In this year's lectionary cycle, the readings for the first Sunday after Christmas are not much better. We hear of King Herod slaughtering the young children of Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the new king Herod has learned about from the magi. Joseph and Mary escape with Jesus, but must flee as exiles to Egypt. Not your typical Christmas story, and I suspect that many preachers avoid the gospel reading for this Sunday. We want to bask in the warmth of Christmas a little longer. (It also helps that so many of us pastors take vacation following Christmas and therefore often miss this Sunday anyway.)
Yet if we use the daily lectionary in our devotions, we are rudely shaken from Christmas warmth and mirth well ahead of Sunday and its "Slaughter of the Innocents." We are confronted with the fact that loyalty to God often does not ingratiate one to those in power, and that's often true of both political and religious power.
The people who killed Zechariah, the people who killed Stephen, and the people who killed Jesus all claimed to be acting as God's people. Many of them were no doubt absolutely convinced they were doing God's work. It is so easy to assume that God agrees with what we want and how we do things and so to see those who challenge us as our enemies as well as God's.
The story of Christmas is the story of God's entry into the world in the most vulnerable way, as a helpless infant. And while that infant escapes Herod's slaughter at Bethlehem, the man he grow up to be will face execution. He will not wield divine might against the powers that be, but will instead go quietly to a cross.
As much as we love the Christmas story, it proves difficult for many, certainly for me, fully to embrace the God of that story. The God of the Christmas story does not intervene to stop Herod's slaughter, or the slaughter of the Holocaust, or the slaughter today in Aleppo, Syria. Rather God confronts the evil and brutality of our world by entering into that suffering, by suffering as Jesus and calling us to join Jesus in his work, in the way of the cross.
Christ is born! Angels sing and celestial signs appear. And the powers that be still resist, by brutal force and by subtle co-opting of Jesus' name. But Jesus keeps calling us to join him in carrying a cross, in living as boldly as he did because we have discovered a power and freedom that makes no sense by the world's measures. As Jesus taught us, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
Jesus' words do not have much logic in the reasoning of the world and the powers that be, nor in the reasoning that most of us live by. But when the strange and wonderful ways of God begin to transform us, we start to see a new possibility.
This Sunday I'm preaching on Matthew's story of Herod's slaughter. Providentially a friend shared a post by Amy Merrill Willis on the passage, and I've added a quote from it to that sermon, a quote where Teresa Berger reflects on the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The divine presence wept. And then I saw: in her strong brown arms she was gathering the remains of her beautiful creation, all the maimed and the burnt, the dying and the dead, the unborn, the orphaned, the lost, and those who inflicted loss… And I saw that she was a woman in travail, desperate to birth new life, a child of peace… Then I heard the voice of the divine presence saying, Who will labor with me, and who will be midwife to life? Here I am, I said, I want to birth life with you. And the divine presence said, Come, take your place beside me.
Christmas is cause for rejoicing. But it is also a call to join God in something new, in the painful process of birthing something new. It is the beginning of Jesus' call to lose ourselves in something strange and wonderful and, in the process, to discover what it means to be children of God.
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