A Christmas Eve
BFC 2016
Matthew 2:1-12
December 24,
2016
My hometown UCC church was the largest
Protestant church in the small Midwestern community of Metamora. The other large church was Roman Catholic,
some of us secretly whispering about whether the members at St. Mary’s Catholic
Church were even . . . Christian. Even
at a young age, I celebrated my theological geekdom by sharing how our
Protestant faith was superior just by the fact that we celebrated Jesus
resurrected, down off the cross, while the “Catholics” inappropriately kept
Jesus on the cross as if the resurrection had never happened. (said sarcastically)
Surprisingly, I found much agreement among people at our church. That was it.
We were somehow theologically and morally superior to the people who
went to the Catholic Church. Even in
grade school, I showed off my mature and sophisticated theological
arrogance.
Over the years, I have had to reclaim
and reinvent my religion so that it is not just about proving that mine is
right and more true over and against the religious faith of someone else. I know I fall short. I know much of the time I am a hypocrite and
a pretender to a radical faith that calls me into deeper relationship.
Ironically, I did my
international mission work in partnership with the Roman Catholic Church. I had somehow advanced enough by that time to
recognize that Roman Catholic people could be faithful Christians as well. Imagine that.
Almost immediately, I was also confronted with my so-called
“resurrection faith.” Walking into the
main cathedral in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, I
witnessed Jesus not only on the cross but the most graphic depictions of Jesus
making his way, crawling, to his death on the cross. There he was crawling on the Via Dolorosa, the path of pain, bleeding
and bruised.
I
was highly suspicious of such portrayals.
For I was familiar with a Christianity that had a romantic love affair
with Jesus’s pain and suffering as a substitute for our own pain and suffering. But as I spent more and more time with the
people in that area, I learned that was not what this was. The meaning clicked for me when I remembered
one crucifix outside of a Catholic hospital for the disabled, many people
learning how to live with their new disabilities—without fingers, a hand, a
foot, or a leg. This crucifix had Jesus
. . . without a leg.
In
a place in the world where poverty, violence, suffering, bloodletting, disease,
disability, and death were part of their everyday life, what all this pain,
blood, and death represented to the people was that Jesus knew them, empathized
with their pain and suffering, and would not let them be alone. Understand, it was not Jesus standing in
their place to take on the suffering and pain of the world. It was Jesus with them—God with us.
For
me, it was a moment of recognition and responsibility. If I was responsible for any of the pain and
suffering endured by these people, I had to come to grips with their
truth: their pain and suffering was the
pain and suffering of God. God with
us.
Tonight,
on this holiest of nights, we are confronted with stories of deep pain and
suffering. What the birth story in the
gospel of Luke implies is that Mary and Joseph had to leave Bethlehem to
immigrate further north to Nazareth. And
now, so that they can be processed and kept track of in a national registry by
the Roman Empire, they must return back to Bethlehem with Mary fully
pregnant. In the gospel of Matthew, the
story even hints at a deeper and more scandalous situation with Mary.[1] In the gospel of Matthew, Magi are
independent political advisers who come from the Roman Empire’s only known
opponent, the Parthian Empire. Rome
cannot control the stars. There is a
power far larger and deeper at work.
But
that deep power does not stay the hand of the client king, Herod the Great,
known as the King of the Jews. It was a
middle finger to Herod that the Magi travel to Jerusalem, come calling to
Herod, saying they were looking for the King of the Jews. And, glory be, the King of the Jews is not
you and not found in Jerusalem. The
Romans had a saying about Herod’s ruthlessness, who killed some of his wives
and sons to make sure he had no political rivals. Caesar Augustus quipped, “It is better to be
Herod’s pig than his son.”[2] As a Jew, Herod’s refusal to eat pork would
make his pigs far safer than his progeny.
Representing his cruelty, the author of Matthew has the jealous Herod
seeking to kill the rival to his title of King of the Jews by murdering all the
children under two in and around Bethlehem.
At
a time of great poverty, disease, violence, warfare, and death, these were not
stories meant to create some blessed idyll.
These were terrifying stories to say that God knows, God empathizes, God
is with us. In a hopeless world, do not
believe that God is somehow absent. God
empathizes. And the stories are told
today to create empathy for people who live on the edge like Joseph and Mary
and Jesus.
Unfortunately,
I do not think these stories are that any more though. They are quaint. Too often they are told not to empathize but
with added details to make us feel safe and warm and glowing around the hearth. Jesus does not cry. Mary is radiant in blue as she gazes at the
child in contemplation. And Herod is
nowhere to be seen around our crèche. No
worries, our modern-day tellings seem to say.
God has got this. In arrogance,
we tell ourselves that our story is just a little bit better than anybody
else’s in the world. But these stories were not written to provide us with an
arrogance over against other people and peoples.
The
Christmas story is not about, in arrogance, whose God is most powerful. The Christmas story is about an empathetic
God who is forever asking us, in divine imitation, to seek common cause with
the vulnerable of the world over and against the Herods of the world. It is time we put Herod back in the crèche so
that we become the people who provide sanctuary, resource, and even an
underground railroad to get the Holy Family safely into Egypt.
Empathy. The Biblical stories are told time and again
so that our hearts might be moved to empathy.
We empathize. We put ourselves in
their shoes. If Jews threatened, we
become Jews. If Muslims enrolled, we
become Muslims. If immigrants and
refugees, we join hands and say, “Today, in its telling, we enact the Christmas
story all over again.” We empathize and
say as we do so, “Certainly, God in Christ is with us.”
It
was the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at the concentration camp
at Flossenbürg,
who wrote of the Christmas story that it is God who is in that manger. He went on to write,
No powerful person dares to approach the
manger, and this even includes King Herod. For this is where thrones shake, the
mighty fall, the prominent perish, because God is with the lowly.
Who among us will celebrate Christmas
correctly? Whoever finally lays down all
power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism
beside the manger . . .
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that
God loves the lowly … God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God
marches right in. God chooses people as God’s instruments and performs wonders
where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; God loves the
lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.[3]
Now is the time to give the Christmas story back its power. Christians in other parts of the world,
particularly those pernicious Roman Catholics, see their lives in these stories
filled with poverty, disease, violence, warfare, and death. So that no matter how evil the time, how
despotic the Herod, how hopeless the night sky might appear, they know that
God’s angels are winging their way to join hands with the lost, neglected, the
unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken and whisper softly in their
ear, “God is with you.” If you find
yourself in any one of those categories, this is the night when Emmanuel
empathizes, comes close, and refuses to let you be alone. You are not alone.
If you, like me, are not
found in any of those categories, it is time to leave our arrogance before we
approach the manger as the Magi did and to be overwhelmed with joy that God
does not intend to leave the world as it is.
May we be the angels, God’s messengers, who join hands with others to
say, “Tonight, not only is God with you but I am with you.” We take back the power of the story.
And we also need to be reminded, as the people of
God, that we are mighty.
In a recent TED Talk,
one of my spiritual mentors, Rabbi Sharon Brous spoke of the need to reclaim
and reinvent religion. Brous is best
friends with Rev. Otis Moss III, the Senior Pastor at Trinity UCC, in
Chicago. She said that there is a
burgeoning multi-faith justice movement in this country that is staking a claim
on a counter trend to extremism that says that religion can and must be a force
for good in the world. As we have done
before, it is time for us to take the lead.
Brous believes our world
is on fire. And it is my job, she says,
as a religious leader, to make you uncomfortable and keep you awake to the
suffering of the world. The world
encourages your psychic numbing and your belief that you are invisible. As religious leaders keep you awake, Rabbi
Brous also believes we are to encourage your mightiness. We are to say, “No, we cannot do everything,
she relates, but we can surely do something.”
During the Jewish High Holy days, the only days
when the Jewish people prostrate themselves to the ground in total submission,
she has added to the ritual. She then
has her people stand with their hands raised to the heavens and say, “I am
strong. I am mighty. And I am worthy. I can’t do everything. But I can do something.”[4]
Tonight is Christmas Eve. It is also the beginning of Hanukkah—a time
when both faiths light a candle in the deepest night to remember God’s
presence. We say that the night will not
overcome or extinguish that light.
We may be hypocrites and pretenders but God, in
full grace, could care less. God so
loves the world. And the world is on
fire. It needs your empathy, your willingness to clasp the hands of
others. Please stand if you are
able. Raise your hands to the
heavens. And repeat after me.
I am strong.
I am mighty.
And I am worthy.
I can’t do everything.
But I can do something.
You may be seated.
You are. You are strong. You are mighty. You are worthy. You can’t do everything. But you can do something.
God draws close in empathy for the world. In imitation, tonight, we tell this powerful
story so that once again our hearts might be enlarged with empathy. Emmanuel.
God is with you. God is with
us. God is with us. Amen.
[1] In the Gospel of Matthew’s genealogy,
women of sexual suspicion are included. Why?
Knowing that one of the early Jewish accusations (after the split)
against Christianity was that Jesus was a bastard, could this be the author of Matthew
rehabilitating Jesus’s story? Or is it
possible that Quintilius Varus, in his decimation of the Jewish revolt city of
Sepphoris also had his Roman legions move through the backwater community of
Nazareth to rape and pillage around the time of the birth of Jesus? So Mary is not stoned because all young women
were raped?
[2] Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2:4:11
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010),
pp. 21-22. The text has been made
inclusive.
[4] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “It’s time to
reclaim and reinvent religion,” TED Talk,
October 2016. https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_and_reinvent_religion#t-832297
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