Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 2:13–22

A year ago, just a few days after the inauguration, I was in Cairo. The Egyptian Christian—Coptic—part of the city is among the oldest settled areas there. A group of Lutheran pastors were standing at the top of a stairway that led down to another street, now well below the modern city. Our devotion that day used this very gospel text, led by a deacon who worked for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service—an organization Gloria Dei has known for a long time.

Over the years, this congregation has helped settle immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe, Laos, Peru, and most recently an asylum seeker from Nigeria. At the time, we didn’t know that much of the funding that supported that work would soon disappear, effectively shutting it down.

After the devotion, we hunched through a small door into an ancient church. More steps led down into a renovated chapel, where there was a circle in the floor, covered by glass, with a simple sign:

Slide 1 – Picture, Abu Sarga, Cairo

“The well which the Holy Family drank from.”

I remember standing there, feeling the fullness of the place. Whether Jesus drank from that well didn’t really matter. What mattered was that for centuries—more than a thousand years—people believed that he had. God had passed through their neighborhood. The Spirit of Jesus fused the holy and the ordinary in a way that could not be undone, no matter what was happening above on the street. We quietly moved through a deeper chapel that claimed to be the cavern where the Holy Family lived for three months.

Slide 2 – Well, Coptic Quarter, Cairo

When we came out of the church, there was another church a block away with another well, another sign, another claim: “This was the place.” This one was rougher, less polished, which somehow made it feel more authentic. You could even be blessed by this water, with a sign of the cross, that holy-ordinary fusion marking you.

Slide 3 – Sign, Coptic Quarter, Cairo

About a block away, another church and this map–sixteen places across Egypt where tradition says the Holy Family rested, drank, hid, or survived. In typical Middle Eastern fashion, people were quick to tell you why their site was the real one—making the holy souvenirs more valuable, more effective. And yes, there was always a deal.

None of this appears in Matthew’s gospel. Scripture is silent, yet the Copts know that Jesus was welcomed most certainly by their ancestors, and this welcome was their heritage. “The holy family was here. They were safe here. God passed through us. And my nephew has a little store a block away with beautiful saffron for almost nothing.”

Matthew may not have had a nephew that needed business, but his instinct to describe the experience of Jesus Christ through the ancient stories of Israel. Matthew echoes Israel’s deepest memory: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” Moses, saved on the banks of the Nile. God at work. This is not a history lesson. It’s a word of hope to his own church community. The God who heard the cry of the enslaved in Exodus is moving in this family, in the body of Christ. The God who broke Pharaoh’s grip continues to act—this time in the life of a child carried into exile.

Think about that. Before Jesus learns Torah. Before he teaches. Before he heals. Before he forgives. Before anything, his opening years were as a refugee. That busy angel warns Joseph: Get up. Take the child and his mother. Flee to Egypt. Because power is afraid. Because a ruler feels threatened. Because violence is how insecure authority protects itself. It is always the most vulnerable who are affected most when tyrants are afraid.

Sometimes this day is called Holy Innocents. It’s not the story that fits the sweetness of our nativities spread throughout the building. This scene is not included in any of them. Yet this is the real world. Fear and power give birth to violence. Children are ensnared. Rachel weeps. The cry of lament hangs in the air along with the angel chorus. Christmas is not protected from grief. Christmas is the birth of God’s presence in this real life.

Matthew never tells us where the family stayed in Egypt. But that didn’t stop the believers along the Nile. They marked wells. They told stories. If Jesus made a home here, then this place is holy. God sanctifies survival. God shows up where frightened families find refuge. God does not hover above suffering—God enters it. God sends messengers to the ones like Joseph to protect those whom God holds dear. God calls them into a land which has always been promised.

This story is still more alive and real than we want. News that the US bombed Nigeria to protect Christians on Christmas Day; Christmas as a justification for violence. The bishop there already announced, “We’re not being persecuted here.” It was violence as a show.

Even with a winter storm wrapping itself around this building right now, ICE on the front page is not a weather story. Unmarked cars. Early morning knocks. Families afraid to leave home. And into that fear, Matthew places Jesus—not aligned with Herod, not shielded by power, but carried by terrified parents into exile. God journeys with the hunted child.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde says that immigration is not first a political problem—it is a human one. The moral measure of a society, she says, is how it treats the vulnerable who arrive afraid and in need of mercy. I might add the moral measure of a society resides in its capacity to welcome the stranger, “the alien,” to make a home that is a promised land.

Yesterday, I noticed that we’re already summarizing the year, newspapers and television shows choosing which set of stories will define and thereby shape us. Matthew places us within a story bigger than any tyrant’s story, God’s ongoing plan to mend the entire universe. We do not frame history by Herod. Or Pharaoh. Or any that claim to be the savior. We frame history by the One who keeps writing a story of liberation and grace—a story that frees the enslaved, protects the vulnerable, welcomes the refugee, and even offers freedom to the tyrants themselves, if they ever let go of their fear.

The Holy Family drank somewhere.

The story passed through someone.

God was here.

God is here.

God will be here again.

Slide 4 – Holy Family Icon, Cairo

On my last day in Cairo, I went back to the church. For what? You guessed it. Souvenirs. I bought an icon of the Holy Family. Not even any bartering. The church charged full cost. I packed it up in my suitcase, flew out of Egypt, and gave it to a family from Peru, seeking not so much even the promised land, but a place to be home, to be safe, to thrive. When this little family of three, who found refugee here in this building, downstairs, after packing up to move to their own apartment, said, “Now we can help welcome the next family that comes. We have a lot to tell them about living here.”

And so it goes.

The Holy Family drank somewhere.

The story passed through someone.

And now it passes through us.

Wherever water is offered to the thirsty.
Wherever doors open to the afraid.
Wherever children are protected rather than sacrificed.

Wherever…

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ will come again.