Each Sunday morning on my way to church I tune in to the CBC to hear Choral Concert. It is a program full of beautiful choir music from all around the world. It is especially beautiful at this season of the year. Howard Dick, the mc of this program includes in the hour what he calls the Billboard when he announces concerts all across Canada. Recently I was amazed at the many performances of Handel's Messiah are performed at this season. It seems to outstrip all the other concerts. Christmas is especially rich in music. It seems that the biblical narratives of the birth of Christ has inspired much beautiful music as well as art and poetry.

This morning we have come to the end of the birth narrative as it is found in the Gospel of St.Matthew. It and its counterpart, the Gospel of Luke, are undoubtedly the best know portions of the Bible . But the birth narratives aren't just wonderful stories, full of colour and joy, both evangelists have a purpose in telling the story as they have. Matthew seeks to show that Jesus is the long awaited messiah, the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of Jeremiah and Isaiah some five hundred years before the event. Matthew uses the phrase over and over that this has taken place as foretold by the prophets. And Matthew makes the point that this messiah will usher in the Kingdom of God and that this kingdom will be diametrically opposed to the the empire, the Roman empire of the time.

Matthew begins his narrative with a genealogy which he traces the ancestry of Jesus back to Abraham the patriarch to whom the three great monotheistic faiths of our time Judaism, Christianity and Islam, look as their founder.

But remove the music and the tinsel and the beautiful words, particularly of the King James Bible and what you have is a rather crude story, of hardship and fear,of intrigue and death.

In our lesson today we find Mary and Joseph and their baby once more on the road. An angel of God had appeared to Joseph to warn him about King Herod's intention and told them to flee to Egypt. Very early in his life Jesus becomes a refugee. Perhaps the term refugee is rather modern but the condition of fleeing from one's home is nothing new. There are to day virtually millions of refugees. I recently had coffee with a friend who had just returned from working with the United Nation among the refugees in the Darfur region of the Sudan. About 1.3 million of them are gathered at the border between Chad and the Sudan living under the most primitive of conditions , many not even in tents. They had fled from the Sudanese militia who plunedered, burned and murdered people.

You know about refugees.This congregation has been involved in refugee support. I myself came to Canada as a refugee from the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia. We managed to escape to Britain and the following year, 1939, came to Canada. I tell this story in my book, Uprooted and Transplanted.

Matthew goes on to tell of the Slaughter of the Innocents when Herod sent out his guards to find all children of a certain age to put them to death so that he might eliminate the one of whom it was predicted would be a threat to his power. Matthew quotes the prophet Jeremiah :

"A voice was heard in Rama, sobbing loudly and lamenting: it was Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more."

Nor is this event strange, the innocents have been dying also in our time, in Rwanda as told by General Romeo Dallair, in Bosnia , in Iraq and in many other places around the globe. It is in the news daily. Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologian of the last century said that the gospel must be preached with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

That has been the way of empires throughout history. They cannot tolerate anything that threatens their power. The Roman empire, however, withered and was eventually replaced by the Holy Roman Empire which as one of my history professors said was neither holy nor Roman. It was the church militant which had taken on the ways of secular empires, had armies, and subjected people to horrible torture. There was also the British Empire on which it was said the sun never sets. Remember the wall map in our classrooms advertising Neilson's chocolate bars, the map was red with empire. It was the mighty British navy that held that empire together. Its story isn't all positive by any means. There was the German Reich that was to last a 1000 year but did so only 10, or perhaps 30 years if you count from the beginning of the Great War, the Soviet Empire with its gulags and mass murder of its own people. Today there is only one superpower , the American Empire, the most powerful nation of the world with weapons of not merely mass but total destruction.

Recently the president of that empire was in Canada, here in Ottawa and then in Halifax where he first of all thanked the people of the Maritimes for hosting the stranded passengers after 9/11, while it was still fresh on his mind. He then invited Canada to join in his pet, the Ballistic Missile Defense shield. Undoubtedly Canadian territory is very important to the United States . It was so during the Cold War when they built the DEW Line across Canada's north that is now rusting into the permafrost.

It is an invitation that is hard to reject, after all American's are our neighbours , our best trading partner, we speak the same language, well sort of, read each others' books, listen to the same music, watch the same movies and TV. Canadian go south in the winter to play golf and Americans come north to fish and hunt in the summer. We pride ourselves on the world's longest undefended border. I am reminded of a friend who has a recreational vehicle and travels to the states frequently. On a recent trip she was thoroughly searched at the boirder, and not in vain.... they found it, a can of Campbells Mad Cow and Barley Soup. It was confiscated and she thinks that the guards soon enjoyed it in the canteen of the border post.

And yet resist we must if we are to be true to our nature as peacemakers and peacekeeper, concerned with the health of the planet. Canadians have gone out to monitor election because we are trusted. We believe in multilateralism, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. We pioneered in the removal of landmines. We are quite different from the empire to the south who have not done any of that at least not during the reign of the present administration.

We pray the Lord's Prayer: "Thy will be done on earth..." and "Come , Lord Jesus , Come". There are some especially in the United States who believe that Jesus will come, not as he came many years ago, but with power, with armies of angels that will clean up the mess of the world, that will destroy the unbelievers, even liberal Christians. Born-again Christians will, of-course, have been removed from the battle to heaven from where they are able to view the carnage of Armageddon.

I don't believe that. I believe that God has revealed his tactics in the gospels . His is not like the earthly empires. His kingdom is one of peace and justice.

A few days ago, December 17th, Bill Moyers retired from PBS , the Public Broadcast System. He had recently been awarded a citation by the Harvard Medical School for his support of ecology concerns. He gave a most powerful speech whereby he expressed his concern for this world and told how often the news he read was not good. He then quoted Shakespeare , from the tragedy, King Lear. Shakespeare pictured a Britain that was torn, on the verge of civil war. His own family was torn by greed. The hero, to my way of thinking, was the Duke of Glaucester. Lear's son in law had had his eyes put out. Later when Lear and Glaucester met again, Lear asked him, "And how do you see the world?" The blind Glaucester answer: " I see the world feelingly."

"Feelingly", Moyers said that that is how he tries to see the world and that is how we must see the world. I believe that this is how God means us to see the world, that the world is not a piece of cake to be eaten, not a commodity to be bought and sold, to be conquered by shock and awe, but through justice and the pursuit for the integrity of creation. Feelingly.

The Kingdom of God is not like the empires of this world, of the past like mediaeval Spain or France or of the future like China , it is a realm of peace and cooperation not blood and fire, shock and awe.

I believe that this is the burden of the Gospel of Matthew. Pray: Come , Lord Jesus, Come. Give us the courage to act peacefully and feelingly as did Jesus the Christ .