Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech
ha-olam. Blessed are you Lord our God, ruler of all possibilities.
* * *
[begin with long silence and gaze at
congregation]
“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was
infuriated,
and he sent and killed all the
children in and around Bethlehem
who were two years old or under,”
And Rachel wept, wailed, lamented for
her children.
“She refused to be consoled, because
they are no more.”
I don’t know, guys. I mean, it was Christmas just last week.
It was, you know, fun, and happy, and
candlelit and,
I know giving birth in a stable isn’t
easy
and it wasn’t as clean and pretty as
we like to remember it.
But, good God, it’s so much worse
this week.
[rub face]
I don’t really want to preach about
this story.
I don’t want to think about it.
But.
So Mary and Joseph and toddler Jesus
and maybe a brother or sister
(yeah, they had other kids—another
day we’ll talk about that)
were living in Bethlehem and things
were ok.
It’d been a couple years and the magi
had come
and given them some embarrassingly
expensive gifts
and they’d left only recently, kind
of shiftily,
like they knew something was up.
And then Joseph had a dream where an
angel told him,
“Dude, it’s bad. You gotta go. Now.
NOW.”
So they grabbed what they could and
ran.
I imagine they weren’t the only ones.
Maybe they had warning, but once the
killing started,
there were families choking the road
trying to get away.
They ran and ran and hid and all the
while shook with fear,
maybe trying to be strong for the
kids.
And what were they running away from?
Their king who was already terrifying,
their king who shifted loyalties to
foreign powers to get his way,
who didn’t hesitate to kill off
anyone who stood in his way
and who raised taxes to extortion
levels
so he could build fancy new cities
and make himself feel immortal.
Their king was so threatened by the
idea he heard from the magi
that there could be a new king,
that he had all the little boy babies
and toddlers up to age 2
ripped from their mothers and fathers
and murdered in the street.
Or others say Herod knew he himself was
dying
and also knew there wouldn’t be
anyone mourning his death,
so his slaughter served a dual
purpose of
not only keeping the throne to
himself
but also creating a ready-made misery
when he died.
Their king stopping at nothing to
hold on to power,
willing to justify not just murder
but the destruction of the beauty and
potential of young lives.
It’s called the Slaughter of the
Innocents.
I’m not ready for this, liturgically or emotionally.
Scholars say this didn’t actually happen.
That, even if it did, there were only
maybe 1000 people
living in Bethlehem at this point,
so it might only have been 20
children.
As though that makes it better.
Twenty or ten or even five means it’s
not horrific.
But most scholars say this is a theological point, not an
historical one.
Herod never had these babies killed.
Matthew is the only account,
either in the bible or in historical
sources.
He wrote it in himself to make a
theological point.
Matthew is big on tying Jesus’ story
to the ancient Israelites’ stories—
remember the long genealogy
at the beginning of the gospel of
Matthew?
That’s him tying Jesus definitively
in to the family of David.
Remember the star that the magi
followed?
Related to some passages in the book
of Numbers.
The holy family runs off to Egypt?
And warnings in dreams?
And massacre of children?
Totally the Exodus story. Jesus is a
new Moses,
the one who will change everything
like Moses did but better.
Matthew’s all about bringing in these
references
to give legitimacy but also holistic
beauty
to the story he’s telling about
Jesus.
And it works for him in general.
But…but.
We don’t need this story to be factual for that historical
time and place.
We don’t need it to have actually
happened to tell the story.
We tell the story because we know the story.
It happens over and over and we don’t
know how to stop it.
On Christmas here at Good Shepherd it has become something of
a tradition
for the praise team to offer the song
“Christmas Eve Sarajevo” by TSO.
It’s fun and exciting and for the
first time,
I wondered why it was called that.
I knew it was about the Bosnian War
in the nineties—
ethnic cleansing between the Serbs
and Croats in the former Yugoslavia.
It was atrocious.
And it looked a lot like the Rwandan
conflict and Aleppo,
and so many other conflicts.
For three years they killed each
other, both military and civilian.
Families and entire towns were
annihilated.
The city Sarajevo took the worst of
the damage.
And a cellist sat in the middle of
the fighting
and played Christmas carols through
the night for days.
The TSO song he inspired is beautiful
but it is heartbreaking.
Sarajevo was a massacre
and so many of those massacred were
innocent.
This story repeats throughout history.
In the middle ages, the Church sent
several crusades
to take back the Holy Land from the
infidels.
Leaving aside the seriously
problematic nature of that whole cause,
one of them was called the Children’s
Crusade.
Because they sent children.
Adults going on crusade often didn’t
survive
the long, violent journey to Israel.
And they sent kids?
They didn’t make it. At all.
They all died in the cause of
attaining more power
for the rulers, for the adults.
In America, we decided that the
native peoples
from whom we’d taken the land needed
to be more white.
You think I’m kidding or using modern
understandings of racism.
I’m not.
European culture was considered the
correct culture
so we took children from their
families,
dressed them up like dolls,
refused to let them speak their
languages or see their families,
and made them ready for polite
society.
Where they wouldn’t be accepted
anyway.
How many of them died of suicide or
broken hearts?
I’m not being poetic here.
This was a different kind of
massacre.
Four years ago a young man took guns
into Sandy Hook Elementary
We don’t know why.
He wasn’t King Herod trying to keep
power.
He wasn’t trying to reclaim the Holy
Land with sacrificial victims.
Yet the result was the same.
Innocents sacrificed for an adult’s
dream.
For years some
have thought they could change
a child’s sexual orientation from gay
to straight
with prayer and psychology.
It’s called conversion therapy and is
increasingly illegal
as scientists show us how damaging it
is.
And I’m not talking about “oh, gosh,
those kids feel bad
and we need to boost their
self-esteem.”
I mean the suicide rates and
self-harm rates
and psychological trauma from these
programs
are unbelievably high.
I mean these kids have been
massacred, in a sense,
for the adults to prove their righteousness.
And this year alone—2016 has a lot to
answer for—
this year alone the number of unarmed
black men shot by police,
the number of mass shootings in
places like
Paris and Orlando and Dallas,
the uptick in gun violence in cities
like Chicago,
the length of time Flint, Michigan
has gone without drinkable water.
Matthew says Rachel weeps and laments and refuses to be
consoled,
because they are no more.
These acts of violence we can’t seem
to stop doing
are the slaughter of the innocents
over and over.
Maybe we do know how to stop it, but
we don’t. It’s too hard.
This is sin: humanity’s propensity to
screw things up—
both that we actually can’t stop
hurting each other
and that we don’t want to stop, not
really.
Jesus the cute baby comes into this world, this sinful,
R-rated world.
And he lives in
it, he sees it happening, he doesn’t hide from it,
he walks with us and experiences pain
just as we do.
I think it’s important for us, intellectually and emotionally
to juxtapose sweet Christmas with
horrible slaughter.
It’s hard but good to hold these
different experiences together.
Ugh, but really, experientially?
If God is God, then God should do
something.
And, also, shouldn’t we have
something more uplifting
here on New Year’s weekend?
We’re always talking about how God is
doing a new thing,
how there’s hope, how Jesus changed
things.
Where is the good news in the
slaughter of the innocents?
All good questions, but all predicated on a rather small God.
God who is entangled by our rules and
our physics.
God who is entangled in our expectations
of rightness and judgment.
God who isn’t actually as vast as the
universe
and as tender and caring as nothing
we’ve ever experienced.
God is so much bigger than we know, holding us in massive divine hands,
weaving the fabric of the universe
together.
Years ago, I read this amazing and
difficult book
Time’s Arrow
by Martin Amis.
It’s very odd and heartbreaking,
because his premise is
that the Holocaust makes absolutely
no sense
unless it’s lived backwards. Do you
get that?
There is no sense to be made of the
slaughter of the innocents
during World War II as it is.
None. It’s atrocious. Period.
However, if we could live it
backwards,
if we could see the smoke in the sky
flowing together
into a chimney
and somehow creating bodies which
awake and embrace
and are given clothing and handed
children
whom they love so much they cry
and then sent on their way to lovely
homes…
if we could live it that way,
the massacre of the Holocaust would
be beautiful.
Matthew says Jesus is the new Moses
but he also says Jesus is not exempt
from horror.
God’s presence doesn’t promise to
take away the pain immediately—
someday
it will be gone, next year in Jerusalem, in the Kingdom.
God will wipe away every tear from
our eyes
and there will be neither sorrowing
nor sighing.
How do we make sense of this,
without being Pollyannaish,
without the science fiction of living
it backwards,
without falling into infinite
despair?
We don’t make sense of it,
we don’t justify it,
we simply see it, clearly and without
argument.
It is a gift to have our eyes opened,
to see the world as it is
—beautiful and broken—
and to know we are not alone.
2017 is filled with possibility—possibility of disaster, yes,
AND possibility in the new babies
born even now,
possibility for all the generations before
and after those new babies
to make different, compassionate
choices,
possibility for God to do that new
thing.
Happy New Year.
