HopeInHardship_1-2-22.mp4 from Floris UMC on Vimeo.
The story of Jesus’ birth is quickly followed by the death of children on the order of a paranoid king. Many people experience tragedy and suffering as a sign of God’s absence. What is the nature of our hope when Jesus was born amid the sorrow of mothers whose children were slain and whose families became refugees fleeing for their lives?
Matthew 2:13-18
13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt,
15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
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