Sermon, Year A, Christmas Eve, "Playing our part in the Christmas story resistance"

 

A Christmas Eve Col/Paul 2025
Matthew 1-3
December 24, 2025

 

           My Advent spiritual guides this year have been two writers I had never known, let alone read, before the month of November began.  One was Erna Kim Hackett[1] who began her Advent reflection guide by comparing Advent to a Korean spa.  In such a spa, Hackett describes receiving a Korean scrub. 

           I have never been to such a spa or received such a scrub, so here I rely on my new spiritual guide’s description.

American spas are all about soft music, dim lighting, and good-smelling oils. A Korean spa is a middle-aged person who is utterly unfazed by your pain, scrubbing every inch of your flesh until dead skin you didn’t even know was there rolls off your body. They do not care about your modesty or self-consciousness . Their job is to scrub off the dead skin that has been building up since your last visit. It will not be comfortable. But you will be cleeeaaaannnnn. You will wonder if you have ever bathed before.

Even when we cannot see it, dirt still accumulates.[2]

And the Korean scrub makes sure all of it, every last dead skin cell, is rubbed off our body.

What Hackett means in that comparison is that our wider culture has gotten us used to the regular violence, the regular de-humanization, the numbness, the powerlessness that has been quietly building upon us.  And Advent, particularly in reading through the Gospel of Matthew’s story, is an invitation to scrub all that is regular and normative to American Christianity off because it is antithetical to Jesus.  

You want to protect a vulnerable, exhausted family, a hunted-for-child?  Then you had better scrub all that dead skin off, buck up, and find yourself in the story.         

Will there be, can there be, a people who will choose a gritty, hard-nosed tenderness and vulnerable humility, presence and collective power, an earth-centered, enduring journey over domination?  Will there be, can there be, a people who will look back through their genealogies to see humble and suspect roots that inform them about what God sees and how God acts? God does not see their or our roots and authority in the same way that the wider world does.  Will there be, can there be a people who know that that is exactly where God would arrive—in a backwater community, off-the-beaten path—to begin resolute resistance against authoritarianism and oppression, a state religion of violence and slaughter,  and community-wide culture of sickness and death?  Will there be, can there be a people who will be about tenderness over domination?

If we are caught up in the detritus and dross of domination, Advent invites us to a Korean spa.  God does not care about our modesty or self-consciousness.  A child’s life is at stake.  Time to scrub clean.  “We stand in a long line of people who refused to disappear.  Their courage is in our bodies, reminding us that another world is possible and already being born.”[3]

“God is groaning with the birth pangs of a new creation.  And birthing something new costs something.”[4]  Birth is engaging with loss and engaging with death, and the messiness of bodies and blood.  Domination loves to carry its message through abstraction. Domination loves to get away from bodies, loves to get away from the earth--because it is all messy and because bodies and the blood and the earth are all considered feminine.  And domination wants to conquer and fight against . . .  to control.  Will there be, can there be a people who will be about tenderness over domination so that this new birth in a backwater, war-torn, occupied Bethlehem is possible—in a manger?  Under the rubble?

Throughout this Advent, I have been sharing that you have to believe the world needs to be saved to understand the logic of Matthew’s gospel.  If the world is good “as is” then the Gospel of Matthew makes no sense.

In Matthew, political leaders are obsessed with power, prone to grift and bribes, and self-absorbed in their own accomplishments and legacy.  Probably not a surprise that the city-building King Herods named two of their cities after Caesar.  Caesars love to have their names on things.  And these Herod guys know what side their bread is buttered on.  In Matthew, the state religion praises those in high political office, treat them as gods, to gain access and special favors, creates their own justifiable, charismatic means for draining the most vulnerable of their livelihood, and justify violence, targeted assassination, and war as a means to bring about peace.  Even Rome’s entertainment, the empire’s spiritual practice, sported amphitheaters like the Colosseum.  Here were brutal re-creations, microcosms, of how Rome destroyed people they “called” barbarians by having them bloody each other.   Or they would capture majestic wild animals, starved them into angry beasts, to make these animals the equivalent of the barbarians.  In Matthew, tributes, tariffs, and taxes drove people in rural Galilee into tremendous debt.  And those who were poor became destitute, their spirits broken by poverty, as they sold off their land which had kept them at subsistence level.  Sickness, deformity, mental illness, and death became community-wide as regular issues around hunger, nutrition, sanitation, and community health became everyday struggle.  Imperial pressure led to disease becoming rampant. 

Huh.  Matthew’s world sounds nothing unlike where we are today.  Matthew makes it clear.  The world needs saving. 

Time to scrub all that dead skin off, buck up, and find ourselves in the story. 

We could be Joseph.  Joseph was not the main character but the supporting actor in the story.  He offers a model for how we can learn to stay involved, show up in presence, and be attentive to God even when we are not the main character.  Yes, he could have become the main character by publicly shaming Mary.  He could have chosen his individual piety and righteousness to contrast with her supposed immorality.  Even before the dreamer receives divine counsel, he is going to choose tenderness and kindness.  And then the angel challenges him to go further.  Stay in the story, Joseph.  Stay in the story when the story isn’t about you.  Tenderness is revealed through support and accompaniment. 

[S]o many people claim “divine messages” that justify cruelty and protect empire. Joseph’s dream pulls him in the opposite direction. It calls him out of guarding his status and into a different kind of courage.[5]

We could be Joseph.

We could be the author of the gospel of Matthew.  Even though King Herod may be known as a skilled solicitor of the Roman Caesar and a great builder—an architect of aqueducts, a constructor of cities, a fortifier of fortresses, and a remodeler of the Second Temple—the author of the gospel of Matthew has different eyes. Matthew has different eyes, eyes that are trying to see the world as God sees it.  If success under empire were measured as righteousness, Herod would be considered a hero.  But Matthew paints Herod as a fool. 

And in outlining the author of Matthew’s vocation, Nobel Prize winning writer Toni Morrison said,

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools.  Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to [hu]mankind; they are its necessity.[6]

Writers like the author of Matthew satirize authoritarianism, call a fool a fool, but most importantly, humanize people and populations authoritarian rulers are trying to de-humanize to kidnap, imprison, and wipe off the face of the earth.  This is exactly what Herod Antipas does in kidnapping, imprisoning, and murdering John the Baptist.  For authoritarian rulers like Herod, people become pawns and human beings become expendable.  The author of Matthew will have none of it.  He calls a fool a fool and honors the humanity of the most vulnerable. 

Domination systems want us to fear and hate each other.  And we need a good scrubbing to make sure we will not be a low-level Herod, call these fools out, and humanize our neighbors.  There is accumulated dirt from an empire that trains us to dehumanize, dominate, or despair.  Scrub . . . it . . . off.

We could be the author of the gospel of Matthew.

We could be the Magi.  The Magi use the Earth and Sky to discern God’s wisdom in the world, a spirituality rooted in creation, one that listens to the universe as a sacred text.  They confront the fool, refuse to obey in advance, and are not impressed with Herod’s title, his throne, his illusion of authority.  The Magi don’t somehow confuse Herod’s position for some kind of spiritual faithfulness.  They choose not to be errand boys for empire.  Herod tells them to go find the baby, this “so-called King of the Jews,” and report back. 

Know people like that?  Folks who have signed onto the project that the King Herods of the world started?  People willing to carry out violent, de-humanizing acts, breaking laws and using unjust practices carrying around weapons, like Herod’s soldiers, to be errand boys for empire?

These Magi take another road home than the one appointed to them by King Herod.  Herod wants them to follow orders.  By going home by another way, they break the law.  Follow orders!  And as Erna Kim Hackett writes,

 

Instead they used their wisdom and resources to stay curious, to follow the truth written in the sky, and to respond with humility when they finally reached Jesus. And when they found him, they worshiped.  And here’s what I truly love about the Magi. They did not try to colonize Jesus for themselves. They did not linger to claim ownership, or build a shrine to their discovery, or make sure everyone knew they saw him first. They simply went home.[7]

 

In confrontation, non-cooperation, refusal, humility, and full humanity, we could be the Magi.  Scrub off being the errand boys for empire.  Do not become empire’s emissaries.  We could be the Magi.

           Finally, we could be Mary.  We learn more about Mary and who this young girl is more in the Gospel of Luke than in Matthew.  But the author of the gospel of Matthew makes sure we know, through the beginning genealogy, that Mary is sexually suspect.  And Mary, this young girl, does not allow how the world might see her to quiet her voice or back down.  The Powers-That-Be want to retreat into shyness, to shut up, but she refuses.

She sings with a strong voice the story of her people and her knowledge of God as Liberator.  She does not allow her worldly status to dictate her boldness.  The story says that the angel asks that the story continue through her only with her consent.  And she gives it.  For God is not Herod.  God is not Herod!

           Finally, Mary also seeks out the Elders in her community to discern further wisdom.  Once again, humility is part of her character’s narrative. 

           She will not allow worldly convention to limit her boldness.  While others might suggest that she has no role to play, Mary is not playing that game.  She knows that God sees her very differently than how the world might see her.  And she is banking on how God sees her.  She is the bearer of the Divine.

We could be Mary. 

She, herself, becomes a follower of Jesus.  And to follow Jesus is to love our neighbor not abstractly, but in material, public, courageous ways.[8]  Mary shows up, sings, does not let her status dictate her behavior.  Scrub off the way empire wants and intends you to be shy, tells you to shut up about your truth, about the accountability of the wealthy and the powerful.

Two of the most well-known pieces of art depicting Mary put her strength and tenderness on display.  One is holding her child.  The other is holding her crucified son. 

All empire brings is death. 

Now I am sure there are many other ways to become the community that resists empire and domination.  Joseph, the author of the gospel of Matthew, the Magi, and Mary with the help of Luke, remind us that the only way to resist is in community so that we might be the tapestry woven together to be the Empire of Heaven--in tenderness, humility, wisdom, and boldness.  Sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, this is how it always has been so that you might find your place in the story.  And now the day comes.

 

To understand the meaning of Jesus’ birth, we do not start in heaven with abstract theology. We begin on the ground, in a geography marked by occupation, surveillance, and the threat of state violence. Matthew does not offer us a warm fairy tale. He gives us a border crossing. He gives us a baby whose first encounter with political power is a death sentence. He gives us a holy family forced to flee by a tyrant whose fear curdles into violence. Jesus enters the world not as a conqueror or a protected royal heir, but as a refugee carried across a border by parents desperate to keep him alive. His first breath is taken in a country that is not his own. His early memories would have been shaped by displacement, uncertainty, and the lingering terror that every boy his age was murdered because of him.[9]

You want to protect a vulnerable, exhausted family, a hunted-for-child?  Then you had better scrub all that dead skin off, buck up, and find yourself in the story.

Maybe this year, maybe if we act soon enough and with enough courage, we might take our part early enough to even save some of those children in Bethlehem who have not escaped Herod.  Maybe this year, right?  Maybe this year.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Praise God—the tender, the merciful, the humble, the presence, the bold, the one who accompanies us on the longest of journeys.  Praise the Living God who chooses, age after age, tenderness over domination.  Praise God.  Amen. 

---

[1] Erna Kim Hackett defines herself as a public theologian, raised in the Korean immigrant church.  She holds a Master’s in Intercultural Studies from the Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, and her work sits at the intersection of faith, decolonization, and justice. Erna specializes in leadership development for those navigating systems of oppression.  In 2019, she founded Liberated Together, a sanctuary for women of color, queer WOC, and non-binary folks deconstructing and reconstructing faith through liberative theology and sustainable approaches to social justice.

[2] Erna Kim Hackett, “The Long Unlearning of Empire and Patriarchy:  Advent 2025,” Liberated Together, pp. 7-8.

[3] Ibid, p. 16.

[4] Rev. Jonah Overton, “"A Messy Christmas", Advent 4 (Matt. 1:18-25),” The Green Lectionary Podcast, December 12, 2025.

 

[5] Hackett, “The Long Unlearning,” p. 37.

[6] Toni Morrison, “Peril,” In These Times, https://inthesetimes.com/article/toni-morrison-peril-racism-fascism-liberation-black-women-writers.

[7] Hackett, “The Long Unlearning,” pp. 55-56.

[8] Hackett, “The Long Unlearning,” p. 25.

[9] Hackett, “The Long Unlearning,” p. 68.

Sermon, Year A, Fourth Sunday of Advent, "The Beatitudes remain, Rome has fallen"

 

A Advent 4 AL Paul 2025

Matthew 5:1-11

December 21, 2025

           We live in a pluralistic world where we come into contact with many people of no faith and many people of distinctly different faith.  As a Christian and a faith leader one of my highest callings amidst so many different faith perspectives is to live my faith with humility.  I don’t try to pretend I have all the answers.  Clearly, I do not.  Sometimes my sermons every Sunday are me trying to figure out this thing called faith.

           But a big part of living my faith with humility is recognizing that just because someone else’s faith is different does not mean their faith is any less true, any less beautiful and complex and good.  I was with Native leaders from the Pokagon Band this past week and I can tell . . . they want to know, intuitively, whether I think my Christianity makes me better than them.  Or do I see wisdom and truth in their tradition that offers the possibility of changing me.

In the same way, I have served two different churches where a local rabbi became my best friend.  They are always interested.  Do I think Christianity is the new and improved form of Judaism such that their Jewish faith falls short?  Or am I humble enough to see Judaism as a deep, broad, and diverse path which has a wisdom that is longer than Christianity?  During Advent, that is a critical question.  Because the Scripture verses chosen for Advent make it seem like Jesus is the answer to every Jewish prophetic prediction.  They shall call him Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace . . . gotta be Jesus.  By his stripes we are healed . . . gotta be Jesus.  “My God, my God why have you abandoned me!”  Ah, well, look, that is the Psalmnist in Psalm 22, predicting what Jesus would say on the cross!

I remember in high school being blown away by all the ways the gospels correlated with something from what I used to call the Old Testament and what I now call Hebrew Scripture.  As I studied further though, I learned from scholars like former priest, John Dominic Crossan, that there was another reason Jesus was seen as the fulfillment of so much Hebrew Scripture.  Gospel writers and other New Testament writers actively made “prophecy historicized.”  In other words, New Testament writers would search the Hebrew Scriptures for content that would give authority to the life, teaching, and ministry of Christ. 

They did this so Jews in the First Century would see Jesus as part of a long line teachers and prophets who spoke and acted according to the tradition—not to break with the tradition.  But eventually, Christianity, which began as a cult within Judaism, was either thrown out of the synagogue or broke from the synagogue.  Christianity became distinct from Judaism.

Later on, Christian thinkers and teachers became known for supersessionism or fulfillment theology where Jesus became the answer for every future prediction made in Hebrew Scripture.  At its worst, this suggested that Christians somehow replaced Jews as the chosen people.  Rabbis and Christian pastors I respect state quite bluntly these days, in light of current events, that there are no chosen people. 

           Now while most Christian teachers and scholars in my seminary did not see Jesus as the fulfillment of all Jewish prophecy, they continued to preach from the Revised Common Lectionary for Advent.  And in Advent, we have one after another Jewish prophecy that Jesus seems to fulfill.  But again, what if gospel writers went back into Hebrew Scripture prophecy and used it to give Jesus’s life, teaching, and ministry more heft within their tradition?  That was not done to replace the Jewish faith but to extend it see it continuing to be lived—until Christianity and Judaism went their separate ways far out into the future. 

What many pastors and preachers might not ever tell you is that many of things later attributed to Jesus were not about prophecies far out into the future but many times a statement and reference to things going on presently in their community.  Some of the suffering servant passages which later got attributed to Jesus’s torture and death were actually statements about the untold suffering the whole Jewish people went through during the Babylonian Exile.   

Some of those statements are profoundly dangerous for the Jewish people as the Scripture passages suggest Jews as total innocents in the world who unjustly go through untold amounts of suffering, dislocation, and death.  Or . . . if the Jewish people weren’t innocents, they certainly inherited more suffering and death than they deserved as God’s chosen.

Meanwhile, Jewish prophets before the Babylonian Exile suggest that their suffering is a direct result of the sin of the Jewish political and religious elite who defrauded the poor, made violence an everyday experience for the wider Jewish populace, and set as values their own wealth and gain.  Regardless of sin, no people deserves the desolation, violence, and death brought to the Jewish people from the Exile but stories about innocence or deserved holocaust or genocide do not serve us as we discern paths to peace. 

Christians picked up those narratives of innocence and deserved genocide too easily, and, even worse, those stories have been picked up by Christian Nationalism to do the worst of our nation’s history.  Those narratives have not allowed our nation to be honest about its history and allowed our government to make claims about who we are that are entirely fictional.  We are not innocents in the world and the belief that we are has allowed us to wield the sword in horrific ways believing that the violence we do does not destroy peoples or disfigure who we are.

           So what do preachers and pastors say with this being the reality?  Are they honest?  Do they tell you that gospel writers actively scanned Hebrew Scripture to help Jesus fit within the long line of poetic tradition?  Do they share that many of the prophecies were about what people saw way back then and are not about a Jesus far out into the future?  Or are they a little less honest to say, “Look, Jesus, is being talked about by all these prophets, his actions fulfilling detailed statements about a Promised One who would come to save us?  It is one thing to say that Jesus fulfills a long line of Jewish values encouraging steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.  It is quite another thing to say that Jews several hundred years earlier predicted the arrival of Jesus. 

Jesus does not replace Judaism.  He is not the new and improved version.  Rather, Jesus and Paul made choices within the wide and vast diversity of Judaism to interpret Judaism as powerful and meaningful for the people of their time. 

           Ok, that’s a long explanation to say.  As your pastor, I am trying to live out this humble faith knowing that I don’t have all the answers.  But I want to honor those of different faiths, particularly Jews who have meant so much to my faith through the years.  And I I am trying to do right by you so you see me trying to do my very best to communicate what I see.

So what I chose to do for Advent is select verses from Hebrew Scripture that were not finding their fulfillment in Jesus but were teaching from Jesus’s long tradition as a Jew these ancient values, these deep values, sometimes these countercultural values. 

As I said last week, I often worry that we don’t see some of the powerful parts of our tradition because we romance the Advent and Christmas story.  My most fervent prayer is that before we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, I help you remember who he was, what is coming into the world, so that you might join hands with this long, ancient tradition.  And that is why this week, when we light the candle of love, I want you to hear from the core of Jesus’s teaching what was meant by that in the Gospel of Matthew.

Because the other strong Scripture which defines Jesus in Matthew, found nowhere else in the other gospels, is when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats.  And Jesus does so by asking, did you extend love to people who have their backs against the wall?  You join Jesus and the Empire of Heaven if you give people who are hungry something to eat, those who are thirsty something to drink.  Do you welcome the stranger?  Visit the ill and those in prison?  Those who do all that . . . they are welcomed into the Empire of Heaven.  That is one of the critical Scripture passages which will eventually define this Christ Child. 

The other is the Scripture passage we have before us today.  It is Jesus’s sermon on the mount, the Beatitudes, a radical statement over and against the Roman imperial gospel which blessed the wealthy, spread the gospel through military conquest (you know you are next when they start calling you “the barbarians”), and silenced all those who disagreed with them through political execution.  The Romans said that they did these things by divine decree.  Jupiter and the pantheon of gods were clearly on their side . . . because, well, look at the state of the world.  Rome and its Caesar ruled. 

This understanding that might makes right and reflects the divine order affirmed the status quo and justified Roman Caesars taking divine titles for themselves like god and son of god.  But this understanding also made the Jews, a conquered and enslaved people born out of liberation by a God who had not chosen the winners to break the waters and give them birth, particularly problematic. 

As we go forward this next week to celebrate Christmas remember the content of the Beatitudes part of the radical, countercultural nature of our tradition.  Jesus is not speaking into a vacuum.  He is remember the God of the Exodus to extend the tradition even further.  Jesus hears the wider Roman wider culture say that god loves the rich.  Jesus says, “Blessed or honored are you destitute, the ones left for dead.”  Jesus hears the wider Roman wider culture say that god accumulates the wealth of nations for us as we slay your fathers and sons of fighting age.  You are given over to us by the gods.  Jesus says, “Blessed are you who mourn.”  Jesus hears Caesar say to prophet after prophet, “You are not to be critical of the crown.  We are the ones who bear the good news of might and power over peoples.  Roman gods encourage us to mete out wrath upon those who question, organize, and offer an alternative to the bread and circuses we drop from on high in coliseums throughout the empire.”  Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.  Blessed are those who are persecuted because of justice, for theirs is the empire of heaven.  And the values of heaven are far different than those of Rome.”

That is the content of the child we will celebrate in less than a week.  He is strongly, intentionally seeking out a way of being that is contrary to Roman empire.  And found in almost every one of the deep faith traditions is a way, a path, that is contrary to the pursuit of material wealth, the justification of violence over and against a people thought to be lesser, and truth-tellers who stand into the wind to say and live contrary to the party line on behalf of God’s good earth, the poor and oppressed, the sick and the dying, those thought to be the sinner and the outcast.  Those truth-tellers very often do so even when they are threatened, beaten, persecuted, and executed.

As we head into Christmas, I say we join those long-line of truth-tellers to reach across the great divides of culture and faith, to live humbly enough to extend our hands and say that we believe that Roman imperial theology is a lie.  Like Jesus, we see a God who is moving and living and breathing to remind us that there is another way, another peace, a more profound Truth.  Magi have been reading the stars, interpreting dreams, and are aware that all of creation is ready to break into a song that is ancient but new.  Angels are at the ready, a veritable army referred to as a host, now showing themselves to those who have been laid low by life, showing themselves to disarm fear and infuse courage.  And a small displaced family seeks shelter from the ravages of the world.  They become hunted by the client king Herod who believes himself to be the King of the Jews and certainly will not stand for any claims contrary to Caesar.

Courage, my dear friends, for the Beatitudes still stand while Rome has fallen.  God has been waiting.  And now we are ready to join hands to piece together the Empire of Heaven, more appropriately known as the Beloved Community.  Let us live into the content of the Beatitudes as Christmas comes.  Amen. 

 

Sermon, Year A, Third Sunday of Advent, "Invitation to a Science Fiction Project" or "What are we willing to walk a long time for?"

 

A Advent 3 AL Col Paul 2025

Matthew 2:1-12

December 21, 2025

 Former Detroit author and activist, Adrienne Maree Brown, has written:

all organizing is science fiction.

we are creating a world we have never seen. we are whispering it to each other cuddled in the dark, and we are screaming it at people who are so scared of it that they dress themselves in war regalia to turn and face us.[1]

In effect, this is what the gospels are.  They are a form of science fiction mystery which call us to an imagining with God, an imagining of a different future--without violence and war, without hunger, poverty, and oppression.  We require imagination, a different way, for as the great Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.  They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[2] 

The gospels knew this.   Though they used the language of the Roman Empire to critique the Roman Empire, the world the gospels imagined borrowed the language and vision, the science fiction of prophets who spoke from the time after the Exile.  The Exile was one of the nightmares in Jewish history when violence and warfare, oppression and dispossession were everyday realities. 

Remembering a Scripture verse I quoted from last week, God imagines a different future during that Exile.

The Living God shall judge between many peoples,
    and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    neither shall they learn war any more;
⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
    and no one shall make them afraid;[3]

Those science fiction words imagine peace, shalom, and rest—something counter to their whole experience living in Exile 600 to 700 years before the birth of Christ.  The gospel writers believed they were now living in a similar time.  And  as Adrienne Maree Brown writes about such science fiction writing, “it’s neither utopian nor dystopian, it’s more like life.”[4]  

It is the science fiction imagined by those prophets who wrote after the Exile, envisioning a time when people might grow food that they might eat themselves, build homes they might inhabit themselves.  They imagined that science fiction when all that they could remember of the Exile was growing food for others to eat, building homes for others to inhabit.[5]   From these writers, like the prophet Isaiah and his tradition, the gospel writers borrowed heavily to imagine with God, to create their own science fiction. 

That science fiction is necessary because the world they live in is brutal, hard, and scary in the matrix of Roman occupation, oppression, and everyday violence.  Last week I spoke of Rome’s client-king, Herod the Great, who prided himself on being the King of the Jews.  How Herod was so brutal that he killed one of his sons he saw as a threat to his throne, leading the Romans to say, “Better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”

Our passage today begins with Herod.  Spiritual Director Erna Kim Hackett summarizes how the Biblical story reads us.  Again, sometimes we read the Bible so that we might discern meaning.  And sometimes the Bible reads us to discern who we are in the world:  She writes.

I found myself fixated on Herod this year.  I’ll let you figure out why I couldn’t stop thinking about an insecure leader who panders to empire and feigns interest in religion to try and secure his authority.  In the history books, Herod is remembered as a good leader.  He was prolific and visionary when it came to infrastructure.  He remodeled and expanded the Second Temple.  And he maintained a long-lasting relationship with the most powerful empire of his time and its most powerful leaders.  By many metrics, he could be viewed as a very successful leader.  But the Bible does not give a [bleep] about any of that.  If success under empire were the measure of success, Herod would stand at the center of the story as its hero.  Instead, he becomes its warning, a mirror showing what happens to a soul distorted by empire.  Herod reveals how power twists a person, how it turns faith into theater and people into pawns.  So much of America Christianity is desperate to succeed the way Herod succeeded:  political access, proximity to power.  It confuses elections with favor and wealth and blessing.  But Advent confronts us with a different truth.  Empire’s victories are not God’s victories.  The story opens with a tyrant on a throne and [Christ] in the arms of a refugee woman.  Only one of them is worth following.  God shows up on the margins, not in the halls of power.  Advent is an invitation to scrub off every way empire has wooed us, and to quit confusing Herod like ambition with Jesus’s way. ^[6]

 

The passage starts with Herod but the Scripture continues with the Magi playing their traditional role.  The Magi were the ones who read the way the Earth and Sky moved to tell us who were the true kings, the kings blessed by nature’s wisdom.  As a result, the Magi forever posed a threat to ruling powers.[7] 

We have regularly assumed three Magi made the journey because there are three gifts.  But the story does not tell us how many.  Imagine at least 12 Magi, in their traditional role, taking a little side trip to Jerusalem just to stick it in and twist it by innocently asking Herod, “Where will we find the King of the Jews?”  In the movie version of this scene, I imagine Herod, who believes King of the Jews is a title reserved exclusively for him, excusing himself and finding a private room where he punches his royal purple walls for about a half hour before he returns.

The question by the Magi is a form of Biblical humor, sarcasm aimed at the upper-crust and powerful.   In our modern world, it might be a number of radical Muslim clerics arriving in Washington, D.C., asking where they might find “the leader of the free world.”  Making it clear that they don’t think it’s the president, they move on to Haiti to follow the star they have seen.  

The story is told as a snub, a diss, to move from the seat of Rome’s client-king, the seat of local political and religious power in Jerusalem to a place on the margins. 

The Magi come from the East, the place of the Roman Empire’s mortal enemy, the Parthian Empire.  Imagine not only 12 magi arriving in Jerusalem but maybe 50 to 100 of them with all of their royal servants and accoutrements.  For the Biblical passage says that when the Magi tell Herod of the star they have seen Herod and all of Jerusalem are frightened.  The king-makers show up to say they are looking for the King of the Jews.  And, oh by the way, Herod, it isn’t you!  The Magi have been looking for portents, signs in the natural world, which would tell of the passing of an old order in favor of something new.  

As the seat of Roman-controlled Jewish power, everyone in Jerusalem knew that a star sighted by the Magi could only mean that change and transformation were about to occur, a new king was on the rise.  Three times in Matthew, Chapter 2, it says that these “king-makers” prostrate themselves before the infant child, a form of worship and reverence for a ruler or an emperor.  Not once did these same Magi do so for King Herod.[8]  They have made their choice.  The Magi proclaim who is the true king, the king for whom heaven and nature sing.

Long have Christian scholars misinterpreted what the Magi bring to symbolize gifts that reflect the life and death of Christ.  Rather, the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh evoke the words of Psalm 72, the Psalm that was the basis for our responsive reading for today.  That Psalm is considered a coronation Psalm to be spoken as every Israelite ruler takes the throne. 

Psalm 72 says that the king shall practice social justice.  This value is affirmed as nations and kings from all over the known world shall make a pilgrimage to Zion to lay these gifts at the feet of the king.  This king shall be the champion for the economically poor and downtrodden.  The king who shall crush the oppressor.  The Magi bring these gifts to affirm Psalm 72, to affirm the true king’s primary value.

Three times in Chapter 2, Herod’s death is mentioned, as a way of suggesting that when God’s narrative and the narrative of imperial power come into conflict, imperial power is not ultimate.  The imperial system, a system exposed as ruthless and murderous, opposes the presence and power of God.  And at each turn the imperial system is thwarted in trying to kill the new king.  1) The Magi are uncooperative. 2)  Angels and dreams further the will of God and frustrate Herod’s plans..  3) Though the Holy Family must quickly leave for exile in Egypt, they do escape with their lives. 

All to say that the imperial system is not the ultimate.  Rome has its limits.  While Caesar claims the god, Jupiter’s presence, for Rome, throughout the Gospel of Matthew claims are made for Jesus’s presence among the community of the disciples.  Even after the Empire crucifies Jesus and he dies, his presence is still afoot for those weaving together the Empire of Heaven.[9]

The title of king is not taken lightly by the Romans.  Those who claimed the title without ordination by Rome were routinely executed.  The historian Josephus chronicles that others who took the title king did not fare well.  This is an ominous sign of what is in store for Jesus.  Simon was beheaded. Athronges was captured.  Menachem was killed.  And another Simon, who led one of the longest and most successful revolts against the empire, was executed in Rome’s capital city as a dramatic presentation of Rome’s superiority and intolerance for any challenges to its superiority.[10]

Jesus of Nazareth became a symbol of hope and resistance because of the very real and gritty ways of living he offered that helped Galileean communities to be sustainable and resilient at a time when they were fracturing.  Roman imperialism and its Caesar exerted everyday intense stress, pressure, poverty, and violence against their subject peoples. 

Jesus did not counsel people to engage this struggle righteously alone.  We sit in places like this church today because Jesus encouraged people to fortify one another by piecing together community, sharing food with one another, participating in mutual healing, darning back together fractured relationships destroyed by the economic violence, challenging the system which robbed those with those living with their backs against the wall.  And in the way Jesus practiced this movement, he had fun doing it.  I want to remind us again and again that they called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard.    

As I preached last week, these Bible stories are a threat to those who want to romanticize Christmas.  As a preacher and a pastor, I don’t know if I have ever been challenged to make Advent and Christmas more Biblically real.  Again and again, however, I have been challenged to practice the more imperial, sentimental Christmas with the right hymns, the right Christmas Eve words said at the right times, and to preach in a way that makes everyone feel all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. 

I hope.  I hope and pray for just a second, however, that like last week we might consider that the Biblical Advent and Christmas are needed in places throughout our world where people are imagining what God is imagining, entering into a science fiction project that speaks to our hearts of a new dawn, a new day where we might all experience the goodness of God.

Because again, for some in the world,  the pain is all too real.  And a sentimental and vanilla Christmas does not rhyme with their family’s tremendous debt, the fear of one more medical bill, violence some face in their everyday life as a spouse or child, people caught struggling with trauma and addiction, and the worry for some that they will be stopped without proper papers. 

 Or, now in our own country, what happens if Herod or Caesar come for my family and my children?  What am I to do?  Do we pack up our family and head for the safety of Egypt?  How do we make sure that the Holy Family escapes the mass slaughter of someone who calls himself the King of the Jews?

The Gospel of Matthew makes it clear that even Jesus’s arrival does not prevent the slaughter of children, poverty and disease, and deep, deep pain in the world.  What Jesus brings is the idea that God wants a decidedly different world, wants us to imagine it, to do our own project work in science fiction, and that God is inviting us in to be collaborators on the project. 

Spiritual guide, Matthew Fox, has written, “Sentimentalism is feelings without care for justice.  Nazi concentration camp hierarchy would torture prisoners during the day and return home at night and weep listening to Beethoven.”[11]

“The tamed piety of the conventional church wants an innocent baby who comes gently into our secure lives and keeps everything benign and friendly.  It may be conventional and it may be tame but it is not biblical and it is not Christian.”[12]   The Biblical story is all too messy and real.  That story is about both hope and hurt; pain and risk, as well as excitement and joy.  All were part of the adventure.

I want to invite us all over again to be Christ’s church, a symbol of hope and resistance over and against Herods and Caesars in each age.  How might we join with, be good allies with,  peoples that seeks liberation from the everyday warfare aimed at its people?  What would that look like to create a space where every person might be able to rest under a vine and fig tree--to offer refuge and sanctuary? 

 In this day, the Magi come looking for the people who walk the path of a new king, people who seek to be collaborators on the imagined project God has set before communities of sustainability and resilience.  Goodness knows Advent hope, peace, and joy begin when we ask what God might be imagining for the world and then begin to weave that together.  We begin where the prophet Isaiah and all the Gospel writers began—at a time when people have trouble even thinking it’s possible.  It’s not born yet.  We can only describe it along the edges.

Coloma/Watervliet or Bainbridge has/have never been the center of the universe, but neither were Bethlehem and Nazareth.  People of good courage, let us begin, with imagination and vision to walk the road to begin the science fiction project God has placed before us.  Like the Magi, what are we willing to walk a long time for?  

Last night and promised tonight the beauty of the Geminid meteor shower tells us that a new world awaits us.  The Herods and the Caesars of the world quake in their boots knowing they could not control or commodify it.  Let us scrub off every way the Domination system has tried to woo us to remember who we are as followers of the refugee child on the move from Bethlehem.  Let us be scrubbed clean to journey with Magi and to imagine with God.  Amen. 

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[1]Adrienne Maree Brown, “afrofuturism and #blackspring (new school, #afroturismtns),” adrienne maree brown, May 2, 2015

[2] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007

[3] Micah 4:3-4a

[4] Brown, “afrofuturism.”

[5] Isaiah 65:21

[6] Erna Kim Hackett, “Liberated Together” on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/DR_Qssskdkj/?img_index=1.

[7] Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire:  Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA:  Trinity Press International, 2001), pp. 66-67.

[8]  Carter, Matthew and Empire, p. 66.

[9] Ibid, p. 67

[10] Ibid, p. 161.

[11] Matthew Fox, The Pope’s War:  Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved  (New York:  Sterling Ethos, 2011), p. 39.

[12] Ken Sehested quoting Kyle Childress, “Wiseguys and one scared king,” Prayer and politiks, January 1, 2012.  http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/2019/01/04/wiseguys-and-one-scared-king.3418910.