The first Sunday after Christmas is always a little… barren.
Let’s be honest about that. We were just here a few days ago. We lit candles on Christmas Eve. We sang Silent Night. We heard the angels, the shepherds, the good news of great joy. Some of us are still tired from hosting, traveling, cooking, or simply being around people for an extended period of time.
And so I think a question crosses each of our minds: Do we really need to come back again to a worship service so soon? I’m glad you all said yes, but as we can see with the low attendance this Sunday, like we do every First Sunday after Christmas, most of us would say no. We do not need to come back so soon.
Which is exactly why most of us miss the story that we heard today.
Because while Christmas Eve gives us the part of the story we know and love, the first Sunday after Christmas gives us a story we rarely tell. It’s still Christmastide and we are still in the season of celebrating the incarnation, but this story is different. And it shifts quickly.
Our passage for today – found only in the Gospel of Matthew – is another story about the Christ Child, but it’s not gentle or nostalgic or easy to wrap up with a bow but instead it’s brutally and terribly honest about the world Jesus is born into.
An angel appears again but not to announce joy. This time the message is terrifying: Get up. Take the child. And run.
In just a few short verses, the Gospel of Matthew tells us that after Jesus is born, Joseph is warned in a dream that Herod is searching for the child in order to kill him. Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt under the cover of night, staying there until Herod dies. They leave their homeland. They cross borders. They seek refuge in a foreign land because staying where they are would put their child’s life in danger. During that time, Herod orders the slaughter of children in and around Bethlehem. When it finally seems safe to return, Joseph is warned again, and so the family moves once more, settling in Nazareth instead of Judea.
The Holy Family are refugees: people who are displaced by political violence because the fear for their own safety has forced them to migrate. This is a story about real danger and a family doing whatever they must to survive.
Biblical scholars regularly point out that the Gospel of Matthew presents Jesus as one who embodies the history of God’s people, living that story again in his own body. Egypt is the place where Israel once fled for survival, the place where survival turned into oppression, and the place from which God eventually brought them out. That’s why the Gospel of Matthew quotes the prophet Hosea: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” In Hosea, that line originally refers to Israel itself. But here it’s making the claim: Jesus embodies the story of God’s people.
Just as Israel escaped a murderous ruler in Pharaoh, Jesus escapes a murderous ruler in Herod. Just as Israel’s story begins with children in danger, so does Jesus’ story. And just as Israel’s salvation unfolds through exile and return, so does the life of Christ. This reoccurring message teaches us that God’s saving work has always moved through real danger and oppression.
Jesus enters the world and almost immediately the world tries to kill him. The incarnation did not happen in a safe nor just world. God takes on flesh in the middle of threat, and that threat is not even vague. It has a face. It has a ruler. It has policies. It has armed power behind it. Herod is not just “a bad guy.” He is a political leader who uses fear to protect his rule and his fear becomes lethal. He demands the slaughter of children.
And if that is the world Jesus is born into and if Jesus embodies the story of God’s people, let’s be honest about the world we are living in now.
We are watching the rise of Christian nationalism, and it is not “politics” or “culture wars.” This is a movement that corruptly fuses Christian identity with national identity, and then insists that real belonging, real safety, and real power should be reserved for a narrow kind of people. It takes Christian symbols and language as pretty wrapping and a pretty bow on domination and power. It claims the name of Christ while preaching a gospel of control.
Christian nationalism is built on fear: fear of losing power and fear of cultural change and fear of no longer being centered and fear of sharing a country with people who are different. And because it is fear shaped by holding onto power, it uses that fear to oppress others. It becomes rhetoric and policies and threats and violence. That fear becomes lethal.
And we do not have to guess who are being targeted.
Christian nationalism consistently targets immigrants and refugees, and it frames their presence as danger. It targets Black and Brown communities through narratives of crime and disorder to justify policing and punishment. It targets queer and trans people, especially young people, with a fixation that is both political and spiritual, as if their existence is a threat to the moral order. It targets women’s bodies and their autonomy. It targets religious minorities and anyone who does not fit the vision of a Christian nation. It targets educators, libraries, and truth-tellers. It trains hearts to harden by narrowing dignity to only a small circle of those in power.
The Holy Family are exactly the kind of people Christian nationalism would reject: a brown family fleeing from violence, crossing borders out of necessity, dependent on refuge in a foreign land… all because their child is in danger.
I was listening to a podcast and The Rev. Dr. Rolf Jacobson, a professor at Luther Seminary, said something along the lines of: Christian faith is a serious witness to God’s response to the horrors of the human condition. In other words, Christianity is not a denial of what is terrifying and brutal and unjust in the world. It tells the truth about it and then insists that God still enters into it.
And that’s what this story in the Gospel of Matthew is showing us.
This story is not safe for anybody. Not for Mary and Joseph. Not for Jesus. Not for the children in Bethlehem. Not for anyone living under corrupt power.
But Jacobson continued to reflect and said what is at stake is worth God becoming human anyway. Worth vulnerability and risk and suffering and death. The same corrupt power, the same empire of domination and violence that threatens Jesus at the beginning is the same corrupt power that will kill him at the end. But this power does not get the final word. It is not the empire, but the Spirit of God who raises Jesus and defeats death.
Christian nationalism wants a Christ who blesses the empire. It wants a country built upon corrupted religion that makes people feel justified in oppressing others. It wants a church and a country that calls control “wisdom” when it leads to exclusion and calls cruelty “strength” when it oppresses marginalized people and communities.
But yet we have a God who enters danger, identifies with the oppressed, and confronts corrupt power not by joining it, but by enduring it and overcoming it through the life-giving and life-raising power of God. What is at stake is the very life we have been promised.
The world is still dangerous. And Christ still willingly enters into it.
Is love worth it?
Is justice worth it?
Is solidarity worth it?
Is protecting life worth it?
The incarnation tells us that God believes it is. It is all worth it!
Faith looks like witnessing the horrors of humanity as fuel to ignite love— until that love moves us and justice becomes more than an idea. Justice is the very incarnation of Christ because the presence of God becomes visible again, right in the middle of a world still trembling.
Is justice worth it? Yes!
In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.
Is justice worth it?
What can you do?
Scripture:
Matthew 2:13-23
Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Allentown on December 28, 2025 by Pastor Taylor Hall