“Seeing God” based on Exodus 1:8-22 and Matthew 2:1-18

In theology there is something called “the problem of evil.” It may not be what you’d think. You might think that this would be the problem that there IS evil in the world, which I think is the most reasonable interpretation of the words. Instead, it is the question of WHY there is evil in the world, and how one balances that reality with their conception of God.

Because, if you believe in an all-powerful God, and you notice that evil things happen, then you have to figure out why it happens. There are overly simplistic answers for that: 1. God prioritizes free will 2. God doesn’t actually care 3. What we think is evil isn’t and God has a “plan” that we can’t see.

Process theologians, who trained me, solve it a different way. They say that God is the MOST powerful being, but not ALL-POWERFUL. Therefore they can hold firm that God is all-loving without having to answer the question of why evil things happen.

I’m with them on that, several years of reflection on the ideas they present got me there, despite the rather difficult work of giving up on the idea of God as all-powerful. However, while process theology has good critiques of every other theology’s answer to to the problem of evil, I have never thought they’ve adequately answered the question either.

There are a lot of easily accessible answers I also dislike: 1. humans are fundamentally evil; 2. Humans are just animals and animals are vicious; 3. Souls are good but bodies are bad and in trying to protect and care for bodies people do evil. None of these work for me. I don’t think people are evil, I rather think people are naturally good – or at the very least neutral. I don’t like ANYTHING that disparages nature or claims that it is evil because I think the natural world is fundamentally sacred, and that includes BODIES which I desperately believe we need to re-affirm as sacred and good.

Our scriptures today point to evil. The Pharaoh, in his fear, enslaves the people – evil. The Pharaoh, in his fear, orders babies murdered – evil. King Herod, in his fear, ordered the massacre of infants – evil. The world today tells us of evil too, it doesn’t require looking very hard to find it. I, for one, had a meeting this week for the Annual Conferences on how we are going to fund the lawsuits related to accusations of child sexual abuse in the church and evil doesn’t feel far away at all.

Sometimes I hear people “solve” the problem of evil by claiming it is all the fault of one of the traditional sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony or sloth. I think you can hear in what I’ve already said that if pushed I might say that evil emerges out of fear. But at the core, I really actually just agree with Old Turtle1. I think that people forget that they are “a message of love from God to the earth and a prayer from the earth back to God.” I think the answer to the problem of evil is simply that we sometimes forget the most important things.

Apparently, my answer is a common one in Celtic Christianity, which is a tradition of God-knowing that I believe I’ve always been taught but without being told where it came from. In John Philip Newell’s book “Sacred Earth Sacred Soul” tells of the 2nd century teacher Irenaeus who saw “Christ as respeaking the sacred essence of the universe, re-sounding the divine that is at the heart of all things. This was to see Christ as reawakening in humanity what it has forgotten.”2

A few centuries later Pelagius “taught that grace was given to reconnect us to our nature, which was sacred and made of God. Divine grace is not given to us to make us something other than or more than natural. It is given to us to make us truly natural, to restore us to the sacred essence of our being.”3

A few centuries later, John Scotus Eriugena taught “Everything is sacred…but we live in a state of forgetfulness of what is deepest in us and in everything that has being. The more we forget our true identity, the less we treat one another as sacred. We suffer from ‘soul-forgetfulness.’ But Christ, he says, is our memory, our ‘epiphany.’ He comes to show us what we have forgotten, that we are bearers of the divine flow. He reawakens us to our true nature and the true nature of the earth, that we are and all things are in essence sacred.”4

The problem is that we forget, and then the real answer is to learn how to remember.

I love the midwives in Exodus, Shiphrah and Puah. They are said to remember God, and therefore they have the courage and resilience to resist the authority of the king himself. I wonder, sometimes, if they were able to do that because they were two. What might have been overpowering to one – the power of the direct command from the king – couldn’t stand up their shared sense of what was right. I think part of the gift of God in helping us remember is the gift of each other. People with whom we make sense of the world, people with whom we decide which laws are unjust, people who remind us that everyone and everything is sacred and should be treated as such. Part of remembering is each other.

Tammy Rojas, in We Cry Justice, comes to a similar conclusion:

The only way we can change the system of oppression we live under is for all of us to come together. WE may be taught division, but we can unlearn it. We can fight back against it and show that love of all people will be what saves us.

…

God dwells within the walls of closed rural hospitals and pours onto the streets with those demanding health care as a human right. There are midwives saying no to the injustice of killing babies and midwives saying no to the denial of health care. It is through nonviolent direct action that we can overcome the empire.”5

Which, I think, gets us to our gospel lesson of the day. Funniest thing, calls for nonviolent direct action to overcome the empire OFTEN reminds me of the gospel.

The magi are said to have an epiphany, right? I mean, that’s why we CALL this Sunday epiphany. I’m not quite sure which thing counts though. Is the epiphany the experience of God’s loving presence that they experienced in meeting Jesus? Or is the epiphany simply a reference to the dream telling them not to return to Herod? I believe they both count, and maybe today should be called “Epiphanies.” Anyway, the radical action we see in the midwives refusing the order of the Egyptian king we ALSO see in the magi returning home by another route. They were outsiders, foreigners, who had been given access to the country with an agreement that they would return to the king with the information he wanted in order to strengthen his power. But they didn’t. They went home by another way.

God, whether as seen in Jesus, or in a dream, reminded them. They made the choice to honor the sacred life of the baby, and went home by another route. That’s another way we can remember – simply by the grace of God. Sometimes we can simply see the love of God shining in the world and it reminds us. Sometimes we have a dream, a vision, a sudden insight, and we are reminded. Thanks be to God for those epiphanies.

The gospel does indicate that evil still exists, right? The courageous actions of those who are reminded of the sacred power of love matters, but it doesn’t erase evil. The king still forgot, and his power was still magnificent. To be fair, we don’t have a record of a massacre of babies in that time, and we would because records were decent. This story is told to name Jesus as the new Moses, to connect one king’s paranoia to another, and one baby’s miraculous life to another’s.

The problem is that while babies weren’t killed there and then, they have been. They are. So while the story “isn’t true” it also is. And it is never the full story. When we see the evil things of the world, and the natural disasters, we can usually find some midwives in their midst too. Doctors without Borders, World Central Kitchen, UMCOR – people organized to respond to horrors by caring for the sacred people who are hurting the most. Evil is real, but so is goodness.

It is IMPERATIVE that we remember the sacredness of the world, of its creatures, of humanity. Forgetting that sacredness has created so many of the problems we see around us every day.

So, how do we remember? We remind each other, like the midwives. We are given glimpses of insight, like the Magi. We come together to worship, like communities of faith around the world throughout time, to remember who God is and what God loves and soak up God’s values and dreams to inoculate ourselves from the forgetting around us. We pray, and find ways to connect directly to the Divine, to soak up God’s love for ourselves so we can see it reflected in others.

And, we pay attention. We look for signs of the sacred around us. The unique beauty of each snowflake. The hope of seed catalogs. The wonder of clean water. The sounds of children. Smiles of greeting between friends. Snuggly mammals. Delicious food. Flight patterns of birds. The Holy One is with us, all around, reminding us of the sacredness of God and creation and each other all the time in infinite ways. The Good News of God’s love is EVERYWHERE when we look.

There are reminders everywhere – which is good because we need a lot of them. Dear ones, take note of the signs of God’s goodness, of the sacredness of the earth and of life. Epiphanies are everywhere. Then, when you see them, remind each other. That’s a core part of what it means to be people of faith, and when I look around at the world, I believe we are desperately needed as reminders to all of God’s people. Amen

1Douglas Wood, Old Turtle (Mexico: Scholastic Press, 1992). If you don’t have this book, you can watch it be read here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om1Wemm3a1U

2John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (USA: HarperOne, 2021, p. 28.

3Newell, 30.

4Newell, 89.

5Tammy Rohas, “45: Midwives Who Say No” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 196-7, used with permission.

January 7, 2024 – Epiphany

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady