Matthew 2:13-23
The danger to Jesus begins the first Sunday after Christmas. The danger of Jesus begins the first Sunday after Christmas. It doesn't take long at all for our story to move from the non-threatening, sweet tableaux of the babe lying in a manger to the harsh reality of how threatening God's Messiah is to the status quo and the powers that be. Even as an infant, as mere potential, power must try to stamp Jesus out.
The status quo and the powers this morning are embodied in the person of Herod, King of Judea, client-puppet of the Romans, builder on a fantastic scale of such marvels as the temple in Jerusalem, the harbor in Caesarea, the fortress at Masada, and palaces throughout his kingdom, a paranoiac murderer who killed his wives and children, his siblings and cousins, and every and all opposition. In short, a garden variety tyrant the likes of which the world has seen hundreds if not thousands come and go.
The danger of Jesus to Herod as the status quo power that be is one of legitimacy as the King of the Jews. Everyone, Herod included, knew that Herod's legitimacy was based on raw, violent power. He had ascended the throne with the blood of his predecessor on his hands and tried to kill a lot of people as he died. This morning, we read of how he had all the young children under the age of two in Bethlehem killed in an attempt to wipe out the infant Jesus. That he failed to thwart God's purposes of light and love should be of some comfort, although hardly any at all to the families of the innocent victims. Mohandas Gandhi once said, “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” From a big picture perspective, Jesus lived. Love lived. But all the other mothers and fathers despaired. This is a hard lesson that challenges us. Are we the status quo and powers that be? Do we stand with the status quo and powers that be? Do we resist them when they resist God's love? Or do we just try to avoid conflict, hoping we're not living in Bethlehem when Herod's troops show up looking for the Messiah?
if you think these are easy questions to answer, I think you might need to think a little harder. Hitler and the Nazis killed millions of Jewish and Eastern European children. Our faith tells us to stand up to such violence and brutality. From the distance of 70 years with an ocean between us, it is easy for us to nod our heads in agreement, but who can honestly say they would have resisted if they had been present in Germany in 1943? When the SS burned villages and machine gunned everyone, who among us would have lived our faith and stood up to the status quo powers that were? Fear of the status quo is a powerful force.
Or in our own time, it is obvious that the atrocities being perpetrated by Bashar el Assad and his followers against children are beyond the pale, need to be resisted and stopped. A few months ago, we had a debate in our country and it was decided that it was not our responsibility, not our fight, something to be worked out by the Syrians amongst themselves. You see, the status quo and powers that be have a lot of energy working in their favor.
These two examples, while extreme, are complicated in someways and can thus be brushed off. Truth be told, the Nazis are dead and gone and that is an intellectual puzzle at best now as none of us will ever have to act on our convictions. And Syria, well that's a long way away from here and our lives are pretty busy keeping up with the day to day right here in Dover. Let's dig a little deeper and closer to home. What about all the children working in sweatshops around the world, making us our affordable clothing? Our faith would indicate quite strongly that we should advocate for justice for these children. They should not be working and their parents should make a living wage. But what do we do? We have to have clothes and we buy them, even though we know that a label saying "Made in Bangladesh" is a finger print of human misery. And even so, that misery is still a world away and easy to avert our eyes from.
What about the millions of children living in poverty in the United States? One in four American children if the statistics are to be believed. Sure, we may not know any of these children, although those of us who helped out with Family Promise will have met some of them, but these kids live near by. They are our neighbors. Jesus doesn't leave a lot of gray area on the question of helping the poor, loving our neighbors, sharing what we have with those who have nothing. But the status quo is so, well, the status quo. Just the ways things are and have always been. What could we do to fix it? It's such a huge problem. Beyond us. And anyways, it's not right in our face.
What would we do if there was something right in our face? Right here in Dover? Something that could mean the difference between life and death for some children in our town? Even one child in our town? Remember, Herod killed the children of only one town, not all the kids in Judea. Perhaps the child we save could be our neighbor's kid? Some kid we coach at soccer? Teach Sunday School to? Our own kid? Something that is so much the status quo but which we could actually do something about? Would we be willing to upset the status quo?
By now, you may be wondering what this danger to our children is in our community that we could resist as a church. Well, I would bet that many of you have driven by other congregational United Churches of Christ in the area and noticed rainbow flags flying out in front, in Wellesley, Needham, and Natick to name the closest ones. Churches just like ours that have become what is known as Open and Affirming, which is to say overtly welcoming to Gay and Lesbian people as well as everyone else. They fly the flag so that gay and lesbian Christians know that they are truly welcome and will be safe, which is not often the case in most churches, even though most churches have signs which say "All are Welcome."
You may be wondering, what does this have to do with us? Isn't everyone welcome here? Well, this subject has come up a number times in the Board of Deacons and even Church Council I think before my time and every time it is dropped as too potentially contentious, it'll split the church. People will leave. We'll become the gay church....really? In Dover, Massachusetts? Why single out gays and lesbians for welcome when we really want to welcome everyone? Really? Everyone? The process of conversations and meetings is too arduous. And so on and the item gets tabled for another year. Anyway, there just aren't any gay or lesbian people we know.
Until it is your child, your grandchild, your friend or neighbor's child, some child you know and love and not some hypothetical person who doesn't even exist except as a stereotype in your mind which could be disturbing or not to you depending on your predisposition to homosexuality, whether you have no exposure or a lot, think it is distasteful or of no consequence, think the bible says it's a sin or not, and so on. But faith is not a concept. Faith is a lived experience involving very real people.
Imagine being a youth going through the emotional and hormonal rigors and confusion of puberty only to discover that you are gay or lesbian in a place like Dover where everything looks so traditional. Depending on your relationship with your parents, it could be a total nightmare. It is not like it was when I was a teenager and gays and lesbians were regularly ridiculed and even abused. Now the schools forbid bullying and teach tolerance, but that is still a far cry from being welcomed, accepted, and celebrated, no strings attached...which is exactly what we want for our own children, isn't it? Quite frankly, it would allow us to loosen our own ties, relax and be ourselves a little more in the midst of all the high achievement and perfection of our adult world here in Dover.
imagine what message we could send to our children and their friends if we hung that rainbow flag and said, no matter who you are or who you love or what makes you tick, you are not only welcome here, you are celebrated here, especially if you are gay or lesbian since we know that you don't really believe that we mean you when we say no matter who or what because you have been burned, silently snubbed and openly rejected so many times before. The same way we celebrated the children who performed in our Christmas pageant two weeks ago. Gay and lesbian teens deal with high levels of depression and alienation and commit suicide at higher levels than heterosexual teens. We could literally be a lifeboat to these children, a light on a hill, a sure and certain refuge in the gathering storm.
Of course, there is the status quo. There is the way church has always been. Overtly and enthusiastically welcoming everyone would be going out on a limb, maybe too far for some people who might be unable to go out there with us. But if we imagine ourselves as Bethlehem and these are our children threatened by the status quo and powers that be and one of those powers is, of all things, our church, then our vocation as a church of Jesus Christ, a place of light and love, in our own words, a welcoming community of faith and service since 1762, then our vocation becomes clearer. Not easier. Just clearer. It's not whether we're going to be Herod, because I can't imagine anyone suggesting that. The question is, will we follow Jesus? It is a question of legitimacy. And it's about very real children, our very real children and their very real friends.
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