Well, Happy New Year! My new year got off to an interesting start. On New Year’s Day, we found a wadded up little piece of paper that had gone through our wash.

Upon further inspection, it appeared to be a check. And on closer investigation, it was a check that apparently someone had given me at the front door of Bethany on Sunday the 31st, knowing that I was a trustworthy person who could get it into the offering! Fortunately, we could still make out the last three letters of the person’s name, and track it back to get it re-written. The moral of the story is…don’t hand me checks at the front door!

Today is January 7th. Yesterday, the 6th, was officially the day of “Epiphany,” which comes from a Greek word meaning “manifestation,” or “revelation.” That’s why we sometimes say, when our eyes are suddenly opened, we “had an epiphany!”- a divine revelation. I think the Seahawks had one last night!

In the case of the church calendar, it refers specifically to the revelation of the gospel to the Gentiles…the word that the gospel is for the whole world. And “the whole world” is represented by the wisemen, the magi, in the story Tim read earlier.

So today, we officially can wrap up our whole look at the early parts of the gospel story, the nativity, and start something else next week. It’s a nice and neat ending to all of Advent and Christmas. Except for one thing. It is neither nice, nor neat. In fact, there seems to be a real disconnect.

On December 10 of last month, we were worshipping here in the morning at one of the services, and there were red candles and green greens all around, and the amazing Advent Choir was singing “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

It was a beautiful, soft moment of worship…and right then an ambulance went screaming down Queen Anne Avenue, siren wailing, which usually means someone is in trouble. And I remember thinking, surrounded by all the beauty of our worship, what a huge disconnect that screaming ambulance was.

It happens here in chapter 2 of Matthew, doesn’t it? On the one hand is the story of the coming of the Wisemen or Magi. A story of faith. Wise men, scholars, even kings, perhaps, looking for meaning in the stars and leaving their homeland willingly behind because of the apparent news of the arrival of a great king in the west, in Israel as it turns out. Even though they are not God-believers, certainly not in the Jewish sense in Israel, much more likely they are pagans, they receive this news and they go.

There is a strong sense in which they represent an early sign of God’s grace, the Word that the gospel good news is big enough and indeed intended for all people, the same Word that the Apostle Peter and later the Apostle Paul will both experience later and then begin to teach. And wonder of wonders, these foreigners, aliens, outsiders come and believe. They bring gifts. They fall on their faces in the presence of the child king Jesus to worship.

So simple. The story has such few details. Heard, followed, came, believed, worshipped. I want to be like that. It’s a picture of grace, the way things are supposed to be. If it was a movie, the camera would slowly pan back, leaving us with a sense of awe and reverence over the surprise and power and width of the gospel coming in Christ and being portrayed through these magi. Wonderful. Let’s tie off Christmas. Let’s take down the decorations, put our nativity sets away and get on with living in ’07, inspired by this picture.

Except. Instead of the credits coming up and people starting to leave the theater, these extremely disturbing pictures appear on the screen. Soldiers, swords, running, blood, screaming, hysterical voices. A family, parents and infant, flee to the south seeking refuge. Jesus will start out his life as a refugee. Not an immigrant, choosing to start life in a new place but a refugee forced out of his country and onto a perilous road.

Jesus joins a good number of people in refugee status. The latest figures I could find say that the world refugee population is at a 25 year low of 9 million people. But 25 million more are displaced within their own countries. The 14th century woodcut on the front of the bulletin is far too serene. Where are the looks of sheer terror, the sweat running down, Mary and Joseph looking back over their shoulders, wondering when they will be overtaken and hunted down?

If you’ve seen the movie The Constant Gardener you’ve seen a portrayal like this.

Nomadic militiamen with no regard for human life appearing on horseback to terrorize a village in Northern Kenya for no good reason, the residents running for their lives and some of them not making it. Your heart starts to pound, you feel the terror that many people experience not in movies, but in real places like Sudan and Uganda and Afghanistan.

What a disconnect. What happened between the magi on their faces to worship, and the terror of children near Bethlehem being hunted down?

Herod. Herod the Great, the powerful puppet king of Israel on behalf of the Romans. On the one hand, merciful enough to lower taxes in tough economic times, to build the huge temple in Jerusalem for the Jews. Generous enough to melt down his own gold during a famine in 25 BC to buy food for the people.

On the other hand, Herod was not a nice man. At all. Suspicious of everyone near to him. Murdered a wife and his mother-in-law. Murdered two of his own sons. Earned Caesar Augustus’ description, “better to be a pig of Herod’s than one of his sons.”

Herod had 300 civil servants murdered. And he left orders that upon his death, one member of each powerful family in the region would be executed, so that he could know that tears had been shed on the day of his demise. Enough to make you shiver. That’s the Herod that ordered the execution of male babies under two.

What, in God’s name, is an animal like Herod doing in the nice, soft Christmas story? What a disconnect. Good thing it doesn’t happen in more civilized times like ours, we think. Until we stop for 10 seconds and remember just in the 20th century:

• Leopold, King of the Belgians, had roughly 10 million killed in the Congo, 1/3 of the total population.
• The genocide going on in the Sudan, still going on in Darfur. 300,000 killed…2 million displaced.
• The Gulag of Stalin’s Russia. 1 million political opponents killed, 10 million more deported with most never returning.
• Armenians killed by the Turks in 1915? 1-2 million people.
• Jews murderd by Hitler, about six million in the 'Holocaust'.
• Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot: 1-3 million, 1/4 of the country.
• The Kurds of Northern Iraq killed by Saddam Hussein, 100-200,000.
• The Tutsi of Rwanda by the Hutu, 800,000 in 3 months.
• Croats/Muslims/Albanians of Kosovo by Serbs, 200,000+.

This is the reality of the world. Evil is present. On a large scale, and on small scales. It was present in Jesus’ day, his very life and town bumped up against it. Evil is present in our day.

In some ways, in this story, Herod represents the reality of evil in the world. But we will surely miss something very important if we are not also reminded of the reality of evil…in ourselves.

Sin is a very complicated issue. We say “I’m not Herod, not Polpot, not Stalin, I would never do those things.” No. No probably not…though there were millions of everyday people in all these cases who never stood up to do anything about them, or who contributed in smaller ways, or who just followed orders or who were scared into actions they didn’t believe in. So we shouldn’t distance ourselves too much.

But perhaps we would be more like the scribes and theologians that Herod recruited to come and tell him and the wisemen about the new child king. They knew the Bible. They could explain where the Messiah would be born. They knew why the wisemen had journeyed so far. Bethlehem was just 5 miles away. Could they not have found the energy to see if it was true?! But they couldn’t be bothered to go and check it out themselves. They stayed in Jerusalem.

Soren Kierkegaard once marveled that the wisemen had only a rumor to go by, but they undertook a long journey, while the scribes who were well informed, well-versed “remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem.” And, Kierkegaard said we had better be alert lest we do the same thing. “Similarly, we may know the whole of Christianity yet make no movement. The power that moved heaven and earth leaves us completely unmoved.”

One way or another, the holy family makes it out of Israel and down to Egypt. We don’t know much about that time, really very little, not even exactly where they went. There are many, many ancient legends that sprang up around the story, not with any discernible historical connection, but interesting nonetheless.

For example, here’s one I found several places: As the family heads into Egypt, they are set upon by robbers. They were to be murdered, but one of the robbers looks at the baby and finds himself strangely moved. He refuses to allow the family to be harmed, and as they left said to the child, “If ever there come a time for having mercy on me, then remember me and forget not this hour.” As the legend goes, this is one of the two thieves later crucified with Jesus, the one who received forgiveness and mercy on the cross. A nice story, likely not true.

What is true is, Jesus flees to Egypt…as a fugitive. Don’t you wonder what Joseph and Mary are thinking?! All the amazing things that have happened, that we have celebrated in the last month: angels, messages, prophecies, shepherds, wisemen, all pointing to Jesus being the Messiah of God, and now they Mary and Joseph find themselves…fleeing for their lives? What a disconnect.

As the early church father John Chrysostom said, “the facts seem contrary to the promise.” It would have taken extraordinary faith, in that moment, to continue to believe the promises they had heard. To believe that God could possibly bring anything good out of a situation so bad. Our faith also gets disconnected when the facts seem contrary to the promise.

Jesus is not the first person in the Bible to travel the routes from Israel to Egypt, of course. Old Testament kings and prophets sometimes fled to Egypt when the political climate got too hot for them in Israel. Several of the Old Testament patriarchs ended up in Egypt. Joseph, the son of Jacob, betrayed by his brothers ends up there pretty much running the entire country for the Pharaoh and eventually his entire family ends up there. I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to miss these connections of Israel and Egypt.

But as those Israelites became slaves in Egypt, their greatest figure was Moses, who often figures as a forerunner to the Christ. And the parallels are striking.

Moses was born into slavery.

Jesus was born into a time of oppression and violence.

The baby Moses was in danger of being killed by the Pharaoh of Egypt, as he tried to eliminate male babies and reduce the number of Israelite slaves who could challenge him.

Jesus the baby was in danger of being killed by Herod.

Moses was pulled out of the river in a basket and safely raised in Egypt.

Jesus was saved by the flight to Egypt with his parents.

Moses would lead his people out of slavery, out of Egypt.

Jesus would come back from out of Egypt to do the same, in a different way.

In fact, when we baptize people in the sanctuary here at Bethany, we often pray a prayer that includes these words:

Lord, we remember how You led your people Israel out of slavery through the waters of the sea. We remember that You sent your Son Jesus, baptized in the waters of the Jordan, to lead us out of slavery to sin and death, through His death and resurrection.

Now, I’ve preached on this passage of scripture at least 4-5 times in my life. The remarkable thing that struck me this time is that really, the whole gospel can be found in Matthew 2.

One. God in his grace goes to find people…all people, whoever they are. The outsider wisemen. The insider scribes and theologians. Even Herod himself. God gives opportunity, because his desire is that all would come to know and love him. And the poster children here for all people are the wisemen. God’s grace can find all people. Grace is part of the gospel.

Two. There is a reason that Jesus needed to come to this earth. The wisemen didn’t know him, and needed to. The scribes and theologians were too apathetic to search for him and needed to. Herod wouldn’t bow to him, though called to. Until we come to grips with our need for him, we can’t understand his grace. In other words, sin is part of the gospel, because we need to understand the real state of our hearts before we can hear the rest.

Three. The world is not the way it is supposed to be. There is rampant and powerful evil present in our world. It is no secret to Jesus. From fleeing as a refugee child to being crucified by a coalition of opponents, he encountered it, lived under it, died under it. Never can we say that our Savior does not understand where we are.

And at the same time, we will have to grow in understanding that the presence of evil does not mean the absence of God.

There is no promise anywhere in scripture that says if we live well, we will live untouched. No promise that says those who believe in Jesus live protected from evil. Only that God promises to be with us, no matter what the situation. We are never alone. “I am with you always,” Jesus will say at the end of Matthew. That presence is part of the gospel.

Four. The state of things in our world is not the end of the story. If in Christ, the kingdom of God has entered in, then we will see glimpses and pieces now. Time passes. Herod dies. The Jesus who came up out of Egypt to save his people came to do save all people by coming up out of the grave. Resurrection and a future is part of the gospel.

It is this gospel that deals with our disconnect. The same Jesus who has preceded us, who has been a refugee, an outcast, a fugitive also stands also at the end of time and beckons us. We can look to a future, come what may, knowing that ultimately the purposes of God will not be thwarted.