Entering 2008:

“Safe Return Doubtful”

 

Then Joseph got up, took the child and his

mother by night, and went to Egypt.

(Matthew 2:14)

 

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on Epiphany of the Lord Sunday, January 6, 2008

Volume 2 Number 27

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653 

 

At the direction of the angel Joseph leaves Bethlehem, escaping Herod’s rage in a flight to Egypt. For Joseph and the holy family, Safe Return was Doubtful.

 

Speaking of returning to Bethlehem, I was pleased on Christmas morning to see, on the front page of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, an Associate Press article reporting that, for the first time since the year 2000, pilgrims were returning to Bethlehem in number, all 5000 hotel rooms in the city filled for the first time since 1999.  Many of you will have seen that article, featuring a little girl standing among the ancient, massive pillars in the nave of the Church of the Nativity, a church I’ve described to you before, having had the privilege of leading many pilgrims to that holy place.

 

In late 2000, the second Intifada began.  A few months later, just after New Year’s Day 2001, the Intifada growing worse, I traveled to the Holy Land with a group of pastors and scholars, and in the midst of our touring was a meeting with the mayor of Bethlehem, who sought to convince us that Bethlehem was safe for our people to visit.  We did find Bethlehem safe.  And, empty. 

 

The large bus depot near the church, built the previous year to handle the expected hundreds of thousands of turn-of-the-millennium pilgrims in 2000, was virtually empty.  The thirty of us made our way through a mostly vacated Manger Square into the church and down into the cave over which this church built by Constantine’s mother, Queen Helena, in 327 A. D.  I’ve been in that grotto of the Savior’s birth in times when you could barely move, filled with people singing hymns, kneeling to touch the star, weeping with friends, or simply stunned by the experience of being there.  On this day, the grotto was empty.

 

Bethlehem is a troubled place.  Sad, isn’t it, that the birthplace of the one we call the Prince of Peace would be so contentious today.  Peace is elusive for this city where the shepherds heard the angels sing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men.”   This West Bank city with a Hebrew name, House of Bread, is home to some 35,000 Palestinians, but the Palestinian Christian population has dwindled rapidly since the city was turned over to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the Oslo Accords.  Christians, who made up 90% of the population a hundred years ago, now number less than 30%.  

 

Still, for all its misfortune, I can’t imagine, when leading a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, not going to Bethlehem, the famous home of Boaz and Ruth and their great-grandson, King David, the birthplace of Jesus the Christ.  Bethlehem is a must see.  I was reminded of this recently by my family when I mentioned that my good friend Rev. Don Chandler, who has accompanied me on my last two trips, will chosen not to take his group to Bethlehem when he leads a group to the Holy Land this October, settling instead for the overlook of the city called Ramat Rachael (The Heights of Rachel), where Phillips Brooks wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  I threw this idea up as a trial balloon and my wife and daughters needed little time to shoot the idea down, saying the experience of Bethlehem was too meaningful. 

 

Why are some tempted to skip Bethlehem?  Well, the Church of the Nativity is the sum total of sites with biblical significance.  We shop for souvenirs, eat lunch, and go to the church.  When it comes time to depart we hustle back through Manger Square and head back to Jerusalem. All told, our excursion to Bethlehem takes only a few hours, and we are all visibly relieved when, having said our thank-yous and goodbyes to our Palestinian guide, we go back across the IDF checkpoint at the now famous wall, and head back to the more beautiful hotels of Jerusalem six miles away, a city where there is so much more to see connected to the biblical story of Jesus.

 

We learn that while we could spend an entire week in the lush Galilee and yet another week or two in Jerusalem, three or four hours in Bethlehem is plenty, thank you very much.  You see, Nobody Lingers in Bethlehem.  Not even Jesus, who was quickly shuttled off to Egypt after the warning of an angel.  After Herod’s death, Joseph didn’t return to Bethlehem, but to the Galilee.  The gospels tell of Jesus the adult returning to Nazareth to preach, but we never hear of a return trip to Bethlehem, the place of his nativity.  Seems Nobody Lingers in Bethlehem.

 

The bible quickly moves us away from the manger, and our trips to Holy Land do the same.  In a mere twelve verses Matthew goes from the Magi beginning their journey of wonder to the bloody story of Herod’s Bethlehem massacre.  It’s a jolt, that so soon after the joy of Christmas we are confronted with evil in a politically-charged story.  Yes, God has become flesh, but if flesh, somebody is going to get hurt.  Things are going to get bloody.   If Christmas has left us with a Christmas card sentimentality and saccharine celebrations, the bloody story of Herod’s abuse of power is an antidote of political realism. 

 

Likewise, our liturgy takes us in and out of Bethlehem with haste, swooping in to honor the Christ born there, then quickly escaping after the Twelve Days of Christmas to the peaceful Galilee, by way of the Jordan River.  Our liturgical journey will take us next week to the Jordan for Baptism of the Lord Sunday, then north to Galilee to remember Jesus’ ministry.

 

Nobody Lingers in Bethlehem.  Not Christian pilgrims.  Not the bible.  Not our liturgy.  Not even Jesus.  Yet make no mistake — Bethlehem, THIS Bethlehem of human sin and suffering, is what Christmas is all about.  Any God unwilling to come to this Bethlehem won’t do us much good.  God didn’t come to us, Emmanuel, to adorn a Christmas card with infant innocence, but to suffer with his creatures, to bring redemption through a love that made him companion to our human suffering and grief.  In this sense, Bethlehem is all around us, home to each one of us.  Whether in Egypt or in the Galilee, the entire human journey of the Christ encountered his creatures in the Bethlehem of humanity.

 

So in that sense there was no escape.  When Joseph left on his journey, his safe return was doubtful.  Let me tell you about my sub-title, Safe Return Doubtful.   The phrase originates with an expedition in 1914 under the command of Sir Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica, on a ship aptly named Endurance.  Hiring a crew for the expedition, Shackleton is famously said to have advertised, “Safe Return Doubtful.” Talk about full disclosure!

 

Still, the adventurous did apply, and the Endurance launched into the deep, becoming at last mired in the pack ice, unassailably trapped never again to find safe harbor.  Thankfully, the crew was dramatically rescued and did return safely, but only after an improbable ordeal lasting nearly two years.  92 years ago this week, stuck on that ship on January 10, 1915, Thomas Orde-Lees looked 100 years into the future and wrote in his journal, “No doubt the explorers of 2015, if there is anything left to explore, will . . . carry their pocket wireless telephones . . . of course, there will be an aerial daily excursion to both poles by then.”  Talk about prophetic! 

 

Sir Shackleton wrote about the spirit of human exploration, “We all have our own White South.”  There are moments when each of us step into the unknown, into the emptiness.  This week we have stepped into the emptiness of a New Year.  Our decisions, our choices, will play a major role in how that year evolves.  Our choices will necessarily change who we are.  Safe Return is Doubtful.  The wedding in this sanctuary yesterday made me recall my own, when Sherry at the threshold of the church slipped her hand into her father’s arm only to hear him turn and whisper, “Sherry, it’s not too late to change your mind.”  No, but soon it would be.  Once at the altar the voyage had begun, and Safe Return was Doubtful, by which I mean to say, once crossing this threshold, there would be no return to the status quo, no return to life before that decision. 

 

It’s a simple truth, isn’t it?  Our choices are important.  They do make a difference.  This is a key focus of work with youth in school, church, and parenting – to stress that decisions are important, shaping what the young person will become.  Who to hang around with.  How to conduct oneself.  What to study and what school to attend.  What job to seek.  Once a decision is made, Safe Return is Doubtful. 

 

This goes for churches.  We are not the same church today as we were when we entered 2007, when the pictures for our new pictorial directory were taken.  Already it’s dated, and I don’t mean merely that our faces have aged by nearly a year.  I mean that our decisions as a church make Safe Return Doubtful.  And when, a year from now, we enter 2009, we will be a different church in many ways from what we are today.  Nor is this fact something we should fear, because change is fundamental to living, and if we wish to be a Church Alive, we will be changing. 

 

Sometimes, when dreams are born in a new and exciting way, we revere that birth, and it becomes our Bethlehem.  We find ourselves attached and wish never to leave that once-new-way of doing things.  We want never to change.  But folks, Nobody Lingers in Bethlehem.  The birth of anything new must move us forward to Something Other, so that we are always asking, “What is of God’s new reality for us, and what is of the old reality that is passing away?”

 

Perhaps it is true what Bishop Willimon suggests, that some things in the struggling mainline church that were born in the 19^th century, bolstering the church’s witness with wonderful success in making the Church Alive, must pass away and receive a decent burial if God is going to be able to birth a new reality in the church today.  What has happened on a denominational scale also happens in local churches.  It’s natural, of course, for churches to want to stay in the Bethlehem where a sacred idea was born, that infant excitement of a new idea where the gift of God was so obvious that the Enemy was stirred to wrath. 

 

Yet, let us remember that the best of gifts always move us to the Something Other.  Nobody Lingers in Bethlehem. 

 

Sources:

“Blood and Bethlehem,” a sermon by William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Volume 29, Number 4.  I am indebted to this excellent sermon for providing the general inspiration for my own development of this sermon based upon my own experiences in the Holy Land.

 

“Bethlehem 2007 A. D.” an article by Michael Finkel in National Geographic, December 2007.

 

“The Lure of the ‘White South,’” by Caroline Alexander, The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001.