Faith Takes Courage

The message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, December 26, 2021.  The Bible verses used are Matthew 2:1-18.

It’s the day after Christmas.  We’ve opened the presents.  We’ve had some good meals.  We’ve enjoyed some time with family and friends.  At this time of year, we want to enjoy the afterglow.  And part of that is to hear a nice, warm, fuzzy Christmas story.

The trouble is that the time right after the first Christmas was not nice, or warm, or fuzzy.  It was a bad time, a dangerous time.  Really, an evil time.  And we hear about that in our Bible reading today, the story of the wise men. 

The magi–the wise men–are one of the staples of the Christmas story.  Every nativity scene has them in it.  And yet we really know almost nothing about them.  This story, from the gospel of Matthew, is the only time they are mentioned in the Bible at all.

            We don’t know where they came from, other than “the east”.  We don’t know how many of them there were–we traditionally have three of them in the nativity scene, but the Bible does not say there were three of them.  It just says that they left three gifts–gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  

            They knew that the star they had seen was a sign that the King of the Jews had been born.  But they clearly did not know exactly where that would be.  They came to Jerusalem and asked around.  Eventually, word got to Herod of these wise men asking about a king of the Jews, and Herod, after consultation with the chief priests, is the one who actually told the wise men to go to Bethlehem.  One wonders if, without Herod, the wise men would have even found the Savior.

            They did, of course.  And they worshiped him, and they left the gifts.  Herod had wanted them to come back to him after they found the Savior, but an angel told them not to do that, so they went back home.  And we never hear about the wise men again.

            And a lot of times, that’s where we leave the story.  We don’t want to deal with what comes next.  Because what comes next is Joseph, Mary and Jesus on the run.  They are trying to escape Herod, because Herod wants to kill Jesus.  And just to make sure he gets Jesus, Herod orders the death of every male child in and around Bethlehem who was two years old or younger.

            We’re not going to put that in the kids’ Christmas program, are we?  Think what a terrible thing that would be.  You’re at home with your family.  You have a young son, a baby, maybe a toddler.  Just a typical day, a day to be with the ones you love.  

Then you hear some sort of commotion outside.  It gets louder, nearer.  Shouting.  Crying.  Destruction.  You wonder what in the world could be happening.  You wonder if you should look out to see what’s going on, if you should hide, if you should run.  You don’t know what to do.  Suddenly, there’s a crash.  Roman soldiers have broken down your door.  They don’t say a word.  You stand there, frozen.  They find your son.  They take him.  And they kill him.  And then they leave, moving on to the next house.  The whole thing takes about two minutes.

Can you imagine what that would be like?  The mix of emotions.  The anger.  The guilt.  The wondering why.  The complete irrationality of what just happened.  And overriding all of that, the incredible sense of grief over what just happened.

But as with all stories in the Bible, a question we need to ask is:  Why is this in the Bible?  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning whether it actually happened.  But there are lots of things that happened during Jesus’ life that the Bible does not tell us about.  In fact, we have only one story about him from the time he was a baby until the time he started his ministry when he was about thirty.  So apart from just historical accuracy, why is this story in the Bible?  Why did Matthew, under the divine inspiration of God, decide we need to know about it?  What is it that we’re supposed to learn from this story?

Well, there are probably a lot of things we could learn.  One of them is that God was there to protect Jesus and his family.  God made sure the wise men did not tell Herod where Jesus was.  God made sure Joseph knew to take his family and get out of Bethlehem before the Roman soldiers came.  God made sure that His divine Son would live and be able to fulfill the mission He had been sent to earth for.

But God did not protect the other children in Bethlehem.  Why not?  Why did God allow these other children to be killed?  Why did God not do something to stop it?

It seems like it would’ve been simple to stop it, especially when you’re God.  For one thing, if the wise men had not gone to Jerusalem and asked about the birth of the King of the Jews, Herod would never even have known about it.  Why not keep them from going there?  Why not send an angel to let the wise men know where Jesus was?  Or why not send angels to the other families in town, like God did for Joseph, to tell them to get out of town, too?  Or why not do something to keep the soldiers from going to Bethlehem?  There had to be dozens of ways God could’ve prevented this from happening.

The Bible tells us this was to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy, so in one way that’s an answer, but it still kind of begs the question, right?  The Old Testament prophecy came from God.  God could’ve had the prophecy be different, and have it fulfilled in a different way.  Again, God could’ve prevented this.  And God did not.

One thing this story shows us, I think, is the powerful presence of evil in our world.  Because that’s what this is, right?  Complete, total evil.  I mean, wanting to kill just one young boy would be evil.  Killing all boys two years old or younger, just to make sure you kill the one you want to kill–that’s hard to even imagine.  It’s hard to even comprehend the thought process that would make someone do that.  But the way it sounds, Herod had absolutely no hesitancy in doing this.  

It also shows how easy it is for a powerful person to get others to go along with evil.  Because the way it sounds, nobody who was close to Herod questioned what Herod was doing.  Now, it’s possible that someone did, because the Bible does not specifically say they did not.  But we don’t read of anyone who said “Hey, Herod, this is not right.  You should not be doing this.  It’s just wrong to kill these little boys, no matter what your reason is.”

Would it have taken courage to do that?  Yes, it would.  It would have taken a lot of courage.  If someone had stood up to Herod, Herod could easily have had them killed, too.  And the way it sounds, Herod would not even have thought twice about doing it.

And maybe that’s one of the most important lessons we can take from this story.  It takes courage to be a Christian.  It takes courage to stand up for our faith.  It takes courage to say, hey, this is wrong.  We should not do this.  We cannot do this.

And that courage is not just involved when we’re talking to people in power.  For most of us, that won’t happen very often.  Courage is also when we’re in a group, and someone says something or does something that we know is not right.  Peer pressure is not just something that affects kids, you know.  It affects adults, too.  We all want to be liked.  We all want to have friends.  It takes courage to say, hey, we should not be doing this.  We should not be talking badly about this person.  We should not be spreading gossip about people.  It’s not easy to do that, especially when we’re in a group of people we consider our friends.  It takes courage to stand up for our faith in those situations.

But of course, standing up for our faith does not always involve stopping things.  Sometimes it involves starting things.  Sometimes, standing up for our faith takes the courage to say, hey, we should do this.  We should be helping this person.  We should be praying for these people.  We should talk about Jesus when we’re out in public.  Not only should we do those things, we need to do those things.  But sometimes, those are things a lot of people don’t want to do.  Sometimes they’re things we, ourselves, don’t want to do.  It takes courage to say, hey, we need to do them, even if we’d rather not, because these are the things Jesus wants us to do.

Maybe you have that courage.  Maybe you’ve shown that courage.  Maybe you show it every day.  It’s not my job to judge you.  I just know that I do not show that courage nearly as often as I should.  It’s something I need to work on and pray about.  And I suspect I’m not the only one.

Evil is a powerful presence in the world, and it takes lots of forms.  Some of them are big, and some of them are small.  Standing up to it takes courage.  With God’s help, may we all have the courage to stand up for our Christian faith, no matter what the consequences may be.