Sermon for the Second Sunday of Christmas
January 5, 2020
St. Michael’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. Canon Michael J. Horvath
Gospel: Matthew 2:13-15; 19-23
The few weeks after Christmas and New Years are always a bit interesting. On the one hand there is still, for some, the glow that the holiday season imparts on us – we’ve spent just enough time with our extended families, we’ve eaten delicious meals with abandon, and we caught up with friends we might not have seen for months or years.
On the church side of things, we waited with great anticipation during Advent for the coming of the Christ Child, culminating with a beautiful Christmas Eve service at which we celebrated his coming, with angels singing on high and a sense that all is good with the world. And for those who come to church only on Christmas and Easter, that joy of the Nativity story, and all the joy and excitement in finding the Christ Child in the manger, ends there and is preserved in our memories until it is time to resurrect it again the following December 24th. Christmas for many has become an opportunity to escape from the darkness of the world, from life’s disappointments and fears and tears.
At some point, however, we are called back into the reality of getting our houses back in order, putting away the Christmas ornaments, taking down the outdoor lights, finally taking a look at our bank accounts, and maybe stepping on a bathroom scale. Our escape from reality was short lived. Or was it?
Our Gospel reading similarly moves us from delirious joy to stark reality. “Now after the wise men had left….” How strange that that is how today’s gospel begins. We hear of their departure before we hear of their arrival. The wise men left before they’ve even arrived. At least that’s what happens as the readings are presented to us in the liturgy. We don’t hear the story of the wise men’s arrival until tomorrow, the Feast of the Epiphany, when we celebrate the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ to the Magi.
The storyline should go like this: Jesus is born, the wise men visit, the holy family flees to Egypt to escape Herod. The way the lectionary has it set up, however, it seems as though the Wise Men make two visits.
So why the discrepancy? Why are we hearing the story out of order? Some of it is just the way the lectionary falls this year, but I think there is more to it than that. To hear the story out of order makes us slow down and listen a bit more closely. In one important sense, I think we are being asked to remember that during this time of heightened joy at the coming of Jesus and the revelation of his divinity to the Wise Men, we can’t lose sight of the fact that there is still darkness in the world, that disappointments still linger and tears are still shed.
In today’s Gospel reading that darkness takes the form of Herod who has vowed to find and kill the Christ Child even if it meant killing all male babies under the age of 2. So, God, in a dream, tells Joseph to flee with his family to Egypt. That’s pretty dark isn’t it? It’s so dark that this event is given the name of the Massacre of the Innocents. As biblical passages go, this is one made for the movies, right? It has all the action, intrigue, characters, and plot twists that is simply waiting to be picked up by Netflix in a big way.
But just as the story from the Angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would bear God’s son, to the retelling of his birth on Christmas Eve is our story, so the darkness of Herod, and the need to flee from it, is also our story. The Herod of Jesus’s time is alive and well in our time, and our world is full of people fleeing from the destruction of our present day Herods. You know who the Herods are. A clergy colleague of mine wrote: “Herod is our indifference that prevents compassion, our hate and anger that destroy love, our busyness and distractions that deny presence, our violence and anxiety that defeat peace, our inhumanity that negates our creation in the image and likeness of God, and our politics when it is narrow, self-serving, discriminatory, and exclusive. Our world and sometimes our lives are full of Herods.”
One of the joys for me of being on vacation is the opportunity to disconnect from the ongoing and incessant news cycle that we’re subjected to every minute of the day. When I finally got back to catching up on world events, it was with the realization that Herod still sits right in the middle of our Christmas story in all his various forms.
And Herod not only operates on the national and international stage. Perhaps you have your own personal Herod to contend with; the Herods that we need to flee from in order to heed God’s call to bring about healing for ourselves and this broken world.
I am forever reminded that we hold in tension the love and joy of the coming of the light of Christ every Christmas season with the understanding that there are still so many dark areas in our world that need to be illuminated by that love. And in case you fear that Herod is the last word in our Christmas story, then remember where we started. Jesus Christ, the light that called into being God in our midst. Emmanuel – God with Us.
Through Christ, we have been given the strength to face the Herods of this world. Through Christ we are given the opportunity to share love as the essence and purpose of God. The opportunity to love ourselves; to love those who are dear to us; to love those we find it difficult to love; or to love those we may have never thought about loving.
There are so many Herods that need to be stood up to and challenged in our lives. The Herod of gun violence; the Herod of racism; the Herod of poverty; the Herod of addiction; the Herod of loneliness and grief; the Herod of broken relationships; the Herod of homophobia; the Herod of “fill-in-the-blank.” You could name hundreds of others, I’m sure. That’s our reality.
But it’s a new reality in which God stands with us to raise the light of Christ into the dark faces of our Herods. And we can do so without fear, knowing that, ultimately, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Every time we are led by the light of Christ’s love, we grow in that same light and, indeed, we become that light ourselves. We move from being the receivers of God’s blessing to being the blessing of God to others, a holy and grace-filled movement from dark into light. Amen.
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