Transcription
Isaiah the 63rd chapter. I’ll be reading the scriptures from the New International Version. I will tell of the kindness of the Lord, the deeds for which he is to be praised, according to all the Lord has done for us.
Yes, the many good things God has done for Israel according to God’s compassion and many kindnesses. God said, surely they are my people, children who will be true to me. And so he became their Savior in all their distress.
He too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved him. In his love and mercy he redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them all of the days of old.
And turning to the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and I must say that as a pastor who fills pulpits but who is also a lectionary preacher, which means this text comes up every three years, I really hate it when it’s a text that is this hard. And you’ll know when you hear it. This is the story that comes right after the Kings, the wise men, the Magi leave.
Matthew records it this way. 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. So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and left for Egypt 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. 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.
Then what was said through the prophet, Jeremiah, was fulfilled. A voice is heard in Ramah weeping in great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph and Nazareth in Egypt and said, Get up, take your child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.
So he got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in the town called Nazareth.
So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarean. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Too soon. Too soon. I mean, this reading, it’s too soon, isn’t it? It comes too soon.
We have just, after all, celebrated Christmas. And on your Christmas Eve, as I’m sure it was on mine and so many others, it was filled with songs of Holy Infant, Tender Child, so mild, and the little town of Bethlehem that sheltered him. The story you heard was most likely Luke’s depiction of a young mother giving birth to her firstborn child, and angels greeting shepherds, and words of peace on earth, and goodwill to all people.
I’m sure you had a beautiful and hope-filled Christmas Eve celebration, didn’t you? Which is what makes this transition to this harrowing reading from Matthew so jarring. Had I been putting together the lectionary my way, I would have kind of waited on this one. Waited until we were long past the Nativity to talk about it.
Given, though, that this lectionary year of Matthew, I at least have inserted the first part of the story, so we could still feel good about the Kings, think about the kids who walk up here during the Christmas pageant bearing the gifts and all that sort of stuff. We’d feel really good about that. That would have extended our Christmas feeling, wouldn’t it? A week longer, and given us a chance to sing, We Three Kings of Orient are, right? But no, that’s not the way it’s gonna be today.
Instead, we skip the more familiar and enjoyable part of the story to get to the scenes we would rather forget. The flight to Egypt, the slaughter of the innocents. In some ways, when I come upon this passage, even though I know it’s coming, I feel just a little cheated.
That Christmas has been abruptly shortened, and that we have been short-changed. And indeed, maybe you’re feeling that way right now, too. At the same time, and perhaps with your help, we may feel that the biblical story chosen for this week, though abrupt, jarring, and even harrowing, rings, dare I say it, oddly familiar, and perhaps corresponds more closely to the world in which we live than some other parts of the biblical narrative.
So much terror in our world. So much unrest, division, and tension. A brief string of place names.
Gaza, the Ukraine, Nigeria, ethnic communities in our own country, calls to mind some of the violence and terror of this past year. Which is what makes this reading chillingly timely. The horrors we are experiencing are not new.
Now, the news is also that they were not new to Jesus’ time, either. Matthew’s story of the slaughter of the innocents calls to mind what Pharaoh’s execution of the Jewish children took that took place in Exodus, the second chapter. Which is, I think, part of Matthew’s point here.
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. And so, the God we meet in Jesus is not exempt from the tensions, the fear, the violence, the horror of a fallen world. And God’s full-on embrace of the most difficult parts of our story reminds us that this world is not just fallen, but also beloved by God.
It is a reminder of the words from the book of Proverbs, that the wicked shall not sleep. Or as J.R. Tolkien wrote in the Ring trilogy, evil does not sleep, it just waits. Now, in her book Amazing Grace, a vocabulary of faith, the Christian author Kathleen Norris contrasts the fear of Herod, on the one hand, and the faith of Mary and Joseph on the other.
Everything Herod does, he does out of fear. Fear can be a useful defense mechanism for all of us, but when a person is always on the defensive, like Herod, it becomes debilitating and self-defeating. To me, Herod symbolizes the terrible destruction that fearful people can leave in their wake if their fear is unacknowledged or held unaccountable, if they have power but can only use it in shifty, pathetic, and futile attempts at self-preservation.
That’s what Norris shares. The tradition of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents offers an account of the tragic consequences of such defensive, self-preserving, paranoid fear. This brand of insecurity never leads to anything good.
It leads to evil. Ironically, it most often backfires, shrinking rather than enhancing the one who fears. Herod is a case study that proves the truth of the first half of Proverbs 29.
The fear of others lays a snare, but the one who trusts in God rests secure. In the process of fearing others, sadly, the one who fears seeks to douse the light of others’ lives and often appears to succeed. We could make a long list of all the sufferings inflicted on others by those who in the past and today are both powerful and paranoid.
We hold to the faith that such fear cannot douse the light of the world we celebrate at Christmas. This passage forces us to stay real. Paranoid insecurity is a persistent force.
We could even say that in every generation, at every time in the history of the world, and in all different places of the world, there were people living in the time of Herod. Norris points out that Herod’s fear is the epitome of what Jung called the shadowed self. Herod demonstrates where such fear can lead when it does not come to light but remains in the dark depths of the unconscious.
Ironically, Herod appears in this time of the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read, most often on Epiphany, which is the feast of light in the midst of darkness. I was going to ask the children’s sermon to come up and say, well, what does darkness look like? And that’s a hard phrase to define, isn’t it, in terms of what it looks like? But we all know what it feels like, the insecurity we have, the nervousness we have, the hard time we have adjusting for what little light is in there. Norris tells us of a time when she was preaching on Herod on Epiphany Sunday in a very small country church on the poor area of a Hawaiian island of Oahu.
It was an area of the island that the tourists were warned when they got off the bus, don’t go there, because it’s filled with violence. It’s the area that people don’t go there unless they work in all the service industries, such as maids and tour bus drivers, etc. That’s where they could afford to live.
The church had much to fear as it’s planted right within that community, and all around them was alcoholism, drug addiction, rising property costs, and crime. And yet the folks that came to that church came there because for them it was the church of hope. In her sermon, Norris pointed out that the sages who traveled so far to find Jesus were drawn to him because it was a sign of hope to them.
This church, Norris told her congregation, is a sign of hope for the community. Its programs, its thrift store, has become an important community center, signs of hope. The church represented, said Norris, quote, a lessening of fear’s shadowy power, an increase in the available light, end quote.
Now I believe deeply in my heart that the same could be said for you, the Hurley Reformed Church. Same could be said of any church, I believe, that’s staying alive in this area because they are staying alive because they want to follow what their ancestors decided years ago, that this community needed a beacon of light, of hope in it, and so they formed this church. Norris continued to say this, though, that that’s what Christ’s coming celebrates.
His light shed abroad into our lives. She ended her sermon by encouraging the congregation like the ancient wise men, not to return to Herod, but find another way. She encouraged them to, quote, leave Herod in his palace, surrounded by lackeys and flatterers, all alone with his fear.
There is the fear of Herod, and then there is the fear of the Lord, exemplified by Mary and Joseph, which we are promised is the beginning of the knowledge and wisdom of God, as it says in the first seven, verse 7 of Proverbs 1. When we open our doors, even just a crack, to allow the fear of the Lord to enter in, we have taken the first steps in a lifelong process of exchanging the fear of Herod for the faith of Mary and Joseph, because the fear of the Lord is the Bible’s codeword. It’s a codeword for a full-bodied faith that includes trembling before the mystery of our transcending God, and then also trusting in the tenderness and faithfulness of the imminent, very present God with us. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of our being able to say with Mary, here am I, a servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.
It is the source of Joseph’s wordless obedience when an angel speaks to him in a dream, and it’s in Jesus’ words from the cross in Luke, into thy hands I commit my spirit. The fear of the Lord opens us up to the comfort and stamina, the stamina God offers even in times of undeserved and profound suffering. The fear of the Lord is the impulse that shuts off, shuts our self-righteous lips when we look upon the suffering or mistakes of others.
It impels us, rather than to retreat in cold judgment and fear, it impels us to reach out with comforting, capable hearts and hands. That’s hard, because we now live in a 24-7 news cycle, and with social media invading our lives in so many places and ways, most often in ways that can cause us to retreat more and more and more into that fear and paranoia, believing that we can do nothing, we are nothing, we are just victims of a hurtful world. But when we put aside our paranoia, self-centered fears, and embrace the fear of the Lord, we face the reality of an unknown future with good news, that we, like Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, are accompanied by God, who never abandoned them, and promises never to abandon us.
The shadows of fear are illuminated by the light. They are illuminated by the light of Immanuel, God with us. They are illuminated by the idea that God is working in us, God is working through us, God is working around us, and because of that, there is hope.
There is hope, now and always. Amen and amen. Let us pray.
Oh Lord, it is so easy to be fearful in this world, to watch the news and think it’s not good, to hear of the hurts and pains that people are going through, to even worry about our own future and the doubts and fears that we have. Oh Lord, save us from falling down that path of fear into a place of paranoia and acting out. Save us so that we might with joy embrace your great love and therefore find our own lives transformed and through our actions and words, hope you…