Göttinger Predigten im Internet
ed. by U. Nembach, J. Neukirch, R. Schmidt-Rost

HOLY INNOCENTS (Christmas I) December 28, 2003
Sermon based on Mt. 2: 13-18 (RCL, Series C) by David Zersen

(->current sermons )


13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” 14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”(NIV)

CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS WITH THE INNOCENTS

A well-known Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz has Charlie Brown with great bewilderment in his face reciting as his part in the Christmas service the closing lines of today's text: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lament!” What could such lines mean and what could they have to do with Christmas?! Many a preacher has said the same thing, leading some to avoid this text if at all possible. Not only does the text appear only occasionally when December 28, the Feast of Holy Innocents, falls on a Sunday, but even this year when that happens, most pastors will rather choose for this day the text for Christmas I from Luke, the nice familial story which ends with Jesus obeying his parents and growing in wisdom, stature and favor. Today's text, by contrast, is filled with trouble.

On the other hand, it's fascinating how rich in allusion and imagery these two stories are. The world's greatest artists, names like Giotto, Corregio, Peter Bruegel the Elder, Veronese, Caravaggio, Donatello, Fra Angelico and Watanbe, have all found the story of the Flight to Egypt and the Slaughter of the Innocents fascinating. Matthew has created powerful stories for us that have deep roots in the Old Testament and offer resounding words about rescue and salvation. The characterization is often poignant, and the God it describes may seem strange to us, but we would have no other.

A God Away from Home

The first story is known as the Flight to Egypt. Whom do you think, of all the people in the world, loves this story most today? Perhaps it's too obvious. Of course, it is the Christian people of Egypt. Today a minority, but once the great majority, Egypt's Coptic Christians love the fact that when Jesus was on the run, it was safe to come to Egypt! They have made so much of these few verses that dotting the Nile today there are ancient pilgrimage sites, Christian resorts if you will, which remember the places in which the Holy family sought refuge as it fled King Herod. There are so many sites that the Egyptians calculate it took several years for Joseph, Mary and the child to make all the stops. Finally, however, Herod died, and it was time to return home. In Ma‘adi , a suburb of Cairo, there is a church along the Nile which preserves a Bible in a glass case that one day came floating by the church. As the curious priest checked, so the story goes, to see what passage lay before him on the opened page, you can almost guess what it was: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” The faithful still stand in line to see this affirmation of Egypt's place in the Christmas story.

Of course, Joseph has been here before—and so has the son. In ancient days, another Joseph came to Egypt and finally was carried out, at least his bones were, along with his long-suffering son, the faithful people of God, back to their ancestral roots in Caanan. This is really an ancient story, an archetypal story, told over and over, of the God who not only rescues his people, but goes before them, walks along with them, shares their suffering and enables their redemption. Matthew tells his modern version with such grace. Poor Joseph. He never asked for all this. His wife! His wife's child! But there is this dream that Herod is out to kill the child, and Egypt is a safe haven. In the middle of the night, when such things are done, gentle Joseph, the carpenter who never wanted to leave Nazareth, becomes a pilgrim, a wanderer. The child he rescues is a wander too, a “son of man” with no place to lay his head (Mt.8:20). This story continues into our own time, and we know it too well. The sons of men are too often wanderers and their God is away from home. It may seem strange to us, such a God, but we would have no other. In a lovely poem about this ongoing exodus, German poet Arnim Juhre gives his version of the Josephslegende (my translation) and our God:

Joseph fled from Budapest,
dreamed of child murder,
street riots and persecution.
Although the border was already mined,
he fled to the West with his wife;
for she was pregnant.

Another Joseph jumped into his boat,
shoved off from Port Said,
rowed and said to his wife:
The masters of this world
fight over a little body of water.
In the distance ship artillery rumbled.

In Cairo and in a village in Austria
boys were born on Christmas Eve.
No star stood over their quarters,
and the shepherds on the fields of the world
saw hosts who were earthly.

And God said to Joseph
in Cairo and in Austria:
Fear not!
I see that you are in exile.
I too am away from home.

A God Crying in the Night

The next story is usually called the Slaughter of the Innocents. It is the one that gives most scholars trouble because there is no secular reference to this incident and it has no counterpart in Mark or Luke. Perhaps it never happened, they worry. Furthermore, tradition has created a mountain out of a molehill here because Bethlehem was just a little village. The Orthodox tradition which remembers 14,000 infant martyrs on this day is surely wrong. Would a king really be so paranoid that he would give orders to kill innocent victims under two years of age, pretenders to a throne or not? We do know this much, to quote George Bush, Herod “was an evil man.” It is the kind of thing he was capable of doing. He drowned his 16 year-old brother-in-law, killed his uncle, aunt, and mother-in-law, his own two sons, and some three hundred officials he accused of siding with his sons. (Pfatteicher, Festivals and Commemorations, 1980, 470) . Herod is the kind of person whose jealously, hatred, and anger puts people on the run. Where the Herods of this world are, the cries of mothers rise up to heaven. It happened with the Armenian children in Turkey in 1915. It happened with Spanish toddlers at Guernica in 1937. It happened with little girls in Dachau between 1939 and 1945. It happened with Kurdish children in Sadaam Hussein's Iraq and with those small bodies carried in coffins in Northern Ireland. There are many Herods and they wear many masks. Their tasks neither began nor ended in Bethlehem.

The touching thing in Matthew's telling of the story is that he remembers, in all this crying, Rachel. Rachel of old. Do you remember her? She was the beautiful girl that Jacob wanted when he had to settle for Leah. She was the one he was entitled to after seven more years of work and who bore him his two favorite sons, Joseph and Benjamin. She was the one who crying out in agony, dying, gave birth to Benjamin and generations to come. She, the mother of generations, long dead, weeps symbolically in the Hosea quote, as Jewish children are hauled off into captivity in Babylon—and in many Babylons to come. And Matthew thinks it appropriate to have her weep again here in Bethlehem (where, for that matter, women still weep at her tomb today). Rachel is always weeping, along with all mothers of the world. And it never seems to stop. And God weeps with them.

On Wednesday night, Diane Sawyer's Prime Time show was an hour's footage of a visit to Africa by TV talk show hostess and actress, Oprah Winfrey. AID's-torn Africa! Terrible statistics in so many countries in which whole adult populations die as children who are HIV+ are left to fend for themselves—against robbers and rapists! This is far worse than Bethlehem! In some countries, half of the population is HIV positive, and millions, millions, are dying. Of course, Oprah Winfrey is only one person, one childless mother, and a very rich one at that, who invited 50,000 children to celebrate Christmas under “white” tents. She symbolically celebrated Christmas with the “innocents” of the world. Clothes, food, toys, presents for all. And it's not just a one-shot gift. She paid some teachers salaries for several years, so children can have hope. She created $10 million in endowments to help care for children for years to come. Of course, in terms, of the immensity of the problem, it's only a drop in a bucket. Yet the responsibility is not hers alone. It belongs to all of us. In the background, one can hear Rachel weeping for the mothers, the fathers and the children, “refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Oprah was weeping and so was I.

The Meaning of Christmas, Several Days Late

This seems a rather dismal message for the Sunday after Christmas, but perhaps we have to get over the frenzied buying and giving celebrations before we can get down to Christmas' real meaning. Matthew wants to tell us in this text that we get to hear only once ever few years, if the preacher will let us hear it, that if we're looking for a God who is going to come in power and glory, the triumphalist's friend, to judge and destroy the Herods of the world so justice, peace and prosperity can reign, it isn't going to happen. Not in our time! Not in any time! God will not come with preemptive wars to stamp out terrorists, electric chairs and lethal injections to snuff out evil men and women, vigilante packs avenging justice on their terms. He comes in the still small voice, in the vulnerable form of a child trapped when soldiers come to murder, in the form of a man trapped in a despicable rat hole, in the guise of victims everywhere. This God, strange to say, is away from home, is with the least of his brothers and sisters, is always and only friend of sinners, powerless and weeping children. And we celebrate his presence among us, celebrate Christmas for real, to the degree that we affirm “innocents” in their desperation, their hopelessness, their final hours. Even more profoundly, we celebrate Christmas for real-- we meek souls receive him still-- when we realize that we, in our own spiritual poverty, in our own psychological holes in the ground, desperately want a God who is Emmanuel, a God who is with us even in the worst of times. He is with us in our loneliness, our hopelessness, our fear. He is with us in our shame, our bewilderment, our exile. He spreads the great white tent of his love over our sin and calls us innocent along with all the alienated and abused in this world. This is a text filled with trouble, but it helps us come to terms with the only peace the world can bring. This is a story about a God who shows up in the strangest places, but we would have no other.

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin,
Austin, Texas
dzersen@aol.com

 

 


(top)