January 2, 2005
By Jack Price

Do you remember a few years ago the movie Back to the Future?  It was the story of a teenage boy who travels through time into past.  There he encounters his own parents before they were a couple.  He finds that his journey to the past affects the future, his present reality, as well.

While this may not be a smooth segue to this sermon, there is definitely a connection.  Their experience of Christ caused the early Jewish followers of Jesus to re-examine their own faith tradition.  They found a context for the life, teaching, death, and continuing presence of Jesus in that tradition.  Revisiting that tradition, they discovered, a changing, deepening, and renewing understanding of that tradition in light their experience of Christ.  That first generation of Christian believers had to hold their understanding of the Hebrew scriptures in tension with their experience of Christ.  The result was our New Testament scriptures, including the gospels.

Our experience of 1.            Christ today challenges you and me to re-examine our own lives, traditions, and understandings.  This is the task of every generation of believers.  It is vital in order to keep faith relevant.  It is vital for our participating in the new work that God is doing in this time and place.  In this new year, we are again called “back to the future”.

The New Testament gospels are an attempt to interpret the believers’ experience of Christ through the life and teachings of Jesus.  Matthew and Luke both contain birth narratives, including a virginal conception and miraculous birth, that are not in the other gospels.  Luke’s narrative is that familiar story of a Roman census and registration for taxation.  Mary and Joseph journey from their home in Nazareth of Galilee to the ancestral home of David – Bethlehem in the province of Judea.  Only Luke has this specific story.  Only Luke includes a borrowed manger, shepherds, and an angelic chorus.

Matthew’s gospel offers a different perspective on Christ’s birth.  Mary and Joseph are residents of Bethlehem.  They are betrothed when Mary is discovered to be pregnant.  Joseph is not the father.  Joseph intended to do the honorable thing in that culture.  He planned to break off the engagement privately so as not to disgrace or endanger Mary.  Adultery was a capital offense.

Joseph has dream.  In that dream, an angel tells him to marry Mary.  He acts on the dream and it seems that they were married prior to the baby being born.

Three wise men arrive from the East.  They are called wise because they can read meaning in the stars.  They go to Jerusalem then on to Bethlehem.  There they find the house that is the home of Mary and Joseph and their now young child.  Jesus was apparently almost two years old by this time.  The wise men bring valuable symbolic gifts.  After their departure, Joseph has another dream.

            Flee to Egypt!  That’s what Joseph hears in the dream and that’s what he does.  King Herod has all the children in that region up to two years killed in order to kill “new king”.  Joseph takes Mary and Jesus to safety in Egypt.  After Herod’s death, they return home, but it is not safe in Bethlehem.  They move to Nazareth in Galilee.  For Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, this was, in a sense, a permanent exile.

Matthew’s story is remarkable for many reasons.  One of the compelling is the parallel between the New Testament Joseph and the famous Joseph of the Old Testament.  This Old Testament Joseph was a famous dreamer who brought his family – his father Jacob and the other sons with their families --  to safety in Egypt.  They were at risk from the famine in Canaan that threatened God’s “embodied promise”.  The New Testament Joseph is also a famous dreamer.  He takes Jesus and Mary, God’s embodied promise, to safety in Egypt from a rampaging power in Judea that threatened this embodied promise.

            There is a further parallel.  Moses, who was Joseph’s descendent and “spiritual son” in terms of Jewish history, finally brought God’s people from slavery in Egypt to freedom and hope in the Promised Land.  Matthew portrays Jesus as a new Moses who leads his people out of slavery -- not to the powerful nation of Rome but from slavery to their own religious tradition and the oppressive ways it was being practiced.

God’s freedom calls us to embrace the same promise now, to journey from exile to freedom.  The New Testament Joseph’s spiritual son Jesus was the new Moses who was to lead his people from an exile of faith, purpose, and hope to freedom in the kingdom of God and in relationship with God.

Isaiah proclaims this truth (63:7-9).  God carried all God’s people.  God’s presence saved them in all their distress.

Jesus brings God’s gift of freedom to each generation.  This is freedom from an exile of self-imposed isolation -- “my way has to be the only right way”.  This is freedom from an exile of hopelessness when we wonder how to explain great suffering – the loss of more than 150,000 people in southern Asia and Africa or the loss of dear loved one.  This is freedom from an exile of grief when we become prisoners to our own grudges, anger, despair, and the feeling of being left out.

God’s way is freedom from all these.  It is also freedom to embrace the truth we see and understand and to confess the truth that seems inexplicable and beyond understanding.  God’s grace allows us to hold these together in a tension that is not of our own making.  It is a tension that comes with being human.  This is the freedom to embrace the new thing God is doing now, not without fear but without succumbing to fear.

The season of Epiphany begins next week.  Those three wise men represent a new understanding, a broader understanding, that God’s people includes all people.  Christ is for all.  There is a cosmic convergence through Jesus that is not exclusive, but inclusive – for all people and all time.

This season gives us an opportunity to re-examine what we think and what we believe.  We do this remembering that belief – mental assent to particular ideas – is just one aspect of faith.  Faith includes belief, trust, perspective, and commitment.  This broad concept is what the New Testament means by “believe on Christ”.

            I was on a plane recently, seated next to a girl who was probably no more than twenty years old.  Not intending to snoop, I noticed that she was writing  list of .          new year’s resolutions.  The very first one was to be “a more devout disciple of Christ”.  This can be a resolution for all of us.  This is not devotion as often practiced in the past:  devotion that separates us from people who see things differently, devotion that leads to an exile of divisiveness.  This is devotion to Christ that points us and leads us to freedom.

            This is the truth of Christmas.  God’s promise must be embodied anew in persons in each generation.  It is our task to understand and embody our experience of the living, “cosmic Christ”.

What does this mean for us a faith community in this new year?  Crossroads Church has a mission.  We are called to embody Christ in this time according to .      our unique giftedness.  That giftedness includes the diversity and inclusivity to reach across lines of divisions of culture, of ecclesiology, and of philosophy.  By doing so, we can touch those who are hurt, reclaim those who are disenfranchised, and seek life together in all its fullness.  By doing so, we have the ability to show this world, both those in the church and those not in the church, the freedom of Christ, the freedom of God.  We can show this world reality that God is still in Christ, embodied in people like you and me and in faith communities like this.  Through such a present day incarnation, we are committed to a ministry of reconciling people and of bringing together eternity and mortality.  This is a vision of living in the truth of eternity here and now.  I can think of no better use of life and energy.

In Letters to a Young Monk, author Raimundo Panikkar writes:

“Have confidence in yourselves; think deep and big,

that for God no action is impossible, that the urge you feel

within yourselves has historical significance, that there

where the Spirit is, there is freedom, that real love dispels fear,

that once you step out of mediocrity you are saved, that the possibilities are enormous and the world is thirsty for such steps,

Courage means to put one’s own heart into the praxis (practice).

You are the links with the past and, at the same time, the seeds of the future, but the seeds have to fly with the wind, to go with the Spirit, in order to fall on other unknown grounds, and yield fruit”

Brothers and sisters, let us be like Joseph and listen to our dreams and act on them.  Whether living at home or in a place of exile, let us be always moving into freedom.  God who is ultimate and universal meaning itself is at home within us and we are always at home within God.