Matthew 2:1-12
Ephesians 3:1-12
SERMON
In many churches this morning, worshippers will hear cute tales about the Three Wise Men or Three Kings and their gifts, carefully woven fictions designed to keep the privileged comfortable and the marginalized anesthetized.
Of course, we do not know that the visitors in the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew are three in number, or that they are in fact men, and they most certainly are not kings. Besides, it is the job of the preacher to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, not to be a spiritual anesthesiologist.
Some pastors will lean into the theme of the star and light and white, the liturgical color of the day, in their sermons and homilies.
Humans have always been afraid of the dark, as we are afraid of what we do not know and cannot control. Among other species, predators are at work in the dark, but human predators are just as likely to be at work in the day, often from the corner office.
A celebration of lightness all too easily becomes a celebration of whiteness, when the dark is a reality of creation, a productive zone that is a biological and spiritual necessity, one we should embrace. Known unknowns should not be a problem, for God is utterly unknowable. We are called to be mystics.
Still other congregations will hear the traditional theology of good news for the Gentiles, the idea that this moment in the Christ story means that salvation will be available to those who are not Jewish.
Jesus seems to embrace the cosmopolitan character of Palestine in the early First Century and Pauline Christianity would burn like a wildfire across the Roman roads and around the globe, but to suggest that Christianity is the only correct spiritual path leads us back into the trap of antisemitism and notions of a petty god who is most certainly not good, to a god too small to embrace all of humankind, never mind all of creation.
If those are the stories and themes you need this morning, you might want to go online this afternoon, for I am not the only pastor who posts material on the internet. Surely you will find your serving of spiritual porrige.
I am more interested in the part of the story we leave out of the Christmas pageants, the part that comes after our reading, the slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt.
The good news is that it is most certainly a fiction. There was a moment of resistance violently suppressed by Herod the Great around the time Jesus was born, several years before the traditional dating, but there are no accounts of infants being targeted.
The Slaughter of the Innocents is in Matthew’s nativity narrative because the authors of Matthew are trying to depict Jesus as a covenant maker on the order of Moses. The birth story of Moses is marked by the murder of the male children of the descendants of Jacob as an act of ethnic cleansing. The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt sets up a return from Egypt to match the Exodus, even if Moses himself never made it from Egypt to the Promised Land.
The unknown authors of both nativity narratives also are positioning Jesus as the heir to God’s covenant with the House of David, hence the importance of Bethlehem in both stories.
While the slaughter is historically a fiction, operating within the context of the story, we are meant to understand that these children are a necessary sacrifice in the unfolding Christ event, part of some divine plan. We are meant to believe that somehow these lives are sanctified by the slaughter. They are acceptable collateral damage on our journey to the Cross, poor people murdered by the rich and powerful men at both ends of the Jesus story.
There is no such thing as acceptable collateral damage, no life is redeemed in sacrifice, and any god who made such a demand would not be worthy of our worship. Not murdering is not enough. We also must avoid making murder somehow sacred.
America’s slaughtered school children are not part part of God’s plan to create more angels, a theologically bizarre notion at best, perfectly perverse in preserving the threat of constant violence so necessary in an unjust and violent system, whether that is Judea circa 4 B.C.E. or Everytown, U.S.A. in 2025 C.E.
The firefighters who were still climbing the Twin Towers when they fell were courageous, and some lives were saved that day, but in the end, dead is dead, and countless kids grew up missing a parent.
The day FDR died, Harry S. Truman was told about the atomic bomb. We can look at the calculus of casualties, allied deaths as well as the exponential number of Japanese casualties if civilians had aligned with the emperor cult took up arms. Which meant exactly nothing to the almost quarter million killed by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Means nothing to the slaughtered Palestinians considered collateral damage by the genocidal ethno-state bombing them today.
Even the wreathes placed with great solemnity in our national cemeteries represent unnecessary deaths, for while we may declare that the “good guys” won, the “good guys” do not always win, and are not always good, while the “bad guys” may yet be redeemed in this life, and it is only sin that leads humans into war, madness and monsters and me, for we allow them to lead us over the precipice. Madmen lead because mild people follow.
I am certainly not saying we must never take up arms. A tyrant who would invade his neighbor is most certainly already murdering his own people, and we have learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
Still, we are primates with particular skills, capable of composing adagios and constructing automatic assault weapons, terrified one minute and transcendent the next. But that is us, one species evolved on one perfect planet, lives flickering and finite. That is not God, Source and Spirit.
When we sanctify violence, declare it to be holy, we make God violent not in the way of earthquakes and hurricanes but in the human way of emperors. We open the door to razor wire in the Rio Grande, to a million crucifixions in secret prisons in Syria, to murder at New York State’s Marcy Correctional Facility, to the destruction of inconvenient bodies, and to the bodies meant to send a message on Golgotha and on Bourbon Street.
What I am asking is hard. We’ve convinced ourselves that some murders are justified. We’ve decided that we get to decide. And we are wrong.
Non-violence is hard work. Jesus knew this. Gandhi knew this. King knew this. We know this.
As we fall under the rule of cruel and angry racists, let us continue our work as anti-racists, as peacemakers, as advocates for restorative justice, as followers of a murdered man hate could not kill. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
in a time of violence
it is so easy to fall into despair…
But we know you are good,
that creation is invitation,
that life is resilient,
that our grit is gift,
that love is hope in action.
So we pray
for families of the victims in New Orleans,
for the family of a Green Beret with PTSD,
for the family of Robert Brooks,
murdered in our name
at Marcy Correctional.
We pray that we might be peacemakers
and peace-voters.
We pray in the name of one
murdered by Rome
and living still,
saying as he taught us:
Our Father who art in heaven…