Happy New Year!  We continue on the perilous life journey of the Holy Family today. And make no mistake about this; we have a very hazardous existence for this newly formed family. If we really think about the existence this couple and their new child have endured, we will find it to be truly frightening. If we peel back the façade of nostalgia that is placed over the birth of Jesus and really think about what it must have been like, we should be brought up short, made to pause and think. The church is as guilty as any sappy Christmas card in the softening of this picture, with the Christmas pageants that take place in most churches Christmas Eve.

We have this young woman Mary, not yet married, pregnant with a child not her betrothed, engaged to be married to this carpenter Joseph. They are forced, because of an imperial census-edict, to leave their home and their family and travel to a distant city to be counted. When they arrive, they can find no place to stay. And then the birth pangs start. Imagine the fright of the two of them....Where is this baby going to be born? On the side of this dusty road? Down this dirty alley? Ahhh....a stable! But arghhh, the smell! Well, this is better than an alley or the side of a roadway. In truth, this is not a very pleasant reality to exist in or to be born into. They were all so vulnerable. We have the juxtapostion of the joy of the Incarnation and the muck of real life.

And the story continues today, with Joseph being told to flee...take his family and run for his and their lives! And off to Egypt they go, leaving by night and fleeing through the desert to get away from the murder-minded Herod.  Joseph must have been operating on a deep faith in order to act in the manner in which he did. Our Gospel selection then skips four verses and picks up with Joseph bringing his young family back to the land of Israel and settling in Nazareth. This is not travel as we know it today. This travel was by foot or on donkey: exhausting, physically draining, to put it mildly. Again, Joseph and Mary are operating on a deep faith in God. They were so vulnerable and yet so full of compassion for each other and this infant in their charge. This terrifying story is not in the least romantic or bucolic or sentimental. Nor should we consider this account those things.

The four verses left out of our Gospel selection details the horrible story of the slaughter of all newborn children based on King Herod's order. Herod is trying to protect his realm, his rule. This is what Joseph was fleeing: the murder of this child that has been placed into his and Mary's care. Herod, besides being a murderer, gets the story wrong, like so many others. He is told a new king has been born..... God's kingdom is different than what Herod was unsuccessfully trying to protect.

What are we to take away from these stories, besides the horror of thinking about what these realities were really like? These accounts of the birth of Jesus and the early life of this Holy Family are meant to help us understand that God operates on the fringes of society, on the fringes of life. God can be found in the most unexpected of places. The most unlikely of people are the ones chosen by God to act in the world.

We see the way God works in the world throughout Biblical history. Time and again, God does not choose the first born son but the younger, the seemingly weaker. Jacob takes Esau's birthright. Joseph, the youngest son of Jacob, leads the people through famine. Moses, a stutterer, a child raised on the basis of a lie, is the voice of God and a savior to God's people. King David was the youngest son, who was working out in the fields when Samuel came looking for a replacement for Saul. The non-warrior Solomon follows his father as ruler and anointed by God. And a fatherless son, born in a manger in Bethlehem, hidden in Egypt, raised in a small, hillside town of Nazareth, who moves in the non-social elite circles of tax collectors, prostitutes, the poor, sick, lame, is God among us. This person we see as an infant today, when he grows up, has chief advisors and friends who are working class people..... These non-bucolic stories we hear at Christmastide continue this practice of how God works: God operates on the fringes.