A Christmas Sermon: Being Egypt

This Sermon was preached on the twelfth and last day of Christmas. Christmas is incomplete for me unless I have an opportunity to reflect upon the story of the Christ child as a refugee. It has been a very long time since I have updated my blog, but below is a sermon I preached on Matthew chapter 2 where Jesus' family fled from Herod's violence. It acknowledges the "church refugee" crisis my United Methodist Church has also created in its decades long failure to see the LGBTQ community as fully human.

My wife will be the first to tell you how hard it is to get any semblance of Christmas spirit out of me. I generally don’t enjoy most Christmas music heard on the radio, I am not really eager about Christmas decorations or the Christmas spirit. I feel a pressure during Christmas time to have certain feelings that are just not within me. Now to be honest, I now feel as if year after year I soften a little bit more. That’s probably Becky and her infectious Christmas spirit’s fault. I don’t think that people who have buoyant Christmas spirits are bad, but it just seems to me that each time this season rolls around we are eager or at least encouraged to gloss over the more difficult parts of the Christmas story. We love to hear about angels singing but don’t always focus on how they brought terrifying news to Mary. We love to hear about the nativity and sing of the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes, which by the way seems absurd because all babies cry and it isn’t always a bad thing if babies cry. In fact, when infants are born we thank God when they cry because we know they are alive! We romanticize that Jesus had no where to lay his head and don’t spend enough time wondering at how that speaks to our current society’s fraught relationship with hospitality—that our savior was born not only as a child in a manger, but a homeless child. We like to talk about Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh but don’t pause to think seriously about how the only thing that kept the Magi from going back to Herod with information that would have allowed him to murder Jesus was a dream. I can’t move past our Christmas season and enter the month of January each year without acknowledging the scripture passage we just heard. Many churches follow what is called a Lectionary, which is a series of scripture passages assigned to each Sunday to allow preachers to preach through scripture—this passage is not in the Lectionary. Even our church traditions don’t like to focus on this story of Jesus as a refugee. 

We just broke into a new decade over this New Years Day. People are already calling it the roaring 20s. I saw a lot of videos and reflections where folks discussed the entire last decade instead of just the past year as they made their New Years posts. And as I have thought through the decade for myself, I think I have found a good name for it—these past 10 years have been the Decade of the Refugee. In 2010, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees agency or UNHCR released a report stating that, at that time over 43.7 million people were displaced across the world. As of 2019, that number has increased to 70.8 million. If you can’t see the image on the screen very well, take a look at our church’s facebook page and you can find the image there.

The word refugee in 2010 was reserved mostly for people fleeing violence in the Middle East. In 2020 this word also applies to families with children, a lot of them women with children, seeking shelter from violence in Central America on our southern border. In both 2010 and 2020, however, we have to acknowledge how refugees don’t exist in a vacuum—and we have to acknowledge how our nation, the United States of America is fundamentally involved with creating the circumstances that, at least over the course of the past ten years, has increased the number of refugees worldwide by 27.1 million.

We have to acknowledge how our military exploits for oil in the Middle East under the political leadership of both major political parties in our country have led to profound destabilization in the region, driving the largest refugee migration on the planet since World War 2. We have to acknowledge how our secretive geo-political maneuvers in the democratic elections and the para military activities we either funded or equipped in Central American countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua during the Cold War have led to the violent status quos that are driving the mass migration we are seeing to our southern border today. How our rapacious consumption of oil, drugs, and cheap labor are just as much of a cause of the refugee crises throughout the world today as the violence that instigated them. I can’t celebrate Christmas without seeking repentance, and exhorting anyone who will listen to join me. 

Our scripture passage tells of the simple truth that God made God self known to humanity not in a position of power, or even agency, but in the body and story of a refugee family. A migrating family. A family who found safety in an ironic place. For their history long told stories of Moses and how HE escaped the infant genocide of the Hebrew people by the egyptians in the book of exodus. A family that never was able to even return home. Instead of returning to Judea, in verses 22 and 23 we learn Jesus’ family returned to Galilee instead. How many refugees will ever return to their generational home in Syria or Iraq? For those fleeing violence in Central America, when will they ever return home? How sad it is that imagining peace in these parts of the words feels so futile. This scripture passage reminds me of a poem written by Warsan Shire, a British-Somali poet, in 2015 called “Home.” 

no one leaves home
unless home is the mouth of a shark.

you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well.

no one would leave home
unless home chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose
to spend days and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles travelled
meant something more than journey.

i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.

It’s haunting every time I read it—and what I read was just an excerpt—but I invite you to find it on google and read the whole thing for yourself. I generally find that I can’t be at peace with celebrating Christmas unless I acknowledge the truth in this poem that millions across the world know in their bones, a truth that Jesus, God with us, experienced as he fled to Egypt with his family—never to return home to live in Judea until he would embark on a journey that would lead to his crucifixion. I was never comfortable with my faith growing up when it seemingly had no room for suffering and pain in the story. What I came to learn is that I grew up with a faith that avoided telling that story, save for the parts that could be used to guilt me into fearing for my eternal life with the threat of damnation. 

But this story of Jesus’ refugee status is so instructive for us. Not only in acknowledging the plight of the refugee fleeing the violence of war in other countries less privileged than ours. This year as I encounter this story, I find myself thinking of another form of refugee—a church refugee. The refugee who sees the mouth of a shark in the doorway of the sanctuary and feels its teeth in the words that come from the pulpit or proclamations and statements from its leaders. The refugee who can no longer hear the church affirm them to be the human God created them to be while simultaneously and ironically preaching that we are all made in God’s image. The refugees that our United Methodist Church has been casting out for years because of a sentence added to our Book of Discipline in 1972 that harmfully claims “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” 

I didn’t grow up in the United Methodist Church. I didn’t grow up in a church that accepted homosexuality as a part of the humanity God has created in some of us—it was always characterized as something broken, something sinful, something that if not corrected would send us straight to hell. And I believed it. I believed it all the way up till my first year of college, until I began to break out of the small world view that formed me and grew in relationship with all kinds of people different than me—including people who consider themselves a part of the LGBTQ community. The dissonance this created for my faith was so severe it broke it into pieces. Beautiful pieces that I have the particular joy of putting back together each and every day. I could only hope that the small clay jars that confine so many of our siblings’ faith and restricts their ability to perceive the full humanity of someone who is Lesbian, or Gay, or Bisexual, or Transgender, or Queer might shatter one day. So that we can all wake up to the beautiful image that God has planted in each and every one of us. So that we can as a denomination cease our deadly bullying and stem the tide of church refugees we create through our harm.

Our denomination’s statements and policies join the other fundamentalist religious doctrines that are directly associated with the astonishingly high rates of suicide among LGBTQ teenagers. According to a study done in San Francisco,  LGBT youths "who experience high levels of rejection from their families during adolescence (when compared with those young people who experienced little or no rejection from parents and caregivers) were more than eight times likely to have attempted suicide, more than six times likely to report high levels of depression, more than three times likely to use illegal drugs and more than three times likely to be at high risk for HIV or other STDs" by the time they reach their early 20s.” When I was engaging in ministry with the homeless in Dallas, the church I served began to be concerned specifically with LGBTQ teen homelessness in Dallas. More data is being gathered, but a study was done in Houston at around that time that concluded that 51% of all homeless youth between the age of 12-24 had attempted suicide. If we think the church is not a part of this equation, I have really bad news for us. And if we think that the United Methodist Church is somehow different because it doesn’t encourage kicking kids out of the home if they are LGBTQ, then we have a lot of hard truths to confront. Because no matter what our denomination doesn’t say. No matter how much we try to say open hearts open minds open doors. No matter how we try to split hairs about the sacred worth of humanity, we have joined the chorus of the most fundamental christian voices who cry out with bullhorns on street corners that homosexuals must die. We must repent. We must turn away from the church refugee crisis we are creating! 

And this work isn’t easy. This work is uncomfortable because it involves recognizing how all of us share in a portion, however small, of complicity in the suicide of hundreds of thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans children. Recognizing that we celebrate with too much enthusiasm the too-small steps we make forward as a denomination. Recognizing that we have so much to apologize for simply by association—simply because we emblazon the cross and flame on our church building. This means we have to try doubly hard to prove we are a church that can be trusted for someone who is in the LGBTQ community to embark on their discipleship journey with us. And that we have to thicken our skins with humility to the criticism that comes with even being associated with Christianity at all. We have a lot to answer for just by association as a church in this church refugee crisis in the same way we have much to answer for as a nation for the global refugee crisis. And for me and my wife this is increasingly true in the ways we both have benefitted directly from the United Methodist Church as clergy.

So what do we do? Do we assign blame? Do we gear up for a fight and become immune from our faults by finding an enemy to attack? On the progressive side of this conversation in the United Methodist Church I am constantly surprised at how eagerly we will cannibalize each other to avoid the feelings of responsibility we have for the harm we are seeking to correct. Instead of examining our own sinfulness, our own mistakes, I have watched us on the progressive side of things find ways to attack others because we find fault with the grammar they use, or the different pace they might have in embracing change. We are so bound up in our own unacknowledged wounds and sinfulness that we act upon it WHILE we are seeking to enact justice and do works of compassion. 

There has been a lot of news about the UMC this weekend due to a group of people who met and entered into a mediated settlement that might provide a way forward for our denomination. There have been a whirlwind of plans and ideas about ways forward before even this came forward. And with each have come lines drawn in the sand and plans drawn for new walls to be erected. I have seen in myself my own addiction to making the perfect the enemy of the good sometimes. If we are not careful we will lose sight of the uncomfortable truth that we are all siblings—even those who might leave our denomination in the future should a separation occur. 

As impossible as it seems, I have a stubborn hope that we will see the end of refugee crises both of the church’s making and of our nation’s making. I think that, in the same way Egypt was a place of danger in the history of the Hebrew people and suddenly became a place of refuge for the refugee Christ child, we can Be Egypt for the church refugee here on the corner of 14th and Brentwood. And that each local church in our denomination can add to a witness that upends the expectations we have established about our church through our decades long struggle in accepting the LGBTQ community. 

As a nation we can Be Egypt for the refugee fleeing violence. I have to believe this no matter how difficult—I think this stubbornness is what the author of Hebrews was getting at when they said "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The painful and broken place our church has come to can still lead us toward a future where we can work to upend the realities of heterosexism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that still infect the teachings, theology, education, systems, history, the very bones of our denomination. We can still find a way to end violence in the world and begin the work of rebuilding the communities of the innocent who have suffered as collateral victims of the decades of conflicts that plague our world. I don’t know how—but I have an assurance of what I am hoping for and a conviction in something I cannot see. And in the meantime, we do what we can with where we are, hopefully being an outpost for the church refugee like Egypt was an outpost was for Jesus’ family. Today is the last of the 12 days that make up Christmas, and on this day I hope you will join me in repenting for the harm already done, grieving for what has been lost, and hoping for the things not yet seen in our world and in our church. I hope you will pray for our church and pray for refugees as you look back on Christmas. Amen.

-- Ben