Two days before the festival of Epiphany and the end of the Christmas Season, the lights are still up, the music still familiar.

And yet the Gospel appointed for today refuses to let us stay in that safe, sentimental place.

Matthew gives us a Christmas story that is not cozy.

It is dangerous.

It is political.

It is about borders crossed, lives threatened, children killed, and families fleeing in the night.

This is the story of Epiphany’s edge.

Matthew tells us about Magi from the East, strangers who read the sky better than they read Scripture.

They are not kings.

They are not insiders.

In Jerusalem they are religious outsiders, likely Zoroastrian priests, crossing religious, political, and ethnic boundaries because they have seen something they cannot ignore.

They follow a sign, not certainty.

They travel far, carrying costly gifts, risking misunderstanding and danger, because they believe that something holy has entered the world.

And the first thing their faith does is get them into trouble.

They arrive in Jerusalem and ask the most dangerous question imaginable in the palace of a paranoid tyrant:

“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”

For all their wisdom, it is a naïve question.

Because Herod is not a man who shares power.

He is a ruler who survives by fear, surveillance, and violence:

Allies, spies, and lies.

And when those fail, blood.

Herod’s fear is not abstract.

It is the fear of a ruler whose legitimacy is fragile, whose throne depends on Roman approval, whose grip on power is always slipping.

When tyrants feel threatened, children suffer.

That was true then.

It is true now.

And so, Matthew tells us that the joy of the Magi is matched by the terror of Jerusalem.

A frightened ruler makes frightened people.

A frightened empire lashes out.

But before Herod can act, God moves:

Through dreams.

Through warnings.

Through whispered instructions that come in the night.

The Magi are warned not to return to Herod, and they go home by another way.

That phrase matters.

It is not just about geography.

It is about resistance.

They refuse cooperation with violence.

They refuse to be useful to empire.

They choose a longer road rather than a complicit one.

And then Joseph dreams and the Holy Family becomes refugees.

Matthew tells us, with astonishing understatement, that Mary and Joseph flee with their child to Egypt.

Egypt.

The place of Israel’s ancient trauma becomes a place of refuge.

The land of bondage becomes a place of survival.

This is not a spiritual metaphor.

This is forced migration.

This is a family running for their lives.

Jesus begins his life not as a citizen, not as a protected child, but as an undocumented refugee, crossing borders under threat of state violence.

That matters.

Because the Bible does not tell this story accidentally.

Matthew is deliberately echoing the book of Exodus.

Pharaoh, threatened by the possibility of liberation, orders the killing of Hebrew infants.

Herod, threatened by the possibility of God’s reign, orders the killing of Bethlehem’s children.

Herod is a new Pharaoh.

And Jesus is a new Moses, saved by flight, preserved by God, emerging from exile to lead a people toward freedom.

And woven into that Exodus story is one of the most repeated commandments in Scripture:

“You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Not tolerate.

Not pity.

Love.

Why? Because memory matters.

Because a people who forget what it means to flee will eventually become the ones who harden borders, close doors, and justify cruelty.

Matthew refuses to let us forget.

He tells us about Rachel weeping for her children.

He lets the grief speak.

He does not resolve it.

He does not explain it away.

He does not offer easy answers to the problem of evil.

He simply insists that God hears the cries of grieving mothers, even when empires do not.

And here is where this Gospel presses on us, uncomfortably, in our own time.

We live in a nation where immigration is once again being framed as a threat rather than a human reality.

Where fear is weaponized.

Where enforcement is increasingly militarized.

Where families are separated, asylum pathways closed, legal protections stripped away.

Recent data shows hundreds of thousands of people deported in a single year.

People removed not because they are violent, but because policy has shifted.

People sent away despite deep roots, children, work, community.

Some deported in error.

Some without due process.

Some after seeking refuge in good faith.

We have seen immigration courts become places of arrest.

We have seen fear enter spaces meant for justice.

We have seen rhetoric that echoes Herod more than it echoes Christ.

And Matthew dares to tell us that the face of Christ is found precisely there.

In the child carried across a border.

In the mother who flees in the night.

In the family that survives only because someone opened a door.

The Holy Family lived because Egypt received them.

That is the uncomfortable truth of this text.

God’s salvation history depends, at a crucial moment, on a foreign land offering refuge to a Jewish child.

Which raises the question we cannot avoid:

What happens when we close the door?

The command to love the stranger is not sentimental.

It is costly.

It requires choosing the long way home.

It requires refusing cooperation with systems that harm the vulnerable.

It requires seeing human beings where fear tells us to see threats.

The Magi show us one response to Christ.

They cross boundaries.

They give generously.

They refuse to assist violence.

They go home changed.

Herod shows us another.

He clings to power.

He sacrifices children.

He surrounds himself with religious professionals who know the Scriptures but fail to act on them.

And Matthew leaves us with a choice.

Because the story does not end with Herod.

It ends with a child growing up in Galilee of the Gentiles, in Nazareth of all places, among people considered religiously suspect and culturally inferior.

It ends with a Messiah whose ministry will consistently place him among the vulnerable, the displaced, the excluded.

And eventually, this same Jesus will say:

“I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”

Not admired.

Not debated.

Welcomed.

Epiphany means manifestation.

God made visible.

And Matthew insists that God is made visible not in palaces, not in border walls, not in the security of empire, but in the fragile body of a child on the move.

So, what does this mean for us, two days before the end of the Christmas Season?

It means that faith is not proven by how beautifully we decorate our churches, but by whether we recognize Christ when he arrives without papers.

It means that the church’s calling is not to protect its comfort, but to protect the vulnerable.

It means remembering that our own ancestors were once strangers.

That our own story is shaped by movement, migration, and grace.

And it means asking, again and again, whether we are walking the road Herod lays out for us, or whether we are willing, like the Magi, to go home by another way.

Because the story continues.

Christ is still on the move.

Still appearing among strangers.

Still calling us to choose love over fear.

And the good news of Christmas, even here, even now, is this: God is with us. Even in exile.

Especially there.

Amen.