December 26, 2010 - The First Sunday of Christmas

The Need for Christmas
Matthew 2:13-23
Christmas 1 – December 26, 2010

I sometimes wonder about the people who put the lectionary cycle together. The lectionary is the 3-year schedule of readings that we and many other churches and denominations use each Sunday. I know that a lot of thought and prayer and discussion went into coming up with the order. But today, I have to wonder what they were thinking.

Because today is not the day that we want to hear the kind of story we read about in Matthew's gospel. It's the day after Christmas for crying out loud. The final notes of Silent Night are still echoing in the air. We've just barely finished laying the little Baby Jesus in his place at the center of the nativity scene. But before we can really enjoy the scene and savor the moment, an angel of the Lord is appearing to Joseph in a dream again. Only this time, the angel doesn't say, “Do not be afraid.” No, this time, the angel comes with words of warning: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” (Mt. 2:13)

See, on their way from the East to search out the child who had been born king of the Jews, the wise men stopped by Jerusalem to ask for directions. (Maybe that's why they called them wise men? =) ) They went looking for a king in kingly places, in Jerusalem, the city where you would expect a king to be born. And word of this had made it back to Herod, who panicked. Herod was a paranoid, power-hungry man, enraged at the thought that there was another who might take his place. Threatened by one whose birth the very stars announce, Herod tries to find out where exactly this child has been born. He says it's so he can go pay his own respects, but we know his true motive: he seeks this new king so he can destroy him. And when the magi are themselves warned in a dream to avoid Herod on the road home, Herod is infuriated. Not knowing exactly where this one child is, Herod does the next best thing (from his point of view): he sends men to kill all the children 2 and under in and around Bethlehem.

And right then and there, at that moment in the story, our Christmas bubble bursts apart. The joy we felt with family and friends, giving and receiving presents, eating good, special occasion foods – all of the warm feelings, the idea that at this time of year at least we can avoid the hurt and pain and trouble of our lives and the world – they all come crashing down as we hear this story the church has dubbed “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” It's all too easy to imagine that scene, to hear the voices of moms and dad wailing and lamenting, weeping for their children, refusing to be consoled. It makes your heart hurt to think about it.

And it makes you wonder again why the creators of the lectionary decided to put this story on this Sunday, the 1st Sunday after Christmas. It doesn't match up with our Christmas card imagery, it doesn't jive with what we think Christmas is supposed to be all about. We don't want to be reminded of these kinds of tragedies on our special Christmas weekend. We don't want to think about the fact that around the world, even now, even on and around Christmas day, innocent children still die at the hands of the powerful. Please, just let us have our merry little Christmas without the stark reality that children die from poverty, hunger, disease, and abuse, that all too often the voiceless and vulnerable suffer because of the greed and violence of the rich and strong. Wouldn't this story fit better somewhere else in the church year? Or better yet, couldn't we just leave it out all together??

But as hard as this story is to take, as much as it saddens and appalls us, as much as it jars our sensibilities about Christmas, this story and all the ones like it that have taken place throughout time and down through the ages – these stories are at the heart of Christmas. They wouldn't make it on a Christmas greeting card, but it is precisely because the world is so full of sin, of evil, of hurt and pain and tragedy and death that we need Christmas. It is because people all over are hurting and mourning and grieving, because they have reasons to weep and lament and refuse to be consoled, because we are in slavery to our fear of death – our own & others; it's because of our deep needs and our utter inability to find the answers that will solve these problems and save ourselves once and for all that Jesus comes. This story of a bunch of children slain because of a jealous and threatened king is just one symptom, a sign of a world that was broken long before Jesus was born, a world desperately in need of a Savior.

God sees all of these things. God does not stand idly by in the tragedies of life. God is not made of stone – the Hebrews reading reminds us that in Jesus, God takes on flesh and blood and comes down into this world that is still filled with pain and mourning and longing for things that once were and things that will never be. He comes to share our suffering and to bring us hope – because in Jesus, God says a decisive NO to violence and abuse and tragedy. This is not the way God created our world to be, and it is not the way the story will end. That is the witness of scripture to us, that one day this messed up, broken-down, savage world will be restored, that wrongs will be set right & injustice replaced with justice, that he will come to set us free. Over and over in scripture, God comes to the defense of the weak and the lowly, to heal the hurting and heart-broken. Hebrews tells us that Jesus shares our flesh and blood “so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death... and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” He comes to help us, not despite the world's problems, but because of them.

And so, even as we cringe away from this gospel story and all the stories like them that we hear every day, we know that these stories do not and will not have the final word. God promises us a better day, the day the book of Revelation tells us about, the day when God himself will be with us & wipe every tear from our eyes, the day when death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away. We rejoice in that promise, and cling to the One whose promise is sure, even as we pray, “Come transform our world, Lord Jesus. We need you.”

Amen.