Issue 7: “Refugee”

"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often difficult work. Holding beauty and naming pain and hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." Join us in this new series, "For the Soul." Out of suffering often, comes the most powerful worship. In places of brokenness, we encounter Jesus.

After the first epiphany, the Magi went home by another way to escape the violence of King Herod, which also forced Joseph and the holy family to flee to Egypt. During Epiphany, we remember that Jesus himself became a refugee on his way to become our ultimate refuge and home. 

Refugee
by Malcolm Guite

  We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.
For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.
Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.