Lectionary Readings (and full Gospel text)
In the name of our Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What would you do if you had no fears? If you could take any risk, go on any adventure, or do that thing you’ve always wanted to do, what would it be? That was one of the questions that we recently pondered at a youth group gathering. Several of our youth gave some insightful responses. And one youth said something that really resonated for me – “I’d be more honest with people.” It’s a great response. So often there are things that we want to say, but we worry how they will be received. Maybe we think we can offer some helpful bit of advice, but we worry they’ll take it the wrong way. Perhaps there is someone we want to give an affirmation to, but there’s a chance it will come out wrong, so we hold back. It could be that when someone asks us how we’re doing, we play it safe and say “I’m good” instead of asking for the help we need. We are bound by so many emotions and fears.
The message of the Gospel and the focus for this sermon is that we are free in Christ from all that binds us. Part of what it means to be a creature is to be bound up by things that are bigger than us, things that control us, and even things that we are unaware of. Though I’ve never seen the movie, I have watched one scene from the 2006 movie, The Devil Wears Prada that is absolutely brilliant. Anne Hathaway’s character is something like an intern at a fashion company and she’s in a room with several of the executives and designers. They’re discussing which belt goes best with an outfit. Given that the belts all look nearly identical, she giggles to herself and is questioned by Meryl Streep who plays the fashion magazine editor. Hathaway responds, “It all looks to the same to me. I’m still learning about all this stuff.”
Well, “stuff” was the wrong word to use. Streep’s character offers a fantastic and incisive monologue about fashion, using the particular sweater that Hathaway’s character is wearing as an example, tracing the history of that very specific color. She concludes with, “However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was chosen for you by the people in this room, from a pile of ‘stuff.’”
Maybe the whole movie is as good as this scene, I don’t know. But this scene describes the human predicament so well – we are all bound by something. We think we have free will, that we make all of our decisions independently and without influence, but that’s just laughable ignorance. We are all the product of millions of interactions, experiences, and marketing campaigns. We’re something like a fly caught in a spider’s web – trapped by countless threads that trap and bind us.
We all struggle with Sin – which one person defined as “the human proclivity to mess things up.” None of us are perfect, none of us has all the information, and we all act out of brokenness. And we can’t escape that reality: we are bound by sin, by the fact that we all mess up. We’re also bound by Death – the reality that we are all finite. This means that we have to make choices, because in our 80 or 90 years, if we’re lucky, we can’t do it all. We are bound by the limits of one lifetime.
And from these two main constraints, there are so many things that bind us and trap us, preventing us from doing those things that we really would like to do and are called to do. These are things like shame, our past mistakes, our fears, seeking the approval of others, and the expectations and stories that we place on ourselves. We react faster than our thoughts, and we are so often trapped in those unthought reactions.
We’re also bound by our obligations – which aren’t always a bad thing. Because I have a family, I’m bound in certain ways. I can’t spend money without thinking about the needs of my children. I’m bound by this job, because if I just decided to start sleeping in on Sundays, there’d be a price to pay. But even these good things bind us because I’m sure we’ve all known people for whom a good obligation, like a job or a family, turns into an unhealthy obsession, which we describe as being a workaholic or jealous and over-protective. We can become trapped even by good things when they prevent us from being the people God created us to be.
Being bound is not an enjoyable experience. Have you ever been trapped in a situation? What did it feel like? We describe it as being stuck, suffocating, claustrophobic, oppressive, anxious, frustrating, and frightening. There’s a reason no one wants to be trapped in an elevator. We were not created for bondage, but rather freedom. In Genesis, we read that humanity was created in the image of God, an image of freedom, and we were given all of Creation to sustain us as we were told “Be fruitful and multiply.” We were made in, by, and for love. And though love does unite us to one another, love is non-coercive. Love does not create burdens. The love of God does not trap us or bind us, rather love opens us to receive the abundant gifts of God found in nature, one another, and ourselves.
What prevents us from living in a more beloved community are the fears that trap us. We fear that we aren’t enough, or won’t have enough, or aren’t loveable in our current condition and so we close ourselves to others, we refuse to take the risk of love, we try to accumulate more than we need, which creates a shortage for others, and the vicious cycle continues. And this is where Jesus Christ enters the equation as the one who reminds us of and demonstrates for us that we are saved from all of those things that trap us: our shortcomings and failings are forgiven, death is not eternal, we are loved no matter what, and there is always enough.
Now, if we don’t recognize our bondage, we’ll never be ready to receive the Good News of God in Christ. This is the point that we heard in Matthew as the Holy Family fled into Egypt as refugees: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” Egypt wasn’t just a place beyond the tyrannical control of Herod. There are plenty of places Joseph could have taken the family to hide. Egypt is the place of bondage for the Jewish people. Egypt is where the people were enslaved under Pharaoh; where they were forced to do the hard labor of making bricks without straw. Egypt was a place where they were trapped – unable to worship God freely, unable to live freely, unable receive the blessings of God’s abundance. Egypt was also a place of genocide and death, as Pharaoh ordered that all male babies be thrown in the Nile as a means of population control. That is where God tells Joseph to take the child and his mother – into the place of bondage.
You know, sometimes what God calls us to do doesn’t make any sense. Joseph is a better person that I am – I would have had some questions for God about this so-called plan to go back to Egypt, because Egypt was that place the people had prayed, “Lord, if you get me out of here, I promise I’ll never go back.” But escape isn’t the same thing as liberation. Just because we get out of a situation doesn’t mean that we are free from it. This is one of the truths that AA teaches us – just because someone who is addicted doesn’t take a sip, it doesn’t mean they are free from the desire to drink. In Jesus, God is making it clear that it’s not that we’ve escaped from danger, rather we are free from it.
This is where the very challenging passage we heard in Matthew comes in. You all know that the Scripture readings aren’t chosen by me – they are something we hold in common with many other denominations that use what is called a lectionary. Well, the lectionary isn’t perfect. The prescribed readings for today skip verses 16-18 of chapter 2 of Matthew, but I added them back in because we are not a people who are afraid of Scripture or avoid tough texts. It’s often called the “Slaughter of the Innocents;” when Herod orders the massacre of all young children in and around Bethlehem. It’s a horrendous and atrocious act, and it’s also a necessary part of the Christmas story.
Just because our Savior has come does not mean that no evil will ever happen again. Salvation is not the same thing as escapism. We still have to make choices so that love can grow more deeply. Death remains something that awaits us all. Cancer, violence, dementia, and tragedy still threaten us. Our bodies are still frail and our temperament is still inclined to Sin. As the author Kate Bowler puts it in the title of one of her books, there is “No Cure for Being Human.” And the reason for that is that humanity is created good and life is a blessing, not something to be rescued from.
Yes, I pray that all of us are spared tragedy and suffering, but I know that’s not what any of us are promised. But what we are promised is salvation – from the tragedy being final, from pain being eternal, from love being conditional. These are the words of promise that we heard in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am going to bring and gather them back… With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water… For the LORD has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him… I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow.”
As one poet has put it, “I will die, but that is all I will do for death.” That is what being unbound from the fear of death sounds like. The stories of Harriet Tubman, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, William Wilberforce, Francis of Assisi, these are the stories of people who have embraced their freedom in Christ from the fears of death, reputation, disease, and poverty. To be sure, they all endured hardship, but those challenges did not bind them from doing the holy work that the Spirit gave them to do.
Claiming our freedom in Christ is difficult; it’s why so many of us resist it. We all suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome of Sin. It’s been said that getting the people out of Egypt through the Red Sea was easy; the hard part is getting Egypt out of the people. We’re so used to our bondage that we cling onto it. We rather like having enemies because it gives us someone to blame when things don’t go our way. We can feel superior when we pretend to have everything put together.
To embrace our salvation in Christ means that we have to be honest about our neediness and shortcomings. To leave Egypt means to give up the familiar and the comfortable. Inertia is almost always easier than change. It’s why recidivism is so common among those released from prison – it’s not so much that they want to live imprisoned, but it’s more familiar, and therefore easier, than freedom. Leaving Egypt means giving up the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about how we are a victim of our circumstances or how we should keep our expectations low.
Leaving our proverbial Egypts of expectations, shame, guilt, and fear is one thing, but no longer seeing ourselves as Egyptians is another. Into these places where we feel stuck, trapped, and tied up, Jesus comes to us and says, “Out of your Egypt, I am calling you.”
Forget New Year’s resolutions. What if 2025 is a year free from resolutions, expectations and fears? Instead of thinking about what we want to add, how about if we think about what we will embrace this year? Or better yet, what will we allow ourselves to be embraced by? God loves you, full stop. You are not accountable to other people’s expectations of you, including your own. You are not defined by the mistakes you’ve made. You are enough. Though we have been bound by so many things, Jesus Christ has come to free us and bring us the relief of grace. Embrace those Gospel truths, because even if we’ve lived most of our lives in Egypt, we are not Egyptians; we are God’s beloved.
