IF NOT NOW. . . .
by Pamela C. Hawkins
January 1, 2012
Scripture Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Matthew 2:1-12

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While preparing this sermon I came across a phrase I had not heard before. “Righteous Gentiles.”  Many of you may be familiar with the term, but it is new to me, and although I had a feeling about what it means, an intuition you might say, I still decided to search the internet before I bypassed “Righteous Gentiles” altogether.

I confess that my first response to the word “righteous” is grounds for a good detour when I’m preaching. “Righteous” is, for me, like “glory of God” or “persons of the Trinity,” a little thorny to work through in twenty minutes.  “Righteous” feels dusty to me, like something stuck on a top shelf for too long, unused and out of date; a word mostly abandoned to archived religious writings.

That is what I expected my search to reveal, that “Righteous Gentiles” is an archaic phrase from some dated biblical translation.

But instead, my search revealed that “Righteous Gentiles” is an official title for today, in use now all over the world. It is a title of honor awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

More currently translated the “Righteous Among the Nations,” these are non-Jewish persons from many faiths, countries, and economic circumstances who rescued, hid, saved, and protected Jews at the risk of losing their own lives. As their stories from dark times are revealed in the light of the world, these gentiles are awarded, often posthumously, the title and honor of “Righteous Among the Nations,” “Righteous Gentiles,” by Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel.

One of the most remarkable stories about “Righteous Gentiles” takes place in a little village on a dark, cold night lit only by starlight. We begin with a knock at a door of a little farmhouse.  From inside, a man slowly opens the door and sees a woman standing outside. She is poor, tired, and hungry. She has traveled a long way. He is the local pastor of the village protestant church. She is a Jewish refugee fleeing for her life from the Nazis.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

To receive her, to hide and protect her goes against all political authority and power of the time. To make room for this one Jew would not only put this one man at risk, but would implicate as a conspiracy all 5,000 villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon if they chose not to report their pastor to the Nazis and Vichy government. Yet for this man,  Andre Trocmé, taking in the woman and protecting her was the right response as a man of God.

Over the following four years, it is known that at least 5,000 Jewish refugees, many of them children, were taken in, sheltered, and saved by the Christian villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—at least one Jew saved for every gentile villager.

Virtually every household became a haven. Every family played a role.
The story goes that not one single Jew was turned away or turned by from the village. Not one. And years later the entire village was honored as part of the “Righteous of the Nations”, as a community of “Righteous Gentiles.”

When Andre Trocmé was asked, after the war, at what time during the war he made the choice to stand against deadly political authority of the day and to save Jewish refugees, he replied, when “they came here and needed help… ”

Time can be like that, can’t it? One moment it is not the right time for us to act or choose or change; and then, something inside of us whispers or screams or urges: “now.”

“Now is the right time…..” Something we see or try not to see, something we hear that causes every cell in our soul to come to life because the beauty or pain or truth that resonates around us or shows up at our door or passes us on the street, calls up an inner voice of wisdom and compassion asking: “If not now….. when?”

For Andre Trocmé the right time to choose to live differently, the right time to choose life over death, healing over killing, keeping over throwing away, speaking over silence, love over hate, good over evil, peace over war…. The right time to choose was when a neighbor’s need presented herself at his door.

For the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, for the entire village, it has been said that they became part of a “conspiracy of goodness” at a time when goodness was given little hope to survive.

When asked years later about the good that they had done, these Christian villagers replied, “How could you call us ‘good’? We were doing what had to be done.”

Five thousand gentiles determined that it was the right time to save five thousand Jews at risk of losing everything they had. Righteousness does not seem so strange a word anymore. It does not seem so archaic a possibility.

Many years before, in a different village on another dark starlit night, a Jewish refugee stood on one side of a closed door of a little hut-of-a-building. On the other side, out in the night, stood a gentile, a pagan, a wise man by reputation, who had traveled a long way.

Neither person was alone. On the inside were also a young woman and infant boy-child, refugees as well, huddled together in the dark, afraid of who might have found them at such a late and desolate hour. On the outside waited more than one wise man, more than one magus astrologer wishing on a star that he had found what he was searching for in the darkness.

With this wise man hovered other gentiles from the East who had also traveled by star-light through Jerusalem, through King Herod’s courts and inner circles, through prophetic predictions, religious posturing, and political plotting to get to this night at this door under this star with this family.

We cannot fully know what happened when that door opened, when starlight slowly illumined the faces of the refugee family hiding inside, when the wise men first peered into the space to find what they were searching for.

Still, we do know this much from Matthew’s Gospel: what they found changed them.

What they discovered in the presence of the Christ-child altered the course of their lives – changed their direction, changed their alliances, changed their loyalties, their obedience, their hearts, their story.

The wise men started out following the light of a star; they kept going at the instruction of a political leader; they agreed to report—turn in—the newborn child they were seeking; and then they planned to return home just like they had come.

But according to Matthew’s Gospel, that was not in the stars for them. According to the gospel, these gentile wise men got caught up in a conspiracy of goodness in a little village called Bethlehem. Not a conspiracy with the villagers, but a conspiracy with God.

And now, the time has come for them to go back out into the world. Time for them to go home. And it is also time for each of them to choose which way to go, to choose which conspiracy to join – God’s or Herod’s.

Their choice, like the choice of Andre Trocmé and of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, is recorded as part of history of the church. Their choice is revealed in our gospel reading: “they went home by another way.”

A biblical scholar writes: “the wise person’s task…is to know when the right time has come and to move visibly with whatever invisible program there may be…”

What the wise men thought they were searching for in a star, they really found in the light of the Christ-child. And in that light, that holy light, in that loving presence of God-with-us, the time was right for the wise ones to join God’s conspiracy of goodness.

So, what about us? When is it our time? “If not now, …..when?”

There is a beautiful song by Carrie Newcomer with lyrics that illumine this question for me:

“If not now, tell me when, if not now, tell me when.
We may never see this moment in place or time again.
If not now, if not now, tell me when….”

And then she writes :
“But miracles do happen every shining now and then.
If not now, if not now, tell me when.”

Villagers of Belmont United Methodist Church and beyond,
God’s healing, saving light has been revealed in Jesus Christ
and this light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not and will not overcome it.
May we risk opening our doors, our hearts, and our lives
to receive this life-changing Light of Christ.
If not now….     when?

Amen

“The Righteous Among the Nations, “ at Yad Vashem, website, http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/about.asp  
“The Village,” at http://www.auschwitz.dk/Trocme.htm
W. Sibley Towner, “Ecclesiastes,” in Introduction to Wisdom Literature, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 5., ed. Leander E. Keck, John J. Collins, David L. Petersen, Thomas G. Long. (Nashville: Abingdon).
Carrie Newcomer, “If Not Now,” from Before and After (Rounder Records 2010).