1 Christmas A December 29, 2013
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
Isaiah 63: 7-9 + Psalm 148 + Hebrews 2: 10-18 + Matthew 2: 13-23
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
I don’t know what these days in the season of Christmas are like in your households. In ours, they are filled with lively conversation, laughter, movies, relaxation, and leftovers. Lots and lots of leftovers. I am grateful for these days and this season, even as I miss the days when the children were small. The holidays were magical then, it seemed, as we experienced them through the eyes of children.
This Gospel text for this first Sunday after Christmas feels out of place then. It comes in the midst of our celebrations as an unwelcome guest, a reminder of the deepest difficulties in life. They come as families from Newtown, Connecticut to Littletown, Colorado to Darfur, and Syria grapple with the unimaginable sorrow of the killing of their children.
A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.
This Gospel text jolts us from our post Christmas Day bliss back tthe realities of our world. One author noted that this text reminds us: “We do not live in a peaceful snow globe; we live in a world where children die and mothers grieve—not just occasionally, but every day, not just in hospitals but on city streets and in mud huts. We live in a world where the oppressed suffer and the oppressors get away, literally, with murder.[1] No matter how earnestly we have sung of Peace on Earth, good will to all; no matter how we have wished for joy to the world, the headlines tell another story, just as this reading from Matthew does, and we cannot turn away.
Scholars and others have pointed out that there is no historical evidence for this particular infanticide. Unlike many other stories in Scripture, which can be corroborated by other historical writings, this story of the killing of these babies has no such support. But that does not mean that it is not true. And that is why Matthew tells it.
Matthew wants the readers of his time and us to know that Jesus wasn’t born into safety or privilege. Those earliest readers of Matthew’s Gospel would hear echoes of another baby who narrowly escaped slaughter by the empire. They would relate Jesus to Moses. And in 1st century Palestine, those Jews hearing this story would remember the terrors inflicted on mothers by Antiochus, who killed their baby boys if they were circumcised.
But what Matthew seeks to convey here is not just a message of the peril Jesus was born into, and by connection, the peril children born into the world at any time are born into. Matthew’s introduction of Rachel into the story is the place where Matthew’s horrible tale turns into a hopeful one.
When Matthew reminds us of Rachel’s weeping, he is quoting Jeremiah 31: 15. At this point in Jeremiah, the prophet has turned from condemning Israel for their unfaithfulness to reminding them of God’s faithfulness, which was reason for hope. God makes a promise to Rachel and to the people of Israel and to all of those who weep in unimaginable pain….do not give up hope. Your children will return. They may not return to you in this lifetime; but do not give up hope, for in the life to come they will come again to you.
What Matthew wants us to hear in this story is hope in the face of the deepest kind of hopelessness. For God’s salvation may seem inadequate and pointless to mothers who mourn the loss of their children to senseless and cruel violence, but the promise that is born with the Christ child goes beyond this point in time. Matthew knows and the Israelites knew and we know, that there will always be Herods in the world. There will always be those who kill the innocent. They may be known in every history book or they may be a name in a short news cycle: another person with another gun in another school. But the promise of the Christ child is that God has come to dwell with us. Emmanuel – God is with us. With us in every tragedy and in our deepest sorrows.
Matthew is not letting us off the hook on this 1st Sunday in the Christmas season. We do not get to rest for long in the glow of family and friends and leftovers. Because that is not why Jesus was born. The coming of Christ does not lessen our responsibility as his followers in the world, it underscores it. We are to be the bearers of Christ’s light in the world. We are to be the ones who seek out the places where he is found, to follow the light, to reflect to a world filled with such pain, and where the Herods of our time seem to yield more and more power, the unfailing light of Christ.
I have found it true in my lifetime that one of the absolute hardest places to be is with a mother who has just lost a child. Having done my clinical rotation at Children’s Hospital in Columbus, I have been there more times than I wish to remember, yet each time remains unforgettable. More than that, though, I have been with my closest friend at the death of her beautiful infant daughter Christina. It is true, that in these times, words fail us. The only possible thing we can do is be present with people. The only possible thing we can do is receive their sorrows and be with them in those moments of deep darkness, bearing Christ’s light in the dark.
What I cannot begin to imagine, though, is the depth of grief that is present when the loss of such innocent lives comes to pass because no one would speak light to darkness, because no one would speak truth to power. And why would they? It could and might certainly mean the end of life for them or a depletion of resources. Because the fight against evil is a fight against a giant. The fight against injustice, oppression, greed, and pride is one that we must continue to take up. No matter how many powerful people lobby for the other side, no matter how evil the dictator, no matter how overwhelming the task: we must continue to say: this is wrong.
Consider the amazing story of Irena Sendler, a a Polish Roman Catholic social worker who saved 2,500 children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and resettling then with Christian families. The Nazis caught and tortured her. She escaped and survived to be 98. She saved a precious list of which children were sent to which families in a jar. After the war she worked tirelessly to reunite children with any parents that survived the camps. Most didn’t. But thanks to her work, thousands of children were spared the atrocities of another Herod of modern history.
There are other stories, stories like the one of Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark who are working tirelessly to pull all sides together toward gun laws that will prevent the sorts of tragedies that have too many mothers weeping for their children because they are no more.
The truth is that there are still Herods in our world, children will still die in unimaginable ways, causing unspeakable pain. Mothers will weep for them. We, for a time, will weep for their mothers and for them, too. And for ourselves, because we feel so helpless.
But this baby, born in this season, has come to carry the pain, to walk alongside the mourning mothers and whisper to them and to us that death and evil do not have the last word any longer.
That is the Good news, the Gospel news, for this Christmas-tide and for all of our days. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Clendenin, Dan. www.journeywithjesus.net