There was a little girl named Odette who lived in Paris along with her sister and brother, and her parents. It was the 1930s, and even though Odette was born in France she wasn’t French. Her family was actually Hungarian, and her parents had emigrated from a small town just outside Budapest several years before she was born. Odette’s entire family was Jewish, and in those days it wasn’t safe to be a Jew in Hungary. In fact, in the 1920s thousands of Jews fled Hungary for other countries that would be more hospitable to them—or at least those where anti-Semitism wasn’t sanctioned by the state, as it was in Hungary. Odette’s parents were from the same town but they emigrated to France at different times, and eventually, years later, in the community of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, they reconnected. They were married, and started a family, and their youngest child (Odette) was born in 1933.

Unfortunately, as we know, France did not prove to be any more hospitable to Odette’s family and to the Jewish population than Hungary was. When Odette was just seven years old, the French government, while under Nazi occupation, took a census to determine who was a Jew. Soon after, the waves of roundups began to take place, and the Jews were sent to the camps. When Odette turned nine, her parents had her and her two siblings baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, in the hopes that they wouldn’t be discovered, and shipped off to the camps. Many other Jewish parents did the same, fearing for the lives of their children.

But it wasn’t enough; it was too dangerous for them in Paris. And so Odette, and her brother and sister, were sent south of Paris to the region of Burgundy, to a small village, where they were given shelter by a Catholic family, and their identities kept secret for three years, until the war ended. During those years, Odette’s father was taken and sent to the camps. But he survived, and eventually the family was reunited in Paris—a family of French Hungarian immigrant Jews, who by the grace of God had somehow survived the Holocaust.

So who is Odette, and why am I telling you her story? Well as it happens, Odette is my grandmother—my mother’s mother. She’s 86 years old now; I got to spend time with her just last week, in fact. And as we talked, and I gazed into her beautiful, dark eyes, I was haunted by the ghosts of her childhood memories. How could she, a lovely little child, be an object of such extraordinary hate? How did she survive it—how did her parents, Edward and Charlotte, survive it? They were prepared to do anything to save their children—even sending them them off for refuge into the French countryside. How did they bear it? How did Odette, my Mimi—how did she survive separation from her parents?

At any moment the story could have taken a different turn, as it did for so many others. To imagine myself in her parents’ place, striving to protect their children no matter what, is completely agonizing. All I can do is to wonder at their strength; and give thanks for that rural French Catholic family; and just marvel at the grace of God in it all.

In the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, we see these same agonizing questions at play: a family is fleeing violence, striving to protect their child at any cost. Not just any family—the Holy Family, who are forced to become refugees, fleeing from Bethlehem in Judea to safety in Egypt, of all places. The story is told in a similar vein to our modern-day primetime news: at the level of the ruling authorities, the politicians, and what they do and don’t do, how they feel or don’t feel. King Herod is paranoid, and anxious about his political standing; he confers with his court prophets; stately foreign figures show up, and Herod tries to enlist them in his plan; and when he discovers he’s been tricked, he reacts by unleashing a campaign of terror, murdering the infant children of Bethlehem—the Massacre of the Innocents, as it’s called.

So much of the story is devoted to the headlines that Herod makes; so little to the agony that the Holy Family undergoes. Joseph is warned in a dream: he gets up, and they flee to Egypt in the night. Years pass, and in another dream Joseph is told it is safe to return. All we get is the bare bones of the story. And yet we can’t help but wonder how this family had the strength to survive it. The possibility that violence could come to them at any moment; fearing for the safety of their child; wondering if they would be welcomed once they had crossed the border, or if there were even more trials yet to come. They went through the same set of struggles then that millions of refugee families are going through today: from the Syrian family seeking refuge in France, to the Rohingya family that has fled to Bangladesh, to the Guatemalan family huddled together at the southern U.S. border.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees; a fact which should change how we think about all refugees. In 1938, back when Odette was 5 years old, The Episcopal Church published a poster in response to the wave of European Jewish refugees seeking asylum. It’s a depiction of the Holy Family escaping by night—Mary is cradling the infant Jesus, riding on a donkey, with a full moon halo right behind them, and Joseph walking close by, on the lookout. And the text on the poster reads: “In the name of these refugees, aid all refugees.” It shows us how to connect our faith with our lived experience—from Jesus all the way to Odette, and on to those who are seeking after shelter and asylum even today, even now.

In 1938, the same year that the poster came out, Fortune magazine polled Americans on a question: “What is your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian and other political refugees to come into the United States?” The vast majority of these refugees were Jews, of course. Fewer than 5% of respondents said that the U.S. should encourage the presence of those refugees, even if it meant raising quotas. By contrast, 67% of respondents said that, with conditions as they are, “we should try to keep them out.” And that’s what happened. In June of 1939, a ship carrying over 900 Jewish refugees escaping from Germany was refused at the port in Miami due to the quota; it was sent back to Europe, where hundreds of its passengers died later on in the Nazi camps. It’s an appalling piece of history, but it forces us to take Jesus seriously when he says in Matthew 25: “I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me … whatever you did not do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did not do to me.”

To live as a Christian is to act as though Jesus is present, and to follow him wherever he goes. And because Jesus was himself a refugee, we can be certain that Jesus is present among refugees—the least of his brothers and sisters.

On this Twelfth Day of Christmas—on the Eve of the Epiphany—we learn that the Jesus who is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the manger and visited by kings from afar is the same Jesus who is on the road, whose family is fleeing danger. The Love which came down at Christmas does not stay in the nativity scene very long—because the Holy Family is on the move, searching for safety, enduring everything out of love for their son, who was the living, breathing image of the almighty and invisible God.

A dark-eyed toddler; a lovely little child.

Let us be ready to welcome him with open arms when he shows up at our door. Amen.

January 5, 2020: Christmas 2