Today I had the privilege of conducting the baptism of a six year old child. In the Presbyterian Church, there is no defined age for a baptism and I have baptized people at various ages through the years, but this was my first six year old. I found it a deeply meaningful celebration for a number of reasons but mostly because the child got to have a say to and express his faith at the level of understanding. I adapted the baptismal questions as followed:
Minister: Candidate, I know that you have heard the name of Jesus, that you are learning about him, his words and his stories. Candidate, I want to ask you a very important question. Based on what you know right now about Jesus, are you willing to trust him and to serve him as best as you can?
Candidate: Yes, I am.
Minister: Candidate, as a sign of your trust in Jesus, are you willing to be baptized?
Candidate: Yes.
Minister: Mother and Father, in his own way, Candidate could probably teach us all a great deal about what it really means to have faith in Jesus. But he is still growing in his knowledge about Jesus and his gospel. He needs someone to help and protect his faith as he grows. Will you do that for him?
Parents: We will.
Minister: But that is more than we can ask of two people alone. Big brother, will you, as big brother, also do your part to help Candidategrow in faith?
Big Brother: I will.
Minister: And will you, Witnessand Witness do what you can to assist this family in this very important task before them?
Witnesses: I will.
(Congregation stand)
Minister: But even a loving family and committed friends are not enough. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a church to create a faithful Christian. Will you, the people of St. Andrew’s Hespeler, provide for Candidate and his family a community where they can all grow in faith and explore their relationship with God in Christ? Will you welcome and value them for who they are?
Congregation: We will.
Scott: Father and Mother, will you make sure that this congregation (or whatever congregations you may belong to in the future) has the opportunity to fulfill the promises that they have made here today?
Parents: We will.
Minister: Then, by all means, let us celebrate this sacrament of faith and commitment!
The most fun part of the baptism? I must say that I have never had a candidate so eager to say yes to my questions!
he people of Alexandria were all stirred up and you could understand why. After all, didn’t the city have enough of its own problems? The economy had been dismal for years. Ever since the death of Anthony and Cleopatra, Roman taxes had only gone up and up. (It seemed as if nine out of every ten bushels of wheat produced in the Nile valley was shipped overseas to feed the ever-hungry people of Rome) and the lack of a descent flood of the Nile in, like, three years, meant that there just didn’t seem to be enough to feed Egypt’s population.
And then there was the labour market. It had been, what, like a thousand years since anybody was hiring in the pyramid building industry. And really, what other work was there for good hardworking Egyptians? Mummy wrapping? Hieroglyphic drawing? Slavery? The guys who whip the slaves? Listen, the point is that there were only so many good jobs to go around and the last thing they needed was outsiders – non-Egyptians – coming along and taking away good jobs from hardworking Egyptians.
But it wasn’t just about the economy. You had to think about the question of security. The rumour was that these people who were coming in had been part of an incident that had frightened the whole city of Jerusalem. That’s right, they had employed fear (also known as terror) and we all know what you call people who use terror to achieve their goals – or at least what we call people who don’t look like us and use terror to achieve their goals. That’s right, we call them terrorists.
And what was the “incident” that they were involved in? Well it seems to be nothing less than a plot to replace the existing, duly appointed government with some new and previously unknown figure. That’s right, it was nothing less than an insurrection.
Did the existing regime overreact by sending in the troops and exterminating all of the children in an
entire region? Well, yes, there is absolutely no doubt that they did and Egypt certainly should send a sternly worded letter to Rome to protest such absolute atrocities. But, even so, Judea needs to solve Judea’s own problems. By all means, construct refugee camps on the borders of Judea – maybe in Galilee. I mean, yes, Herod is in charge of Galilee too, but what I’m saying is that surely there has to be some kind of local solution without having these people show up in Egypt.
And, dare I risk saying it, these people from Judea were followers of a strange and foreign religion. They didn’t worship real gods – not the ones that you could actually see in a statue or an inscription – and they wouldn’t even acknowledge the greatness of gods like Horus, Isis and Osiris. They just had this idea of some invisible God who ruled over the whole world – a radical and dangerous idea if ever there was one.
That is exactly what the people of Alexandria were saying as they peeked through their blinds and spoke behind their hands about the newcomers – the few families from some town called Bethlehem – who were settling down in their city. What good could come from these refugees anyways? They were only a drain on Egypt – a drain on the world. Nothing good could come from allowing them to come into the country.
It is what people have always said about refugees. Did you think that it only came up in the most recent talk about bringing in huge numbers of people from Syria and some of the surrounding counties? No. Canada may well be a country built by immigrants and refugees but that hardly means that each wave of people coming in was welcomed with open arms.
The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t offer any account of what sort of welcome Jesus, Mary and Joseph received in Egypt. All he writes is that “Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt.” People have often taken that to mean that they left alone and without telling anyone, leaving other children of Bethlehem to their fates. The flight into Egypt has long been a standard piece in traditional Christian art and always it had been portrayed with only three characters making that flight. But I have a hard time believing it would have happened like that. What is being described is a major persecution for political beliefs – for the belief that there was someone else out there who had a better claim to rule over Judea than Herod.
Unfortunately, there is a long history of how people react in such times and there is little reason to think that Joseph’s little family would have reacted any differently. Matthew portrays them as having a home and family and friends in Bethlehem. How could they possibly have even considered leaving if they did not at least attempt to take some of those people with them? So I imagine at least a small group of Judeans from the area around Bethlehem escaped, making their way through the desert towards Egypt.
And how would this small tribe have been welcomed in Egypt? Undoubtedly in the same way that such people have always been welcomed: with suspicion, judgement and fear. Did you know that, in the first century, Egypt (and especially Alexandria) had a very large expatriate Jewish community? But even that likely would not have made much difference on how they were welcomed. What we often see is that people who have already arrived as immigrants or refugees in a country can be very grateful for the opportunities that they have received and yet still oppose those opportunities being given to others still on the outside.
So, yes, there is every reason to think that the family fleeing from Bethlehem would have met with all kinds of rejection and scorn. And how wrong that was! Jesus, we believe, came into this world to reveal God to us, to bring us back into relationship with God and to say and do things that would change all history. He came to bring salvation upon all nations including the Egyptians who, within a couple of centuries, would embrace Christianity with unparalleled enthusiasm. But, when he arrived, the people of Egypt only saw him as a dirty, dangerous and a best gotten rid of as soon as possible refugee child.
Which is a way of saying that the things that people assume about refugees is generally not true. Many of you have probably seen an email that has circulated whenever, in recent years, Canada has talked about taking in more refugee families. This email that you’ve probably had sent to you by some aunt or cousin declares that refugees receive a monthly allowance of $1,890.00 and each can get an additional $580.00 in social assistance for a total of $2,470.00. Which it compares to what is received by Canadian pensioners, an amount of only $1,012.00 a month.
The email was obviously written by someone who wanted people to be very appalled at all that refugees take away from our Canadian resources. And the email, which has been shared literally millions of times in countries all over the world, has obviously connected with all kinds of people for that very reason.
Does it matter that the so-called facts in the email are not actually true? I mean the amount that it says that refugees receive is actually a maximum amount that a family might possibly receive as a one-time payment – not a monthly payment at all so it doesn’t even make sense to compare it to a monthly pension payment. No it probably doesn’t matter because a lot of people don’t care about the facts. They are far more interested in what they see as the reality that refugees are a drain.
But it’s not just about the facts anyways; it is about truth. The truth of the matter is that it has been consistently shown throughout history that refugees bring far more to a country than they take out of it. Yes, at first when they arrive with almost nothing and are unable to work they do receive to a certain extent (though probably less than you might think). But in the long run they certainly give back far more than they ever receive. Indeed, some of it is literally paid back. Any travel expenses that are paid to get them here are literally a loan that they have to repay within a certain amount of time.
But, more than that, it has been found through wave after wave of refugees from various parts of the world, that there has been a continuous story of contribution to Canada in all kinds of ways. Far from taking jobs away from Canadians, in the long run they actually create jobs by helping the economy to grow and through their own enterprise. They pay more into systems like the pension plan or the health care system through taxes than they ever receive. Are there a few exceptions – people who ultimately don’t contribute much? Of course there are, just as there are in other sectors of the population. But overall the contribution of refugees to their host countries is extraordinary.
And the Bible is certainly in tune with these truths. You may not be aware of this, but Jesus is hardly the only refugee that the Bible celebrates. In fact, the list of Biblical refugees is almost a who’s who of scripture. We have Moses, who fled political persecution in Egypt when the king of Egypt wanted to kill him for fomenting a slave revolt. Jacob fled domestic persecution (a brother who was going to kill him) and sought refuge in Haran. The prophet Jeremiah fled an invading army and went to hide, like Jesus, in Egypt. Two other prophets, Ezra and Nehemiah were refugees in Babylon who returned to rebuild their war torn city of Jerusalem. John, the one who wrote the Book of Revelations, was a refugee from imperial power on the island of Patmos.
All of these people would definitely fit the modern United Nation High Commission on Refugees’ definition of a refugee and we regularly celebrate all of the great and wonderful things that God did through them. They were and are no drains on any nation. They are miracle workers, leaders, great thinkers and more whose contributions echo down through the ages.
And that isn’t even counting all of the people in the Bible who don’t fit the strict definition of refugee but who migrated out of a deep need – because of famine, financial disaster and devastation. On this list we could include people like Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, all the children of Jacob, Ruth and Elijah. Can you imagine what the world would be like without the contribution of people like that?
It is true that the world is presently in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in history with 60 million people displaced, the biggest cause of this displacement being the ongoing war in Syria. Of course such a large crisis is going to create waves of trouble all over the world. Of course it will not be solved or even made much better easily. This is a huge global problem the size of which we have never seen before and we will have to put some policies in place and perhaps set some limits that we do not feel all that comfortable with.
But in the midst of all that, let us not forget that a refugee crisis is not just about numbers and statistics. It is about families – real families just like one that included a woman named Mary, her husband named Joseph and their young child. It is also about families that may cause some disruption or even trouble when they arrive but who also have so much to offer to the world. This calls for a certain attitude towards strangers and refugees that is also an essential part of the Christmas message.
But the leper, who lived outside Capernaum, did not!
Because of psoriasis his skin was all white
And the people who saw him reacted in fright.
But as much as they scorned him for being impure
The leper detested himself even more.
He was certain that all this had happened to him
Because he’d deserved it – because of some sin.
So he spent all his days in a terrible mood
And in dark depression he constantly stewed.
For nobody loved him – no body at all
And that’s why his heart was two sizes too small.
It is fair, I think, to compare Dr. Seuss’ story of the Grinch who stole Christmas with the story of the leper from Mark’s Gospel. They actually have a great deal in common. Both the Grinch and the leper live outside of town – away from the society of other people. This is not stated in the gospel story, of course. But it is understood. There were numerous laws and rules in the Galilee of Jesus’ time that required all
lepers to stay out of populated places. A leper risked getting stoned to death just for coming into town. The Grinch’s reasons for living away from others seem to be a bit different – seem to be based on a basic mutual dislike – but the effect is the same.
There is something else that the two of them have in common: there is no real medical reason for their banishment. More than anything, the cause of their troubles seems to have to do with the accident of skin colour. Certainly there is nothing physically wrong with the Grinch that means that he cannot live in Whoville. The thing that sets him apart (at least according to the movie version of his story) is that he just happens to be green and people haven’t been able to accept that.
The odd thing is that that is likely true of the leper too. This is confusing because, for us today, leprosy refers to a very specific medical condition – a highly contagious disease called Hanson’s disease that destroys the nerve endings in a person’s body leading to terrible disfigurement or worse. But ancient people were never so accurate in their medical diagnoses. The people in Jesus’ world just called any skin condition that persisted for any length of time leprosy – any skin condition. That includes persistent rashes, eczema, psoriasis. So things that, for us, are easily treated or managed with creams, salves or other medications meant for them that you were banished from the ordinary society of other people. So the leper may well have been an outcast because his skin just happened to be a strange colour – perhaps white or bright red.
So people labeled as lepers could be unfairly and unnecessarily cast out. It was all based on attitudes of blame. Everyone – including the lepers themselves – blamed the victims for their disease. They must have done something to deserve it. They must have been exceedingly wicked for such a thing to happen to them. The real problem, in most cases, was not the skin condition but the attitude towards it.
And the worst thing about it was that the attitude actually made the condition worse. Being banished from society meant that they could not take care of their skin and so wounds festered, lesions became caked with dirt and new infections were picked up. And it was practically impossible to break out of that cycle.
That leper was sitting outside of the town
When all of a sudden there came walking down
The street a great crowd. And among all these folk
Was Jesus the prophet and healer who spoke
And he told them of life and a God up above
Who poured out on people a most perfect love.
But at this the leper just scoffed and he vowed
That he’d prove that this preacher was merely a fraud.
So he jumped out and fell to his knees with a jeer.
The crowd all stepped back in considerable fear
While the leper cried out in a tone that was mean.
“If you’re willing,” he sneered “you can make me clean.”
Now I don’t know if that request was spoken in exactly that tone or not. But I do know that it was certainly an odd way to put it. The man seems to have had no doubt that Jesus could heal him. What he does question, however, is whether Jesus would choose to do it. And, you see, he had good reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t. After all, why would Jesus treat him any different than all the other people who had long ago decided that he wasn’t worth the trouble?
Remember, this guy’s biggest problem wasn’t any skin condition. It was attitude – both his and everyone else’s. And he simply couldn’t see any way that those attitudes could change – not his own and certainly not anyone else’s. Why it would have taken something truly extraordinary to break through years and years of assumptions and suspicions, of hatred, fear and blame. Why someone would have to do something crazy like...
Jesus felt compassion and reached out his hand.
He touched that poor leper that knelt on the sand.
The people cried out and drew back in dismay
“Jesus, why’d you do that?” they started to say.
The healer ignored their concern for hygiene
And said, “I do will it. I say you are clean.”
And what happened then? In Capernaum they say
That the leper’s small heart grew three sizes that day.
But a far greater wonder is yet to be told.
For those who saw Jesus behaving so bold
Were stunned to discover their hearts too could grow
To encompass that man they had once feared to know.
So sisters and brothers, don’t wait to show love.
In your hands is a power that comes from above.
To touch is to care and to care is to heal
And that’s how from heaven God’s love you reveal.
And he heard him exclaim ere he strode out of sight,