Devotion for January 2

read Matthew2:1-23

Commentary | Dr. Christine J. Hong

A better world for all means to enter deep solidarity and accountability with one another. In the decade after the Korean War ceasefire, my grandparents and my parents would tell me about the many ways neighbors helped one another survive. In fact, when I was growing up, I had great aunts and great uncles whom I later learned were not biologically related to me. They were neighbors who raised children together, cooked together, lived together at times, and became one another’s adoptive families in the wake of the loss everyone experienced when one Korea suddenly became two.

When my parents became immigrants in the United States, their experience of being welcomed by the Korean American community was what grounded them during a bewildering and tumultuous time. In the Korean American church, they sustained life together, preserving culture and language for their children, and processing the many ways racism affected their lives. For them, in the Korean American church there were no strangers, only extended family.

When we consider Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’ story as refugees, fleeing from an enraged despot, I wonder about the people who came alongside them. We know the example of the Magi, who protected the Holy Family by going home another way. Yet, surely, there were others too. People who helped the new parents and their child hide along the way to Egypt. Neighbors who helped settle the small family in a new country, among a new people. Friends who helped them learn a new language, and new ways of life. Jesus probably had many aunts and uncles who were not his blood relations but were family all the same. I give thanks for all my great aunts and great uncles via war and displacement, for all the Korean American church aunts and uncles who raised me, and for the aunts and uncles in Jesus’ life those thousands of years ago. I give thanks for the strangers who became friends and family through solidarity with the Holy Family, wanting a better world, not only for themselves, but for a refugee family too.