failing in our responsibility to teach them what it means to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.  

Jesus promised, “‘ Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’” (Matthew 5:9).  He also taught us to pray that God’s kingdom would be “‘done, on earth as it is in heaven’” (Matthew 6:10).  Peacemakers, seeking to do the work of heaven’s ideal in the middle of earth’s reality.  That is our task, our mission, our mandate.

The most interesting thing is that Jesus never quite made it back home.  He was born in Bethlehem and fled with his family to Egypt.  Then, they went back to Judea and then on to Galilee.  Jesus should have been known as a man from Bethlehem.  Instead, he would forever be known as a “Nazorean” because he never quite made it back home.  He would live his life out in this chaotic world, a world of Middle Eastern sociopathic, maniacal dictators willing to employ genocide to accomplish their political agendas.  He came into that very real world and what we are celebrating right now is that, “there he made his home.”

In our homes, in our marriages, in our marital conflicts, in our business relationships, in our financial affairs, in our sexual relationships, in the world where we have any power of influence, what if we made it our mission to make peace and to be the presence of Christ?  What if?  Not because the world we live in is ideal, but because it is into that reality that God has sent us on a mission of peace. 

We may not win the wars being fought now, we may not have the last word in every conflict, we may not get our way but, when it is all said and done, we will have been the presence of Christ.  If we will do that, if we will be the presence of Christ in this very real world, then someday, when this church’s history is written, we will have found that we did the work of God’s eternal kingdom and that, when it’s all said and done, nothing else really mattered.