Herod at Christmas

First Sunday of Christmas - December 30, 2007

The Rev. Kenneth R. Elkin

None of it fits with our Christmas-card picture of the nativity, does it?

The scene is not painted in pastels.

O little town of Bethlehem,

how still we see thee lie.

It simply is not true,

the way we would like it to be.

It is not a sweet and pastel story,

but one in dusty brown and blood red.

I'm not sure why poinsettias and other red flowers became so popular at Christmas, but they do have this advantage: they remind us that Christmas is a bloody time:

--the pain and blood of birth.

--the pain and blood of those young children slaughtered by the murderous Herod in his attempt to kill Jesus, and the sorrow of those parents.

--then too, the dusty brown of travel to Bethlehem, as well as the hurried departure toward Egypt.

No pastels.

I remember seeing poinsettias about 12 feet high in a protected spot in front of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth.

Someone had decided to import them from Mexico to give their blood-red reminder in the Holy Land, as if they need any more reminders there.

Christmas in the year 2000 was supposed to be a grand affair. They invested millions of $ in fixing up Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem for the event...

...and then the next round of violence began, much was destroyed, and few could even travel to the town.

Finally this year, some more people were able to be there than in the prior seven years.

No pastels in Bethlehem today.

O dusty brown and blood-red town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee seethe!

Caught in the tangle of opposing forces.

But it is nothing new, is it?

The prophet Jeremiah knew it long before, in his own day:

A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled

because they are no more.

The anguish of exile, physical death, spiritual death, and hopelessness

has been repeated many times, in the Bible and far beyond.

Matthew's Christmas pageant ends not with tinsel-clad angels proclaiming good-will, but with Rachel weeping for slaughtered children, and the Holy Family fleeing for their lives.

Herod does what dictators always do:

try to kill the opposition.

Herod, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, PolPot, ...

...on and on goes the list of infamy.

They are all basically the same,

and people of the faith

flee, or suffer and die.

All this is hard:

it is not the Christmas story we want.

How many different version of Dickens' Christmas Carol have been acted or filmed?

Our family saw a production at Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble the other day; they perform it every other year.

The story is perennially popular.

We would like to have a miraculously transformed Scrooge do right by Tiny Tim and the rest of society....

But that is not what happens at Bethlehem.

Herod remains what Herod has always been.

There are many, including some with the power of position and the press, who are embarrassed by Matthew's account.

One such person, who hold the position of bishop in the Episcopal church, says many things which tend to tear down the Christian faith rather than defend it as he is supposed to do.

He says that this story of the brutal Herod just could not possibly have happened; it is just too preposterous.

Really?

Knowing what we do about dictators in general, and brutal Herod in particular, it sounds quite usual.

(After all, Herod murdered many members of his own family when he suspected them of treachery against him.)

But that brutality is not the end of the story.

The Good News is that God comes to us whenever the Herod-types are busy.

God knows our frailties and weaknesses better than we do ourselves, and will yet come to us.

We can't get to him – he comes to us, in his good time, and in his chosen ways.

Sometimes he may open a way to flee from the evil as he did for Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus.

Sometimes he may give the gift of patient endurance, as he gave to the grandmothers in Siberia to hang on for nearly 70 years and to quietly teach the truth of Christ to the children despite official oppression.

Sometimes a bold witness is needed, such as that given by Karen Ridd in El Salvador in 1989.

After being arrested and tortured, she was released, but refused to leave the torture prison until her Columbian co-worker in Christ, Marcella Diaz, was also released.

Their captors were so stunned by this that they did not know what to do.

After some diplomatic pressure was added, both women were finally released.

But then sometimes the gift of life is snatched away.

Sunday after Sunday we name those who have suffered for the faith.

Not very often do they make it to our newspaper, but this week it did:

one unnamed Christian was killed and six village churches were burned by Hindu extremists in Orissa state in eastern India on this past Tuesday.

Even then, just as in the other instances, Herod and death do not have the last word.

Jesus declares in John's gospel:

I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me, Father. [John 17:12]

That is the kind of word which we hear as God's promise to us, and we hang onto it tenaciously.

Nothing in life or death...or in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, says Paul. [Romans 8:39]

And we heard from the letter of Hebrews today that Jesus come among us

is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

He shared all things with us, so that through his death and resurrection

he might destroy the power that death holds over us.

It is therefore not a surprise that singing is one of the important features of Christmas.

What else can we do, when faced with a wonder such as this?

Some Christmas songs simply focus on a sweet baby in a manger, and that is fine as far as it goes.

But we know that we need also to sing hymn about the significance into which this baby grows.

He will, like us, shed bitter tears,

Will know our needs, yet still our fears

And send his Spirit's power.

He will reveal his Father's will,

Our cup of woe with mercy fill

To sweeten sorrow's hour.

Struggling, suffering,

He by dying, Dearly buying Our salvation,

Opens wide the gates of heaven!

[LBW 73.3]

Herod always thinks that he has won, that he has wiped out the opposition.

Herod is wrong.

Jesus lives, and so shall we,

in anticipation now,

and fully in the life to come.

The story in dusty brown and blood red

will finally be told

in gold and blazing light.

Let all sing Christ's praise,

Evermore and evermore. AMEN.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.