First Sunday of Christmas

The Rev. Dr. Lissa Wray Beal

Isaiah 63:7-9  Psalm 148:1-14 Hebrews 2:10-18  Matthew 2:13-23  

What is your ideal Christmas? Christmas tables, laden with good food? Boughs of holly? Christmas lights on a wonderful tree? Presents? Laughter? Is it strictly biblical?: “Peace on Earth; Goodwill to all!”

Maybe it takes a more Dickensian turn: “And to Tiny Tim, who did not die, Scrooge became a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. . . he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every One!”

We all have the ideal Christmas in our imaginations. That kind of celebration by which we know that Christmas is real, and goodwill is possible, and peace on earth is not fleeting.

But for most of us, that ideal gets shattered pretty soon. Maybe it is as you struggle through the crowds on Boxing Day – when Peace on earth seems a fairly shallow affair. Or it might be the newscast in which the first murder of the New Year is marked. . . or a fire that shatters lives. . . or another atrocity perpetrated by a tyrant against citizens.

For some, the Christmas ideal does not last through the Christmas meal, but the family tensions spill over and old pains, like varnish-remover, peel back the mask of gentility.

Because Peace on Earth; goodwill to all – as much as we hope it could last – does not. We walk away from Christmas into a world of pain and loss; hatred, and violence, and indifference.

So much for Christmas. We might hope for peace on earth; goodwill to all. But our real world quickly reminds us that our Christmas celebrations are like those celebrated on the front during WW I – a friendly game of soccer between opposing sides; a shared cigarette; a nip taken in peace – before the hostilities begin again in earnest at midnight.

And, I guess, that really is what Christmas should be. A reminder that something remains wrong with our world. That we cannot protect ourselves (and certainly not our children) from ugliness, pain, or loss. These are our realities.

But isn’t that the first Christmas? The child is born – celebrated by shepherds; gifted by Magi; heralded by angels and sacred light. But our gospel takes us beyond that brief moment of perfect time – back to the realities of a broken world.

For, to protect the Christ-child, God sends Joseph yet another dream. He is to flee from Bethlehem because Herod seeks the child to kill him – no one shall claim kingship but Herod! And Joseph wakens Mary and the baby and they slip out of Bethlehem by night, telling no one where they are headed. They journey far, and the child is kept from the wrath of Herod.

For Herod is wrathful. Known as a ruthless ruler, Josephus the historian tells us Herod is adept at vengeance. He kills three of his own sons. Several large groups of conspirators—real and suspected; adults and their children—are struck down during his reign. He is a ruthless king who brooks no rival. So he sends a group of select soldiers to the Little Town of Bethlehem, lying so still. And he slaughters the young boys under two, hoping to catch the one the Magi had discovered – the King of Israel!

How many children in this slaughter? Well, given the population of Palestine in the ancient world, and the calculated size of the city, we can estimate perhaps 20 young boys. 20. This is the Sandy Hook Elementary School of Bethlehem – a gruesome event of last December 14^th in which Adam Lanza, a lone gunman, entered the K-to-Grade-4 school and slaughtered by gunfire 20 age 6-7 children, together with 6 adults who worked at the school. We watched the news footage in horror. We tweeted and texted, facebooked, and blogged about it. We wept and raged. But we were as helpless against the tragedy as those mothers in Bethlehem when the soldiers burst through the door. The gift of the Christ was given “silently, how silently,” but the realities of Realpolitik shattered the night of Bethlehem with weeping and wailing.

That first Christmas did not last long. It did not protect those children caught in the trigger-sight of Herod. The broken world crashed in, and we have no answer as to why God did not protect these boys of Bethlehem as he protected the Christ child.

All we are given is the lament of Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because her children are no more.

It is in that – a quote from the prophet Jeremiah – that we are reminded that God has not abandoned his world even though Christmas has passed and Herod claims his victims. In the context of Jeremiah, this short lament is given at the lowest point of Israel’s life: Israel has been exiled to Babylon. Their hopes of nationhood; of kingship; of even ordinary life are shattered. All God’s promises seem lost. And Rachel weeps for her children who are sent into exile. But in the next verses, God says something astonishing to those who weep at such pain and loss: he says that they are not to lose hope. That somehow, even in the darkest of the darkest night, there is a future and a hope. That, perhaps the mourning – real as it is – is not the last word. That the Herod’s of the world will not ultimately win. That in the weakness of the Christ child is born the hope that silences Herod’s victory, together with Rachel’s tears.

And so we see the Christ child in his mother’s arms, slipping away to Egypt. To safety. But what kind of safety was it? He went to Egypt as a fugitive. A refugee. He stayed there homeless and landless. Perhaps Joseph eked out a living amid the scorn too often heaped upon refugees with their strange speech. No; he was not living in ease or safety under those conditions.

And he went to Egypt. Not a place of good memories for Israel. But a place of danger; of enslavement. Of infanticide at the hand of Pharoah – that ancient Herod! - every bit as horrendous as that experienced in Bethlehem.

There was no safety in Egypt for a little child of no-account Mary and Joseph. Malcolm Guite, the poet, is exactly right about the flight to Egypt. Steve Bell uses this poet’s words in his Advent CD when he sings of Christ as refugee: “We think of him as safe beneath the steeple/Or cosy in a crib beside the font;/ But he is with a million displaced people / On the long road of weariness and want. / For even as we sing our final carol / His family is up and on that road, /Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel, / Glancing behind and shouldering their load.

Though he escaped the wrath of Herod, there was no easy life for this child of Bethlehem. Only the precarious life of the refugee.

But there was a safety the world could not yet recognize. The safety of the promise of God – that this child would not be killed before his time. That the hand of God was upon him – no – that he was the hand of God – God come in the flesh. And that, in God’s own time and in God’s own way, this Child would crush the Herods of this world.

Our text from Isaiah, and the Letter to the Hebrews read this morning reminds us that God comes in Christ to save his children. Taking on flesh and blood, Christ shared in the sufferings of God’s own creation. And sharing those sufferings, he triumphed over death and thus broke the power of Satan, who continually threatens people with the fear of death. We are no longer slaves to sin and death, but instead have been bought and adopted into the family of God. Our reality is now that of living as God’s children. We know that the darkness of this world is not the final word – Christ has overcome it! And in him, we do, too.

Today, parents bring their children for baptism. Many of us have also experienced the waters of baptism. As a parent, offering your child in baptism is an acknowledgement that the world in which we live is dangerous, and can be frightening. It is an acknowledgement that, while you do the best you can to protect and guide your child, they may still experience difficulties: pain, loss, terror.

In baptism, we take Christ’s offer at face value. As we acknowledge he is God-come-in-the-flesh; as we acknowledge that he has overcome sin and death, he acknowledges us as his own. We become adopted children - adopted by the God of the universe who has overcome all the fearful realities of the world. Because of God’s work in Christ, his adopted children are safe in Christ from the terrible realities of the world. We are wholly identified in Christ – and the essence of who we are is safe in him.

But this does not mean that we always live in that ideal Christmas! No; we still experience pain. We still know loss. We still face death and terror – for bad things still happen to God’s children. We are saved in the world, not out of it.

Yet even in the midst of the world’s realities, we are not bowed down. For we know that we “have died and our life is hidden with Christ in God.” Whatever the world dishes out – whatever Satan and all his Herods dish out – nothing can change the fact that we belong to Christ. That in him, darkness is dispelled and the life and light of Christ is free in his people. Nothing can change that – whether we escape to freedom in Egypt, or walk through the terror of Herod in Bethlehem. There is something more – our identity in Christ – that outlasts all earthly realities. That is, in fact, the only lasting reality.

I recently completed reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a young man in Germany in the 1930’s. He and his family saw the rise of Hitler – a modern-day Herod – and early on realized how evil Hitler was.

Bonhoeffer became a Christian as a young man. All the while that Hitler identified himself as the “Saviour” of Germany, Bonhoeffer identified himself in the only Saviour – Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer committed himself to Christ and came to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that life in Christ was life identified as God’s child. As God’s child, Bonhoeffer understood that whatever came to him by way of danger, or threat, or harm, nothing could change who he was – God’s child. Safe as the adopted child of a powerful, and saving parent. Certain that even should he face death, he would live beyond that in the ongoing life of Christ.

It was this certainly that enabled Bonhoeffer, when he was arrested and charged with treason against the Nazi state, to live his life as God’s child. He prayed. He studied the Word. He sang the hymns that encouraged his heart and other’s. During his 18 months of imprisonment, his certainty that God had adopted him – and was daily with him – empowered a life in Christ that shone in a dark place. Other prisoners who survived the horror of imprisonment and the concentration camp life remarked that Bonhoeffer served to encourage all the prisoners he met – he was so certain who he was and to whom he belonged, that nothing the Nazi’s could do to him could change that.

There was something more to life, Bonhoeffer knew, than prison. Something more than pain and loss of family. And there was definitely something more to life than Hitler’s power. That power would ultimately fail, but not before it tried Bonhoeffer in slipshod fashion, and executed him, just days before the Nazi state fell.

The last words Bonhoeffer spoke before his execution were to a fellow prisoner. Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end. . . for me the beginning of life.”

He knew that his life in Christ was about to begin in even greater fullness. Herod would not win, even though he killed Bonhoeffer’s body. Christ had claimed Bonhoeffer as his child and, at the moment of Bonhoeffer’s death, he was welcomed by Christ into the father’s house.

This is the life of the baptized. It is life as it was meant to be lived: as a child of God. Safe in his loving embrace. Safe, even through the dark realities of our world. Speaking of, and living for the loving parent who has saved us, claiming us as his own. Bearing witness so that those caught by the Herod’s of this world can also believe, and be adopted.

We belong to God. Christ has purchased us. In baptism, we are marked as Christ’s own; a member of the family into eternity. Nothing can change that.