This week, we continue the Christmas story, but we move from the joy of celebrating Jesus’ birth to looking at the world’s reaction. Threatened by the news of a King’s birth, Herod moves to eliminate the threat by killing the children in and around Bethlehem. Although Jesus and his parents escape to Egypt, this story is a sad reminder of the brokenness in our world.
And yet as we begin the new year, we will also hear the promise in the midst of the world’s brokenness, God is still present. In every season and situation, God is here with us, accompanying us on our journey through life.
Today’s Scripture readings are Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 and Matthew 2:13-23, and I found helpful Robyn Brown’s reflection in the ELCA World Hunger Sermon Starters email. This was a joint worship service, so both the video and the audio are from Living Hope.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Most weeks, I try to write a little introduction to the week in the church newsletter emails. It’s supposed to be sort of a teaser for Sunday, a look ahead at where we’re going in worship, along with announcements and things going on for the week.
I don’t know if you read those emails, but hopefully you get them—if not, let me or Shannon know and we can add you to the list.
This week, I had a hard time writing an introduction. Part of it was that I took most of the week off to visit family, but when I did sit down to write something, I realized just how jarring this week’s reading is.
Here we are in the Christmas season; we’ve just had the wonderful joy of Christmas Eve worship, singing Silent Night by candlelight, hearing the amazing story of Jesus’ birth, and this week is still Christmas (even if you’ve already taken down your tree and packed up your decorations, remember, Christmas is a 12 day season—there’s a song about it!). Here in worship we’re still singing Christmas carols today, the tree is still up, but today, we get the unpleasant part of the Christmas story.
I ended up writing in this week’s email that today, “We move from the joy of celebrating Jesus’ birth to looking at the world’s reaction.” That’s putting it mildly!
Today’s section is known as “the massacre of the innocents,” and it’s a horrible story! Sunday School children’s Christmas programs don’t include this part.
By the way, I talked on Christmas Eve about the challenge of picking Christmas carols for worship; well, almost no one writes Christmas carols about this part of the story. I found one brand new one we’ll sing as the hymn of the day, and I hope you like it, because as far as I know, it’s the only option.
Some of you have heard me talk about my favorite two questions for reading Scripture: First, what does the story tell us about God, and second, what does it tell us about ourselves. You can use that framework with just about any Bible story, and I think it’s a helpful approach to this story.
So first, what does this story say about God?
Well, this is part of the Christmas story, and the Christmas story is all about God’s love for us. All of this is happening because God enters into the world to save us. God chooses to be born as a human, chooses to come experience what we experience. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.
God loves us enough to come in the person of Jesus Christ, stepping out of heaven to be born into the muck of our world. Jesus loves us so much that he is willing to lay down his life for our sake. That’s who God is.
Today’s section of the story says more about us, more about the realities of our world. What does this story say about us? It shows how far we humans are willing to go to hold on to power. That’s what Herod’s reaction is about, right? Power.
We’re actually reading this story out of order, so next week, we’ll hear the first part, where magi—astrologers from the East—see a new star rising. They know this new start heralds the birth of a great king, so they travel from their far-away land following the star, bringing gifts for this new king. The star leads them to Israel, where they head for the palace.
They’re wise men, remember, and logically, if you’re looking for a king, you go to a palace. They tell King Herod about their quest, and he has no idea what they’re talking about, but his advisors know the prophecies about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem, so he sends the magi there, asking them to come back by the palace on their way home and let him know where the child is so that he too may go and…also worship.
But after they find Jesus and give their gifts, God warns them in a dream not to return to Herod, so they go back home by a different route.
And when Herod realizes the magi are not coming back, he doesn’t reach well. Matthew says, “He was infuriated.”
Herod seems to be the kind of person who values power above all else. He himself is Jewish, but his father had good relations with the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and by collaborating with the Romans, Herod has been able to gather power in Israel.
He’s known as a brutal, tyrannical ruler, but like everyone who rules by force, he’s always on the lookout for threats to his power. He rules through fear, clinging to his authority at all costs.
So when he learns of a potential threat, a child born in Bethlehem, he takes action. He doesn’t worry about justice or collateral damage, because he doesn’t see the children of Bethlehem as humans, as beloved children made in God’s image; he sees them as obstacles in his way, potential threats to his power.
What does this story tell us about people? Well, it’s not a great picture of humanity, but there’s a lot of truth in this story. It matches with how rulers behave when they’re threatened.
Look at our world today, at the suffering caused right now in Ukraine by a tyrannical leader afraid of losing his power, afraid to back down. Perhaps we ourselves have had moments of seeking power as well, certainly on a different scale, but perhaps even at the expense of others.
We don’t have any particular historical evidence of this specific incident, but it’s entirely plausible, right? And we wouldn’t actually expect to have archaeological evidence, as Herod’s death squads likely only found around 20 children to kill that day around the small town of Bethlehem. Tragic, but only the tiniest historical footnote. And that’s even more tragic.
But that’s the way our world works. And maybe that’s part of the point. Thomas Williamsen writes, “Amid the joy of the Christmas season, these words from Matthew’s Gospel are a jarring reminder that violence and tyranny are enduring companions in this world. Still today we see the bloody and vicious actions of despots—in Ukraine, Syria, Uganda, and the lost boys of Sudan.
Violence is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. In our country, we don’t have to look any further than the deaths of beautiful children in school shootings.
Jesus’ entry into the dark world of tyrant kings gives us a choice—we can trust in the armed brutality of violent power, or we can trust in the naked vulnerability of love.
Followers of Jesus speak justice, live justice, and are aligned with the heart of God. We carry the world in our hearts. Our faith tells us the ‘light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ Violence does not have to win the day.”
As broken as this world is, as broken as we humans prove ourselves to be, this is the world God chooses to be born into. God comes to us as we are, choosing to love the world.
Take heart when you see the injustice in the world, the powerful treating the weak as obstacles in a question for power. Don’t despair. God comes into the messiness, into the muck and the violence and the sadness.
The Christmas story tells us God is present with the people fleeing violence, that God understands what it’s like to be a refugee. There are some 27 million refugees in the world today, 53 million internally displaced people, 4.6 million asylum seekers today.
This story gives an all-too-accurate reflection of the world you and I live in. There are people right now fleeing from oppressive governments, from wars, from famine, from gang violence, from climate change, from rockets hitting apartment buildings.
And God is present with them. Jesus knows what it is to be a refugee. And not just a refugee, but in every broken situation, in broken relationships, grief, loss, bullying, bankruptcies, chronic illnesses; this is the world God has chosen to enter and redeem.
In all those times the poet spoke about in Ecclesiastes, in the times of planting and harvesting, throwing away and gathering, in the situations of war and of peace, in the times of weeping and of laughing, God is present.
In whatever this new year brings, God will be with us. This is where we place our hope.
Christmas promises us that into the shadows of this world, God’s light is breaking, bringing the peace that this world cannot give, offering a hope that cannot be overcome.
The worst this world’s powers can do cannot hinder God’s purposes from being accomplished, God’s promises from being fulfilled.
Merry Christmas.