Difficult Times 12.29.19

Difficult Times

By Jared Slack

A Sermon on Isaiah 63:7-9 and Matthew 2:13-23

For the First Sunday of Christmastide (Dec 29, 2019)

First Austin: a baptist community of faith

I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but had Matthew and I been contemporaries I doubt we would have been all that friendly with one another.

I realize that’s probably not the kind of thing a person should say out loud, at least not from behind a pulpit of this size, but you and I both know that from time to time we find ourselves in close proximity to the kinds of people that just aren’t our proverbial cups of tea. 

You know… the types that go about doing things in the world with a bit of a different perspective and set of priorities than we do. 

They handle themselves in very different ways than we might.

They test our nerves and have a keen ability to get under our skin just enough to be annoying.

They have this way about them that feels unavoidably challenging at times.

Maybe it’s their political views or their moral compass that’s a bit too askew from our own.

Or it could be that the very things we cherish go against the very things that they cherish and vice versa.

And it’s not that they’re bad; it’s not that at all. It’s just that they’re… well, how’s the best way to say this… 

… it’s just that they’re difficult.

And to be clear, it’s not that we don’t like them, per se -- this is still a church after all -- it’s just that we have a hard time loving them along with all the other extra things that happen to accompany them on their life’s journey. 

Those things that for one unfortunate reason or another tend to grate on us a bit more than we would like to admit… 

I know you have those people.

I’ve just admitted to you that I have those people.

There’s even a chance that many of you are fresh off spending a few days in close quarters with these people. There’s a good chance that some of those people are in this very room today or they’ll be back here next week… 

This is a church after all. 

And there’s a near 100% chance that the very people you and I metaphorically label as “difficult” have already blessed us with the exact same title.

It’s sort of like the other day when I walked into my therapist’s office, sat down on her couch and asked, “Is it possible that I’m actually the difficult one?”

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Biblical scholars (or at least, the ones I tend to turn to in times like these) tell us that the basic message that lies at the core of Mathew’s Gospel is actually based upon a combination of information and narrative taken from the early written Gospel of Mark and this other ancient source document called “Q.”

You see, approximately 90% of Mark’s Gospel is found in Matthew, but it may be a bit hard to detect because a lot of it has been copied and pasted out of order and inter-woven into Matthew’s dense collection of footnotes and references to prophetic, priestly, and deutero-nomical sources…

It seems, and this honestly isn’t just me saying this, that whoever put the Gospel of Matthew down on paper was operating from the perspective that the Gospel of Mark, written some 50 years prior, no longer met the needs of Matthew’s particular crowd and the particular perspective they were coming from.

Unlike Mark, who has no time for any kind of birth narrative and skips over all the angst of Jesus’ growing up years, Matthew goes to great lengths to demonstrate in various and numerous ways how this newborn infant, the Baby Jesus, is THE Son of David -- a title Matthew uses over and over -- and that Jesus, before he’s even dirtied his first diaper, unequivocally meets any and all prerequisites for being the long-awaited messiah of Israel.

And this right here may just be what makes Matthew such a “difficult person” for me. Because while the Gospel of Mark has this raw and dramatic flair that wastes no time, and the Gospel of Luke is this unashamed, in your face social justice preacher, and John keeps things at this soaring, mystical level…

I get lost under under Matthew’s deluge of information and citations he deploys to provide a more palatable defense of Jesus’s Messiah-ship for an audience that’s rather wary of his humble and tragic beginnings.

It might be helpful for you to grab the bible there in the pew back in front of you and flip to the first pages of the New Testament to see this for yourself… but notice that just in the opening two chapters, Matthew records a 14-generation-deep family tree, along with a litany of narrative-halting references to almost every single decisive moment in the history of the people of Israel… all the while trying to tell the harrowing story of the infant Jesus, who has nowhere to safely and securely lay his head from the very first day he was born.

Friends, there’s a good chance that on another Sunday, in another sermon, I might be praising Matthew for all his thoroughness…  but today I’m just a tad bit put off by all these easy answers for a story from way-back-when, and in a time right now that is rife with really difficult questions and exceptionally difficult people. 

There is a significant part of me that really does appreciate Matthew’s hard work in connecting all these dots for us. About how Jesus’s miraculous rescue from the hands of Herod is the perfect allusion to when little baby Moses was floated in a basket amongst the bulrushes to avoid Pharaoh’s murderous plot. 

Or how Jesus’s ultimate displacement as a refugee that lands him and his family out in the sticks in a town called Nazareth is an important plot point that fulfills an obscure prophecy from long ago.

And believe me, I just spent the whole last week side-by-side on the couch with my lovely wife, both of us perpetually in our pajamas, indulging in one Harry Potter movie after the other.

It seems that stories involving prophecies from long ago and chosen ones born into tragedy invigorate quite the following. 

That’s true now and that was true then.

But the difficult questions I have today aren’t all that satisfied by any of Matthew’s well-researched answers. Because for me, any answer that begins with this premise that the tragedies and atrocities of our world can be explained with phrases like, “This all happened in order to fulfill what had been spoken..."

...I’m not too sure, but I don’t think that even this sort of knowledge helped Jesus carry the grief of knowing his birth triggered so much pain in the world. That every single time he heard his parents tell the story of how he was born he would be reminded of what it meant for so many. 

That even in those moments when he was preaching before the multitudes, feeding the five thousands, and fulfilling all the incredible work set out for him to do that there wasn’t also with him a lingering dose of grief and reality that from day one his very presence came at a terribly high cost. Or that in the course of his travels that he didn’t from time to time encounter people from the areas in and around Bethlehem. 

The Jesus that I believe I’ve come to know, and the Jesus I try to tell the world about, would have readily seen it in their eyes and heard in their voices, that they had been witnesses to the kinds violence and brutality that can only be doled out by the most powerful people of our world who feel threatened.

And just because all the prophetical stars mystically aligned pointing to Jesus as being the Messiah we’ve all been waiting for… that still doesn’t quite extinguish all the pernicious difficulties of the times you and I live in. 

It doesn’t quite answer all the questions we might have.

A truth that seems to get truer with ever year -- Christmas can’t solve all our problems. We’ll be back here again in just a short year’s time, expectant as ever, longing like we always have been, and waiting once more for Christ to break into our world and make us new… just like the prophecies tell us he will. AMEN.