Sermon preached by Fr. Tom
at St. Thomas Episcopal – Plymouth
January 4, 2015
Second Sunday of Christmas
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be an acceptable offering in your sight, Oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”
When I was in jr. high school, my family moved from Northeast Harbor Maine to Columbia, SC. This was a big move for the family, but Maine was very far from the rest of the family, and my mother missed the South. My father was the diocesan missioner in the Diocese of Upper SC, and he eventually started a church on the outskirts of town. Columbia was growing in the direction of Lake Murray, and people were building homes in places like Irmo and Chapin. Malls were being built. The area was a good one to start a church. There were lots of young families who needed Vacation Bible School. Other churches had not really moved into the region.
Lake Murray brought with it a somewhat seasonal crowd. There were folks with lake homes who would be at the lake house every weekend in the summer, and many of them wanted a place to go to church. It was a great combination.
My father had this couple in the congregation who told a story at coffee hour one week that really stuck with me. I have thought about this incident a bunch of times, and it seems appropriate for this morning’s Gospel lesson. These people loved to sail, and would come to the lake for the weekend and spend most of the day Saturday on the lake. Lake Murray was a lake that had been created in the 20’s to provide hydroelectric power to the state, and it had 500 miles of shoreline. It was a huge lake, and there was plenty of good sailing to be had.
One day sailing, the husband was at the back of the boat, and the wife was at the bow facing the back. The husband suddenly yelled “jump” and jumped off the boat. The wife without a second thought jumped into the water herself. The mast of the ship hit a low power line and the boat was badly burned. If they had not jumped, they easily could have been killed.
Now this is a great story about being lucky or decisive maybe. The thing that sticks in my mind though is not the picture of the boat smoking from the electricity. It is the comment that someone at coffee hour made. She said she never would have jumped.
My brother William was a missionary in Thailand and ran a school there just outside of Chiang Rai. One night in July, 2008 the chief of one of the hill tribes knocked on the door and with the help of a translator told him to pack his things and leave. William asked for some more information, and the chief simply said they had come themselves since it was so important, but the family needed to gather what they could carry and leave the rest. William had the children wear two sets of clothes and let them take one bag that they could carry. They went to the airport and got tickets on standby for the States. While on the plane they discovered that riots had broken out in Thailand with the change in government, and they had gotten out just in the nick of time. Houses and cars were burned. Had they waited until morning it might have been impossible to leave the country for some time, and they might have easily been injured or arrested.
The questions we are all asking ourselves are if we would have jumped out of that boat or gone to the airport in Thailand. Who is it that could tell us something like this and have us do it without a second thought? This really is one of those times when it is all about “He who hesitates is lost.”
In today’s Gospel, the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to pack up the family and go to Egypt. Joseph does just this. Because he is willing to act on a dream of this sort, the life of the baby Jesus is saved. Why does Joseph go? What is it about Joseph or about this dream that makes him get up and tell Mary to pack a bag she can carry and take an extra set of clothes?
I am going to say that in both these cases there were two things going on. There was trust, and there was an established relationship. The husband and wife trusted each other, and the wife knew the husband was not one to do stupid things like jump out of boats without a good reason. My brother had been working with the hill tribe for some time and had baptized many of them. He knew who the elders of the tribe were. These were not men to appear at your door just on a whim.
Joseph was a man of God. He was devout and had an established relationship with the Lord. He knew when the Lord appeared to him in a dream that it was not just something he ate. He trusted God and recognized His voice. This sort of trust and this sort of relationship does not just instantly happen. It is established over time.
I am reading a book called Under the Unpredictable Plant by Eugene Peterson. Peterson is a pastor and author. He is a professor of theology, and was the one who did the Message translation of the Bible. He uses the story of Jonah to talk about vocation. What is it that God is calling us to do? This book talks about some of the ways we try to avoid doing God’s will, and Jonah is a good person for a discussion of this sort.
Jonah as you will recall did not care much for God’s plans and makes a detour to Tarshish. He does not want to prophesy to Nineveh, and when he finally goes back, he is a reluctant prophet. The story ends well for Nineveh though, and as God points out to Jonah, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
We see in the story of Jonah and Joseph that God had a plan. He was taking care of his people, and that he intends good things for us.
The story of Joseph is an example of someone who is in close relationship with God and listens to Him. The story of Jonah is an example of someone called to be a prophet who runs away instead. In both cases, God’s will was done.
Here are the takeaways for us.
We have to be in relationship with God and trust Him or we will not recognize His voice or understand His call. That wife that jumped out of the boat trusted her husband and knew he was not a capricious guy. If a stranger had appeared at my brother’s door in Thailand, he would have been a lot less likely to wake the family and go to the airport.
God has a plan. God does not just tell Joseph to go to Egypt on a whim. There is a reason which may not have been so obvious at the time.
God intends good things for His servants. He sends Jonah to Nineveh to save the people there. Jonah does not want to go. Joseph is sent to Egypt to avoid the wrath of Herod. It may have looked like a lot of trouble at the time, but it all works out for the best because God is taking care of us.
I am going to leave you with a line from today’s Ephesians reading “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…”
I have said these words in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.