Full sermon title: Egypt Flight…or… It’s Good That There Are (most likely) Only A Few To Hear This.

It is the task of any good preacher to link scripture to our daily lives. I believe God is still speaking. I believe our sacred scripture is still very relevant. I believe this because humans have not changed all that much in the few thousand years since these stories first took place.

Once, someone asked me why I was not preaching on the outrage of the day. I replied that if scripture did not speak to it, then neither could I. I have tried to follow that as closely as possible. So the topic for today comes straight from the gospel itself.

Today, the Holy Family flees to Egypt. Herod has learned through the Magi that there is a new king in town, and so he decides to kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who are two years old or under. Scripture calls this the Massacre of the Infants.

The Holy Family flees. They seek refuge. They are refugees. They cross international lines.

Now, things were different then than they are now. There was far less paperwork, far less border security. Unless you were arriving with an army, a young couple with an infant would not have drawn much attention. They would not have been searched or questioned. Wouldn’t have been stopped.

Sometimes I wish an angel would strike us mute until we have something kind or informed to say. Especially when we are about to pop off about something we do not understand. And I do not mean “ignorant” as an insult. Ignorant does not mean stupid. It means uneducated, uninformed. It means we do not know. We have the capacity to understand, but we do not yet know what we do not know.

I used to be ignorant about immigration. I used to be angry about foreigners “coming here and taking our jobs.” Never mind that I was only a third-generation American myself, thanks to my Slovakian grandfather.

Growing up, there was a chicken farm nearby. Lots of “Mexicans” worked there, though many were actually from Guatemala. No one wanted those jobs. The buildings were foul-smelling. The work was grueling. The pay was meager. And yet there was plenty of complaining. Never mind that these neighbors were Catholic and showed up to Mass more faithfully than most. They were refugees. Economic refugees and religious refugees. And the reasons they fled were not abstract. They have names, dates, and mass graves.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Guatemalans fled for several overlapping and brutal reasons. Think less “economic migration” and more “running while the house is on fire.”

Guatemala endured a 36-year civil war, from 1960 to 1996, between a U.S.-backed military government and guerrillas. By the early 1980s, the war entered its most lethal phase. A truth commission later found that over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared. Eighty-three percent were Indigenous Maya. The state was responsible for the vast majority of these atrocities. This was not collateral damage. It was policy.

In the early 1980s, especially under General Efraín Ríos Montt, the army carried out scorched-earth campaigns in the highlands. Villages were burned. Surrounded. Executed en masse. Survivors were forced into so-called “model villages” under military control. The United Nations later called this genocide. Courts in Guatemala agreed, even if justice has been partial and fragile. If you were Maya, fleeing was not paranoia. It was pattern recognition.

Urban areas were no safer. Teachers, union organizers, journalists, catechists, and students vanished into unmarked cars, secret prisons, and roadside ditches. You did not need to be armed or radical. Being suspected was enough. Silence became survival. Leaving became hope.

The church was both a target and a refuge. Priests and preachers were killed. Church-run literacy and aid programs were attacked. And yet churches also became escape networks, helping families flee north. This is part of why many Guatemalan migrants remain deeply Christian. Faith was not decoration. It was shelter and salvation.

By the late 1980s and 1990s, even as massacres slowed, poverty remained with no exit. Land was still concentrated in the hands of elites. Indigenous communities were displaced. Trauma was everywhere. Jobs were scarce. Droughts and hurricanes battered already-fragile regions. Peace came on paper in 1996. Safety and opportunity did not arrive on the same bus.

People fled because staying meant death, disappearance, or forced recruitment. Speaking meant danger. Farming meant hunger. Hope meant movement. When Guatemalans crossed borders in the 1980s and 1990s, they were doing what refugees have always done: choosing uncertainty over extermination.

When someone today calls them “illegals,” that word erases this history. When someone calls them refugees, that word remembers. And memory, like faith, insists on telling the truth even when it makes the room uncomfortable.

I only learned this much later. It never occurred to me what it would take for me to simply walk away from my country. I never had to think about it. It took me years. It is good to confess your sins in church. One of mine was apathy. I did not think to ask or educate myself.

I was in seminary, right around the time Eve was born. We were hiring a professor, and I served on the search team. One candidate from El Salvador told us his life story.

He had spent some of his life undocumented. His family had landed on a list kept by a roving death squad. His father was a college professor who spoke out about the regime’s disappearances. For that, he was targeted. The family packed up and fled in the night. They headed north, seeking refuge.

They found none. Country after country turned them away. When they reached the southern border of the United States, they applied for asylum. For political reasons, and others that remain unclear, they were denied. Immigration officials wanted to conduct a background check with the Salvadoran government, the same government that wanted them dead. They crossed without authorization. Over months, they made their way to Canada, where they were granted asylum. The professor grew up there, earned his education there, eventually earning a Ph.D., just like his father. And now he was applying to teach Christian ethics at our seminary.

I was captivated by him. His story was tragic, but it was also triumphant. I credit him with shaping much of my later work.

When the Syrian Civil War began around 2014, Toledo became a sanctuary city, as it had been before for Hungarians, Poles, and others.[1] There was already a strong Muslim population there due to the auto industry. My church partnered with US Together and the Syrian Orthodox Church to help refugee families get on their feet. We offered adult literacy classes, English as a Second Language courses. We invited Syrian families to our Polar Bear Bash in the winter. Another UCC church joined us in the summer. We toured the city, played in the park, shared meals. During Ramadan, our Syrian friends cooked for us at sundown, and we broke the fast together.

All of that somehow landed me on NPR with Ari Shapiro.[2] It was a wild time. I think back to the young, angry kid I once was, ignorant of world affairs, and I wonder what he would have done if he had known where life would take him.

It is a very human thing to assume our own stories are normal. It would be nice if they were. Everyone safe in their Hallmark town, with a Victorian square and a picturesque gazebo. But other places are not so safe. Some are war-torn. Some have no economic prospects. Some have roving death squads.

That is what the Holy Family faced. They were refugees in Egypt. I doubt they filled out paperwork. If they had, Herod would have found them.

We have many Holy Families at our borders today. And we have talking heads calling them illegals. Disparaging them. Calling them vermin. Claiming they poison our society. They are doing what we would do if faced with the same choices. They are doing what is best for their families.

Author John Fugelsang once said that when he hears people call migrants “illegals,” he chooses instead to think of them as Christian refugees, grounding that choice in Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger. It is a refusal to reduce human beings to criminal labels, and an insistence on compassion.[3]

I say all of this without knowing your politics. I say it with the gospel in mind. I say it with care. It is hard to ask people to consider stories that are not their own. I have known people who left the church because of sermons like this. I am not trying to provoke. I am trying to preach the gospel. And Meghan, too. This is why she’s taking the youth down to Tucson this summer to learn about this very topic.

And here, in Matthew’s gospel, is the Holy Family fleeing to another country to save their child’s life.

And I am telling you that Holy Families are still doing this today.

The question before us is simple, and it is demanding: What is our Christian response?

Works Cited

[1] I first preached on this topic way back in 2017. One of my fav sermons of all time: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/appetizers/

[2] https://www.npr.org/2017/01/04/508220451/in-toledo-syrian-refugees-are-welcomed-amid-a-difficult-immigration-climate

[3] https://jenhatmaker.com/podcasts/series-64/love-over-dominance-john-fugelsang-on-the-future-of-christianity/