26 December 2010

First Sunday of Christmas
Matthew 2:13-23
26 December 2010


The days after Christmas Day. I suspect that they are a depressing time for more than a few people. The tree comes down ... the decorations are put away for another year ... the place in the mall where the Santa was sitting up until just a couple of days ago is now nothing more than a chair in the middle of a filthy piece of red carpeting. The Christmas bills start coming due. And there are still two and a half more months of winter left before spring “officially” begins.
The days after Christmas Day. Strangely, the liturgical year, at least at first glance, does not do a whole lot to dissuade this air of depression, these holiday post-partum blues, if you will. Today, the day after Christmas Day, December 26, is the commemoration of Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, who, as the seventh chapter of Acts reports, was stoned to death by an angry mob of the Jewish religious leadership. December 28, this coming Tuesday, is the day we remember the Holy Innocents, those male babies slain in Bethlehem by Herod in his attempt to wipe out what he perceived to be a threat to his throne by another "King of the Jews."
And, unfortunately for those of us who would like to stay with the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, and sing one more "O come let us adore him," that Gospel text for today will have none of that lingering ... the Christmas carols fade away in the face of the awful reality of what Jesus' birth means to the world. We get to hear about the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, in the face of Herod's threats ... there's that horrible business about the Holy Innocents ... and then Jesus, Mary and Joseph come back to Judea, but move to the north, in Nazareth.
It's a bridge, if you will, between Matthew's telling of the Christmas and Epiphany stories and Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. Matthew is definitely trying to move us, his readers, somewhere ... he doesn't stay too long in any one place ... all we get are little snippets of Jesus' childhood, nothing much to go on until next we see him on the bank of the Jordan River, with his cousin John.
But before our post-holiday depression settles in again ... it isn’t all “sweet baby Jesus in the manger” anymore ... there is something here that Matthew is trying to tell us, if we have ears to listen. Three times in these short verses we hear the Evangelist use these words: "this was to fulfill ... then was fulfilled ... might be fulfilled."
What's this all about anyway? Well, we know from early on in his Gospel that Matthew likes to cite the Old Testament ... the only part of the Bible, we must remember, that was around at the time. This was the word of God spoken through the prophets ... Moses ... Isaiah ... Jeremiah ... Micah. This was Jesus' Bible, after all. And Matthew wants to make sure that we don't forget it. From the first words of his gospel ... "An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham ..." we can see that Matthew wants us -- his readers -- to make connections between what is going on with Jesus and what went on in the rest of the Scriptures.
Unfortunately, Matthew isn’t terribly clear how we’re to go about doing that. Which is good news for preachers this first Sunday of Christmas -- it gives us two points to explore.
Point A is a question which came into my mind as I read this text -- and probably occurred to you as well this morning. It’s a logical question to ask: what is God doing here anyway?
Does all that business about “prophecies being fulfilled” mean that God was micromanaging history, down to its most minute workings? Was God’s hand controlling everything that was going on here, so that it would “come out the way it was supposed to” according to the Old Testament prophecies? And, of course, that leads us inevitably to the “big question:” was God responsible for the deaths of all those little children in Bethlehem?
That’s a big question -- much bigger than just this Gospel reading on the first Sunday after Christmas. For how it is answered says a lot about how we think about our God. Is our God one who predicts that something will happen, and then either makes it happen or knows it’s going to happen and allows it anyway, just so his prediction can come true?
That’s a scary image of God. It’s an image that could certainly cause a lot of fear among us. It’s a “God’s gonna get you for that” kind of image, you know, the old lightning bolt from heaven sent to those who are doing the wrong kind of thing.
There’s just one thing wrong with that image of God. I don’t know how much I could love a God like that, even if I was made to -- it would be a relationship based more on sheer terror than anything else. And that would be an awful way to live.
Besides, what did all those children do to deserve so horrible a death? We call them the “Holy Innocents” after all ... so we must believe that they didn’t do anything wrong. Were they just innocent victims that got in the way of a ruthless God, stopping at nothing to carry out his plan?
Martin Luther dealt with those same questions in a Christmas sermon he delivered nearly 500 years ago. And here’s what he had to say.
“The slaughter by Herod of all the children of Bethlehem ... was a piece of sheer barbarism, but doubt not that Herod would find a plausible defense so that people would regard it, not as tyranny, but as necessary severity. The world is master of this art, when it goes against the Christians. Did not Christ say, ‘The time comes, that whosoever kills you will think that they do God a service?’ ... All Jerusalem was troubled along with Herod. They (might have said): ‘If the word of this newborn king gets abroad, the Romans will be on our necks again. Then there will be bloodshed. So, dear Herod, if you have even a suspicion of where this child is, you had better do some strangling; otherwise our land will be wrecked.’ Thus we see how the little baby Jesus, while still in the manger, filled the world with fear.”
The slaughter of the innocents, then, is neither the work of, nor is it to be blamed on, a reckless God; but rather, it’s the reaction of a world to the true fulfillment of God’s plan, laid out in the Scriptures, come in the flesh of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the incarnate fulfillment of all that God has promised for us -- forgiveness of our sin, life, and salvation. Herod ... the world of his time ... and, dare I say, the world of our time, couldn’t and can’t handle the simplicity, the pure love of God for us.
And this is the point Matthew is trying so hard to make. The baby Jesus flees with his family into Egypt, and is called out again, in a re-enactment of the Exodus event -- except this time, things will not be messed up by human sin, for God himself is perfecting true freedom. Jesus goes to Nazareth and grows up in this small town, like other prophets before him, but this time, it’s not just another prophet sent from God, but God himself, going among the cities of Judea, proclaiming God’s good news of forgiveness and new life.
And yes, the world reacts to God’s Son and treats him the same way they’ve treated all the other prophets before him ... he too is rejected, despised, put to death. But this time the ending is different ... because Jesus did not stay dead, but rose again, giving us the promise of eternal life.
Which leads us to the second point we can draw from this text ... the strange and vulnerable way in which God chooses to bring the fulfillment of Scripture to life.
The miracle of the Christmas story, as we have heard both from Luke and Matthew this season, is that God chose to come into our world as one of us to give us new life ... but Matthew in particular points out how vulnerable God’s Word really is, in the babe of Bethlehem.
The wonder of the Christmas story in Matthew is that, despite all that the world is sure to throw against it, God chooses to come to the world ... us ... as the most vulnerable of persons ... as a baby ... a baby, who like all babies, needs constant care and attention in order to live and grow into an adult.
And Matthew points out this vulnerability so well in that he makes Joseph so prominent -- not as Jesus’ father, this is made very clear in the verses preceding our Gospel today; no, Joseph is to be Jesus’ guardian and protector … you could even say he is “the savior for the Savior of the World.”
Now let’s think about that for a moment and capture all the wonder that is here for us. Isn’t it curious that the divine God desired the help of the human Joseph in order for Scripture to be fulfilled, for God's ultimate plan to be carried out, for God's pursuit of us in love, to win out, over sin, death, and the power of the devil?
Could this mean that there is a place for us in God’s plan, God’s fulfillment of Scripture, too? Could it be that we too are called like Joseph to be guardians and protectors of God’s word ... a Word which God freely sends us to give us forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation ... but a Word which needs us to help it be spread ... to be protected and defended against all those who would do it harm ... who would mingle it with legalistic requirements ... who would even slay it, as Herod aimed to do, when it interfered with their agenda?
The days after Christmas Day. A time to be depressed because the lights and the tinsel are being put away for another year? Not as we hear and follow the Word. There’s a whole new year of God’s grace ahead of us ... time to rejoice in God’s love for us ... time to protect and defend God’s message of love to the world when we must ... and time to spread that message of hope and salvation to a needy, needy world. Amen.