Sermon for Dec. 29, 2019

On Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019, I preached a sermon on Herod and the killing of the infants and toddlers in Bethlehem.  One of my friends asked for a copy of my sermon, and I reconstructed it for her.  I'm also posting it here as a way of sharing and preserving it:



You may be wondering why we have to have such a depressing text for today and so soon after Christmas.  Today's reading comes from the Revised Common Lectionary, which means that Christians all over the world are reading about Herod's murder of all the children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem.

Or maybe churches have decided to have one more Sunday of lessons and carols.  After all, the Sunday after Christmas is one where churches are likely to be without their pastors, who have put in a lot of work between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It's tough to find a supply pastor and even tougher to find one who wants to preach on this text.

In fact, Pastor Keith gave me a choice of texts:  this one, Jesus being presented in the temple, or Jesus at age 12 staying behind during a trip to the temple and scaring his parents half to death when they realized he had been left behind.  I preached on Anna in the temple last year, and the lesson about Jesus in the temple isn't nearly as interesting to me as the text about Herod.

We're getting the story out of order.  Next week, our church will celebrate Epiphany, which tells what happens when the three wisemen come to Herod.  Herod tells them that they should come back, that he wants to pay his respects.  But actually, he's hoping they'll give him information so he can wipe out a potential rival.

We might want to know whether or not the story of Herod is true.  There's no mention of this kind of mass killing in any of the recorded history, and there's a lot about Herod in recorded history.  Maybe he really killed the children, but Bethlehem would have been a small town, so it wouldn't warrant a mention.  We know he was capable of this kind of cruelty.  He killed his two sons because he felt so threatened by them.  Most of us, when we're working for something in our lives, we think about having something to pass on to our offspring, whether it's wealth or a business or a house.  Not Herod.

So even if the story isn't factual, it's still true.  It tells us an important point about the world that we're living in.  We see a ruler so threatened by a rival who has just been born that this ruler has all potential rivals in a town killed.

I've been seeing some posts on social media about putting Herod back in Christmas.  (surprised looks in the congregation)  Yes, I know that we're used to thinking about putting Christ back in Christmas, but Herod belongs there too.

In one of Pastor Keith's sermons from a Christmas Eve several years ago, he told us that if we left the baby Jesus in the manger, we're missing the point of the good news proclaimed by the angels.  The Gospel of Matthew wants to make sure we get the point.  The story of the life of Jesus is bookended by his collision course with the powers of the Empire.  He comes to the attention of Herod and his family needs to flee because of Herod's murderous wrath.  And then at the end of his life, Jesus is executed by the Roman authorities.

Matthew tries to warn us that the Christian path will put us, too, on a collision course with those in power.  We know that those in power rarely give up power.  We may criticize or offer a vision for a brighter future, but then as now, the powers of Empire in this world do not say, "Thank you for pointing that out.  We will make those changes right away."

And yet we are called to work for that brighter future.  Throughout our sacred texts, we see that God is on the side of the marginalized and the oppressed, and God calls us to work on behalf of those who have no power.  We have done that in our church through our work with the food pantry and with BOLD Justice.  We have worked to get more low income housing in our county, we have worked to get more unannounced inspections of nursing homes, we have worked to have more dental care for those who can't afford it.  We continue to do this work, even though the need is so great.

We may be feeling a bit of despair at the thought that we have this work to do, and we may not be feeling so powerful ourselves.  We, too, may be feeling the boot of the authorities on our neck.  We may not see progress.  We may feel like we're one of the outcast and dejected.

Here, too, the angels give good news.  Think about who the angels appear to:  Joseph, a carpenter, which would have been a position in the lower rungs of society--he doesn't even own land.  Mary, an unwed mother.  Elizabeth, old and barren.  Shepherds.  I look out at our congregation, and I don't see any shepherds.  But that profession, too, would have been lowly.

I hesitate to offer a modern counterpart.  Would it be the adjunct teacher, never sure of having enough classes.  The person who pumps gas at a gas station?  Workers in WalMart who don't work enough to be full-time and can't know what hours they will have week to week?  These are the types of people to whom the angels appear, not the rich and the powerful.

Matthew widens the scope even further by including those outside of Rome.  The wise men have been studying the stars, and they notice something new.  They go to investigate, and so, they, too, get to be part of the good news.  Outsiders, included here in this text.

Of course this good news can turn lives upside down.  The wise men go a different route to avoid Herod.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, too, have to flee--but in doing so, they are preserved.

We might feel despair about those who aren't preserved.  What about all those slaughtered children?  Why couldn't God save them too?

For those of you predisposed to despair, and our time gives us lots of reasons to despair, with rulers that seem as determined to be evil as King Herod, I recommend this book, Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark:  Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.  Just before the service, I was reading a passage where she quotes Cornel West and his idea of a "jazz freedom fighter" which he describes as "a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid, and flexible disposition toward reality suspicious of 'either/or' viewpoints" (page 91).

In Jesus' time and in our own, we see that those who can be jazz freedom fighters have a better chance of surviving the Herods of the world and helping to bring about the world that God envisions for us.  The wise men were jazz freedom fighters in their work to give Jesus, Mary, and Joseph a chance to get away.  This task is ours too.

The coming year will give us many opportunities to be jazz freedom fighters if we answer God's invitation in the Good News of the Christmas message.  God calls us to help create a much better world than the ones inhabited by Herod and the forces of Empire.  Let us have the courage and creativity to be jazz freedom fighters in this coming year and throughout our lives.

Amen.