Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. Michelle Webber

United Church of Christ Epiphany

461 Orange Ave/. Los Altos January 6^th, 2008

Let There Be Light

Matthew 2:13-23

We don’t often dwell on this portion of Jesus’ birth narrative. It contains some pretty uncomfortable details. Not the least of which is Herod killing all male children under a certain age. It is a gruesome literary device used not for the shock it gives us, but for its parallel to the story of Moses. But it is hard for us to get past.

I could do all the academic exegesis in the world on this text and every form of interpretation at our disposal would say that this story is not about what happened to those children, but from a post-modern perspective how can we ignore the children? If you believe this story is based on historical fact, then you believe that the life of our Lord was spared at the expense of all the male children born to the Jews in Bethlehem for two entire years. Imagine the grief of that town. And yet the commentaries say that such an event would hardly have made history so great was the violence meted out by Herod.

I have held my new born child in my arms. I know those who have lost such precious gifts. And I have read about those who have lost children to violence. I can scarcely imagine the mourning of Bethlehem that I read between the lines of this story. How helpless the parents who are forced to watch their children be put to death by a cruel dictator. And yet Matthew skips over the human impact of his literary device with the line, “to fulfill scripture,” implicating an all-powerful God in the tragedy. Herod does not deserve the blame for this event, but it is scripture, prophesy from God through Jeremiah, that deems this necessary. If Jesus had been born without Herod’s notice and grew up happily with his age mates would he have been no less anointed by God? Apparently not.

And yet there is something of the truth of our Lord that we can find in this story. Last week I explained why Matthew tells the birth narrative the way he does. He uses what is remembered about the life of Jesus, paralleling the prophesies commonly understood to be about the coming of the anointed one,

attributing to Jesus the origin myths of the Jewish Messiah.

After I preached last week one of the parents said two interesting things to me. One was that in some churches I would be run out of town on a rail for suggesting that the bible is not the infallible word of God and that it might not be literal truth. The other was that she wished her daughter had been there because her daughter’s most

common question is “How do you know that’s true?” Let me suggest that the truth to be taken from the type of story we hear today, in which its parallel to older scriptural stories is more important than any historical accuracy, is two-fold. First, there is a metaphorical truth and second there is the truth of the cosmology behind the story.

The metaphorical truth is that Jesus was to be the freer of his followers

the same way that Moses was the freer of the Hebrews who had been indentured in Egypt. In order for Matthew to spread the good news of our essential freedom,

our individual ability to connect with God without hierarchical intermediaries,

in the most effective way in his community, he used this metaphor to its fullest extent. In this way, the story of the killing of the babies was not shocking because it did not actually have to have taken place in order to reference the metaphor. Implicit in the parallel is the saving of Hebrew babies in Egypt in the Exodus story. So, even though Matthew references a much more recent tragedy, it either would have been understood as a mere metaphor, or, if historically true, a tragedy that signified the sacrifice of those lives for a much wider freedom for the whole community. And they were a community far more comfortable with sacrifice. It was a part of their ritual lives. They sacrificed in the temple on a regular basis.

The first fruits of all of their labor, including their first born children, were dedicated to the temple.

The cosmology behind the story is one of a God who uses violence and destruction to bring about his desired results, and one for whom history is cyclical. Matthew looks to the past to write the origin myth of his community’s future. But Matthews’s cosmology is one that many of us would reject. How can we understand a God who causes or fails to prevent babies being killed in order to prove a point?

Part of the power of being a church who allows a metaphorical reading of the bible is freeing us from some of the damage that has been done over time by an understanding of God as violent and vengeful. When we look at the life of Jesus as a metaphor, or as a folk tale, we can see that, especially in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ life parallels the history of Israel, the history of the people who were the first to hear the story as Mathew wrote it. Jesus does not punish people for their transgression, he forgives them and encourages us to forgive those who trespass against us. He does not use his power over life and death to bring fearful obedience through violence, but to restore people to life. He does not mete out lists of rules and laws that have to be followed to be in right relationship with God; he reduces those rules and laws to their most fundamental and then extends Gods kingdom to those who have been exiled from it. Yeshuah, Aramaic for Jesus, means Yah (or God) who saves. And Matthew’s Jesus is one who quite literally saves us from the violence created by those who believe that God is violent.

When I worked in the staffing industry, we would give all of our new hires this test that had statements like, “People often call in sick to work when they’re not really sick.” It was a predictor of reliability. You would answer on a spectrum from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” The pilot programs for this test indicated that those who believed that people did this were much more likely to do this than those who believed that people don’t really do this.

The cosmological shift represented by the story of Jesus told in Matthew

could be interpreted as shifting the notion of a retributive God into the understanding of a restorative God. And when we believe that God does not tear us down, but builds us up, then becomes much more difficult to tear others down.

Of course this does not solve the moral dilemma of what happened to the babies. If God is a restorative God and not a retributive God, then how do we explain the chaos and evil that we see evidence of in the world? Implicit in Hebrew thought contemporary with the writing of this gospel are both beliefs about God- God as an essentially loving, restorative creator, and God as a vengeful judge, both of them meant to right breeches in the relationship between God and God’s chosen people when those people fail to meet God’s expectations.

The story of Jesus gives conceptual precedence to belief in the essentially loving, restorative creator with which many of us, myself included, are more comfortable. But where is God, then, when unthinkable chaos and evil happens?

Where is God in the death of these babies? Where is God in the midst of war? There is no easy answer to this. Theologians have long been debating this issue. Mythology has built up about conscious forces of evil doing battle with the essentially loving God. Creation theologians might point out that destruction is necessary for creation. Things are created when other things are transformed. Death is but a transformation from one state of being into another. But such theoretical arguments are hardly consolation to a parent mourning the loss of their child, especially when someone is trying to claim that there is an essential spiritual goodness in the sacrifice of that child.

Personally, I take consolation in the concept of Emmanuel, God with us.

I think this is also part of the power of the story of Jesus, of the birth narratives in particular. If you understand Jesus to be an expression of God, or in the least very closely tied to God’s will for the world, then you believe in a God who willingly experiences the limitations of human life on earth; a God who chose to forgo omnipotence in under to empathize with the boundaries we face that feel like chaos and evil. We can not control the weather, even though our ability to predict it and adapt to it improves over time. We have no power over life and death, even though our understanding of it. We can not control the actions of other people.

There are essential limits that we live by and our reactions to these limits can either bring us closer to “God with us,” who knows how frustrating and potentially damaging these limits can be, or bring us farther away from God

into a dark separateness that feels essentially chaotic, a place from which evil is possible.

Jesus, God with us, was born a whole and perfect little baby, dependent upon others to remain whole and perfect. Acts such as the killing of the babies by Herod create fractures, break that wholeness.

My daughter, Jerri Lane, was young enough when she had her first seizure

that she doesn’t really remember it, but until very recently she remained afraid

of walking on anything that she could see through, storm drains, ladders, bridges whose planks did not quite touch. The fall that preceded her seizure left her with a touch of post traumatic stress, a tiny little fracture in her psyche that has taken a couple of years to heal. Her emergency room experience after her second seizure

has left her with a fear of hospitals, especially needles. These are very small examples of how our God-given wholeness is broken. These are little bits of chaos, not even big enough to be called evil that have affected my daughter.

They will be healed by loving attentiveness, by loving touch and assuring words

and positive experiences and prayer.

What happened to the babies in the gospel of Matthew is an exponentially

bigger example of such a break in wholeness. To begin with Herod must have been essentially broken in order to make such an action possible. Instead of healing he passes on his broken-ness in the effects of his actions.

The grief of the parents and the surrounding community, perhaps unthinkable to us, is healable. This is where God is, for me, with us in the grief,

available for loving touch, assuring words, positive experiences and prayer. God is in the restorative process, however many generations that process may take.

There are no easy answers in the midst of the chaos. What is possible

is to answer evil with goodness, to offer kind words, loving touch, positive experiences and prayer and to reach out to God who longs to be with us in the darkness, so that we know that light is possible. And remember, whenever you do these things to the least among us, the most fractured, you do so to Christ. You participate in the restorative process that heals the violence in the story of Jesus

And the violence that has been done in his name throughout history. Let there be light. Amen.