Sermon for 1st Sunday of Christmas: The Holy Innocents.

Exodus 23: 1 - 9

Do not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a malicious witness.

2 “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, 3 and do not show favouritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.

4 “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. 5 If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.

6 “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. 7 Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty.

8 “Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the innocent.

9 “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.

Matthew 2: 13 - end

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.”

19 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

The reading we had from Matthew was not exactly Christmassy, in the sense that it was not jolly, even if it concerned events around the birth of our Lord.

Herod 'the Great', that tyrant, appointed by the Romans, who ruled Palestine with ruthless efficiency, had murdered all the male infants in and around Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the one 'who has been born king of the Jews'.

What are we to make of this?

This reading asks of us difficult questions. How can God allow such cruel injustice in our world, and what should our response be? The bible does not hide difficult questions from us, so we should not be afraid to consider them.

There is a huge body of theology that considers the question of why God allows injustice and cruelty, and we have just ten minutes, so I have invited some voices from the past to give you their thoughts. You won't get a whole answer, but you will get enough to consider...

First Frederick Douglass. Douglass escaped slavery in 19th century America, and become a leading abolitionist speaker, and converted to Christianity. Many of his abolitionist supporters were deeply religious Christians, but, throughout his life, he repeatedly witnessed Christians using the Bible to justify slavery. In his autobiography he addresses this contradiction, saying,

“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

Douglass' message is clear, to be Christian you have to be on the side of justice. If the religion you practice leads you into supporting injustice, you are not a following the way of Jesus.

Next we have CS Lewis writing to Dorothy Sayers, in 1959. Sayers was seriously ill, she and Lewis had been corresponding for years. In one of her last letters, Sayers expressed deep discouragement about the seemingly endless cycle of human evil and suffering, and she questioned whether anything Christians do made a real difference. Here's part of Lewis’s reply...

“I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

The scale of injustice can seem overwhelming, I think Lewis's answer to respond not by despair, but by doing what you can, is useful. We cannot change the world, but we can work to change our world, and that will make a difference.

Next we have a clergyman, or a Pastor, as Robert Greene Lee was a Southern Baptist preacher in Tennessee. The passage is taken from one of his best-known Christmas sermons entitled “From the Throne to the Tree.” It holds Christmas, and the incarnation, as a significant part of answering our questions about suffering and injustice. Exploring the paradox of the infinite, eternal God, willingly undergoing the ultimate self-humbling to reach fallen humanity, he writes,

“Christ who in eternity rested motherless upon the Father's bosom and in time rested fatherless upon a woman's bosom, clasping the Ancient of Days who had become the Infant of Days.

What deep descent!

· from the heights of glory to the depths of shame;

. from the wonders of heaven to the wickedness of earth;

· from exaltation to humiliation;

. from the throne to the tree;

· from dignity to debasement;

· from worship to wrath;

. from the halls of heaven to the nails of earth;

. from the coronation to the curse;

. from the glory place to the gory place!

In Bethlehem, humility and glory in their extremes were joined. Born in a stable! Cradled in a cattle trough! Wrapped in swaddling clothes of poverty! No room for Him who made all rooms! No place for Him who made and knows all places! Oh, deep humiliation of the Creator-born of the creature, woman! But in His descent was the dawn of mercy. Because we cannot ascend to Him, He descends to us.”

Christmas shows us that God did not remain beyond experiencing cruelty and injustice, and Easter shows that if we follow the way of Jesus evil does not have the last say, goodness does.

Our last but one address is from Rev'd Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, and was given at the Anglo-Catholic Congress held in London in July 1923. It has inspired generations of Christian activists who combine veneration of the Sacrament with work among the poor, think of Trevor Huddleston in South Africa, for example.

Western's address was a challenge, he said,

"You are Christians, then your Lord is one and the same with Jesus on the throne of his glory, with Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, with Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, with Jesus who is mystically with you as you pray and with Jesus enshrined in the hearts and bodies of His brothers & sisters up and down the world. . . .Now go out into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them; and when you find Him, gird yourselves with His towel of fellowship, and wash His feet in the person of His brethren.”

Notice that the Anglo Catholic Frank Weston, and the Southern Baptist Robert Greene Lee, both find the heart of their response to cruelty and injustice in the incarnation, in the events of Christmas; and both Weston and Lewis commend action, not theorizing. It's about incarnational theology, not abstract theology, it's about being incarnational in practice, its about asking, 'what can we do to help?'

Finally a woman's voice. Nadia Bolz-Weber's provocative reimagining of the Beatitudes for a modern age. Nadia Bolz-Weber is an liberal American Lutheran Pastor, and her words reflect that, but try to hear the deeper, Christlike meaning within them, what she has to say is more personal and intimate than the grand statements we have heard,

“Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt, those who aren't sure, those who can still be surprised. Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction. Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones for whom tears could fill an ocean.

Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like. Blessed are they who don't have the luxury of taking things for granted any more. Blessed are they who can't fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else. Blessed are those who still aren't over it yet. Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are those who no one else notices, the kids who sit alone at middle school lunch tables, the laundry guys at the hospital, the sex workers, and the night shift street sweepers. Blessed are the forgotten. Blessed are the closeted. Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the under-represented.

Blessed of the wrongly accused, the ones who never catch a break, the ones for whom life is hard, for Jesus chose to surround himself with people like them. Blessed are those without documentation. Blessed are the ones without lobbyists. Blessed are those who make terrible business decisions for the sake of people. Blessed are the burned out social workers and the overworked teachers and the pro-bono case takers. Blessed are the kind-hearted NFL players and the fundraising trophy wives. And blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak.

Blessed is everyone who has ever forgiven me when I didn't deserve it. Blessed are the merciful for they totally get it. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.”

The blessed of the Kingdom of Heaven are not the blessed of the Kingdom of this World, Jesus said, 'The last will be first, and the first will be last.'

The Kingdom of Heaven scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts, the Kingdom of God puts down the mighty from their seat, and exalts the humble and meek.

Amen.

The Collect for Holy Innocents

Heavenly Father,

whose children suffered at the hands of Herod,

though they had done no wrong:

by the suffering of your Son

and by the innocence of our lives

frustrate all evil designs

and establish your reign of justice and peace;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.