sermon on the slaughter of the innocents--yeah, it's rough

Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech ha-olam. Blessed are you Lord our God, ruler of all possibilities.

*          *          *

[begin with long silence and gaze at congregation]

“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated,

and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem

who were two years old or under,”

And Rachel wept, wailed, lamented for her children.

“She refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

I don’t know, guys. I mean, it was Christmas just last week.

It was, you know, fun, and happy, and candlelit and,

I know giving birth in a stable isn’t easy

and it wasn’t as clean and pretty as we like to remember it.

But, good God, it’s so much worse this week.

[rub face]

I don’t really want to preach about this story.

I don’t want to think about it.

But.

So Mary and Joseph and toddler Jesus

and maybe a brother or sister

(yeah, they had other kids—another day we’ll talk about that)

were living in Bethlehem and things were ok.

It’d been a couple years and the magi had come

and given them some embarrassingly expensive gifts

and they’d left only recently, kind of shiftily,

like they knew something was up.

And then Joseph had a dream where an angel told him,

“Dude, it’s bad. You gotta go. Now. NOW.”

So they grabbed what they could and ran.

I imagine they weren’t the only ones.

Maybe they had warning, but once the killing started,

there were families choking the road trying to get away.

They ran and ran and hid and all the while shook with fear,

maybe trying to be strong for the kids.

And what were they running away from?

Their king who was already terrifying,

their king who shifted loyalties to foreign powers to get his way,

who didn’t hesitate to kill off anyone who stood in his way

and who raised taxes to extortion levels

so he could build fancy new cities

and make himself feel immortal.

Their king was so threatened by the idea he heard from the magi

that there could be a new king,

that he had all the little boy babies and toddlers up to age 2

ripped from their mothers and fathers

and murdered in the street.

Or others say Herod knew he himself was dying

and also knew there wouldn’t be anyone mourning his death,

so his slaughter served a dual purpose of

not only keeping the throne to himself

but also creating a ready-made misery when he died.

Their king stopping at nothing to hold on to power,

willing to justify not just murder

but the destruction of the beauty and potential of young lives.

It’s called the Slaughter of the Innocents.

I’m not ready for this, liturgically or emotionally.

Scholars say this didn’t actually happen.

That, even if it did, there were only maybe 1000 people

living in Bethlehem at this point,

so it might only have been 20 children.

As though that makes it better.

Twenty or ten or even five means it’s not horrific.

But most scholars say this is a theological point, not an historical one.

Herod never had these babies killed.

Matthew is the only account,

either in the bible or in historical sources.

He wrote it in himself to make a theological point.

Matthew is big on tying Jesus’ story to the ancient Israelites’ stories—

remember the long genealogy

at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew?

That’s him tying Jesus definitively in to the family of David.

Remember the star that the magi followed?

Related to some passages in the book of Numbers.

The holy family runs off to Egypt? And warnings in dreams?

And massacre of children?

Totally the Exodus story. Jesus is a new Moses,

the one who will change everything

like Moses did but better.

Matthew’s all about bringing in these references

to give legitimacy but also holistic beauty

to the story he’s telling about Jesus.

And it works for him in general. But…but.

We don’t need this story to be factual for that historical time and place.

We don’t need it to have actually happened to tell the story.

We tell the story        because we know the story.

It happens over and over and we don’t know how to stop it.

On Christmas here at Good Shepherd it has become something of a tradition

for the praise team to offer the song “Christmas Eve Sarajevo” by TSO.

It’s fun and exciting and for the first time,

I wondered why it was called that.

I knew it was about the Bosnian War in the nineties—

ethnic cleansing between the Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia.

It was atrocious.

And it looked a lot like the Rwandan conflict and Aleppo,

and so many other conflicts.

For three years they killed each other, both military and civilian.

Families and entire towns were annihilated.

The city Sarajevo took the worst of the damage.

And a cellist sat in the middle of the fighting

and played Christmas carols through the night for days.

The TSO song he inspired is beautiful but it is heartbreaking.

Sarajevo was a massacre

and so many of those massacred were innocent.

This story repeats throughout history.

In the middle ages, the Church sent several crusades

to take back the Holy Land from the infidels.

Leaving aside the seriously problematic nature of that whole cause,

one of them was called the Children’s Crusade.

Because they sent children.

Adults going on crusade often didn’t survive

the long, violent journey to Israel.

And they sent kids?

They didn’t make it. At all.

They all died in the cause of attaining more power

for the rulers, for the adults.

In America, we decided that the native peoples

from whom we’d taken the land needed to be more white.

You think I’m kidding or using modern understandings of racism.

I’m not.

European culture was considered the correct culture

so we took children from their families,

dressed them up like dolls,

refused to let them speak their languages or see their families,

and made them ready for polite society.

Where they wouldn’t be accepted anyway.

How many of them died of suicide or broken hearts?

I’m not being poetic here.

This was a different kind of massacre.

Four years ago a young man took guns into Sandy Hook Elementary

We don’t know why.

He wasn’t King Herod trying to keep power.

He wasn’t trying to reclaim the Holy Land with sacrificial victims.

Yet the result was the same.

Innocents sacrificed for an adult’s dream.

         For years some have thought they could change

a child’s sexual orientation from gay to straight

with prayer and psychology.

It’s called conversion therapy and is increasingly illegal

as scientists show us how damaging it is.

And I’m not talking about “oh, gosh, those kids feel bad

and we need to boost their self-esteem.”

I mean the suicide rates and self-harm rates

and psychological trauma from these programs

are unbelievably high.

I mean these kids have been massacred, in a sense,

for the adults to prove their righteousness.

And this year alone—2016 has a lot to answer for—

this year alone the number of unarmed black men shot by police,

the number of mass shootings in places like

Paris and Orlando and Dallas,

the uptick in gun violence in cities like Chicago,

the length of time Flint, Michigan has gone without drinkable water.

Matthew says Rachel weeps and laments and refuses to be consoled,

because they are no more.

These acts of violence we can’t seem to stop doing

are the slaughter of the innocents over and over.

Maybe we do know how to stop it, but we don’t. It’s too hard.

This is sin: humanity’s propensity to screw things up—

both that we actually can’t stop hurting each other

and that we don’t want to stop, not really.

Jesus the cute baby comes into this world, this sinful, R-rated world.

         And he lives in it, he sees it happening, he doesn’t hide from it,

he walks with us and experiences pain just as we do.

I think it’s important for us, intellectually and emotionally

to juxtapose sweet Christmas with horrible slaughter.

It’s hard but good to hold these different experiences together.

Ugh, but really, experientially?

If God is God, then God should do something.

And, also, shouldn’t we have something more uplifting

here on New Year’s weekend?

We’re always talking about how God is doing a new thing,

how there’s hope, how Jesus changed things.

Where is the good news in the slaughter of the innocents?

All good questions, but all predicated on a rather small God.

God who is entangled by our rules and our physics.

God who is entangled in our expectations of rightness and judgment.

God who isn’t actually as vast as the universe

and as tender and caring as nothing we’ve ever experienced.
God is so much bigger than we know, holding us in massive divine hands,

weaving the fabric of the universe together.

Years ago, I read this amazing and difficult book

Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.

It’s very odd and heartbreaking, because his premise is

that the Holocaust makes absolutely no sense

unless it’s lived backwards. Do you get that?

There is no sense to be made of the slaughter of the innocents

during World War II as it is.

None. It’s atrocious. Period.

However, if we could live it backwards,

if we could see the smoke in the sky flowing together

into a chimney

and somehow creating bodies which awake and embrace

and are given clothing and handed children

whom they love so much they cry

and then sent on their way to lovely homes…

if we could live it that way,

the massacre of the Holocaust would be beautiful.

Matthew says Jesus is the new Moses

but he also says Jesus is not exempt from horror.

God’s presence doesn’t promise to take away the pain immediately—

         someday it will be gone, next year in Jerusalem, in the Kingdom.

God will wipe away every tear from our eyes

and there will be neither sorrowing nor sighing.

How do we make sense of this,

without being Pollyannaish,

without the science fiction of living it backwards,

without falling into infinite despair?

We don’t make sense of it,

we don’t justify it,

we simply see it, clearly and without argument.

It is a gift to have our eyes opened, to see the world as it is

—beautiful and broken—

and to know we are not alone.

2017 is filled with possibility—possibility of disaster, yes,

AND possibility in the new babies born even now,

possibility for all the generations before and after those new babies

to make different, compassionate choices,

possibility for God to do that new thing.

Happy New Year.

sermon on Reformation, repentance, and Susan Boyle

It’s hilarious you have the Episcopalian preaching on Reformation.

We were there for it, of course,

had our own version of scholars and lay folk saying,

“What the heck, Rome?”

but we went to the king and said,

“You can be in charge and get a divorce if you let us split, cool?”

So, it was less dramatic, theologically, anyway.

Our closest feast day to Reformation Day is the

Feast of the approval of the First Book of Common Prayer (1549)

It was written in English

which was pretty daring and thrilling for the time,

but still no hammer and nails.

It’s funny, as well, because,

much to the chagrin of one of my former Edge House students

and just massive Lutheran Pam Mills,

I don’t much care for “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

Except maybe with a beer stein.

Which, come to think of it, Brother Martin would probably have enjoyed.

But I do really enjoy Reformation Sunday.

And I enjoy how much y’all enjoy it.

It’s like going to a part of town you’re not familiar with

and coming across a birthday party

—you don’t know about the family arguments

or the struggles individuals are having,

you only see the delight.

Everyone’s having so much fun being a part of this partying group,

and you want to join in.

From the outside, the red shirts

and the jokes about Minnesota are charming.

Of course it’s not just a party, it’s as serious as the business end of a .45.

Today is a party that celebrates a massive change

in the way the church did things.

It’s a kind of death and resurrection, really.

Do you remember the movie Network?

It’s a brilliant parody as well as foretelling of how the news is made.

In it, the national news anchor gets fed up

with news becoming entertainment

and his and his coworkers’ being expendable.

On a live broadcast he snarls,

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”

It becomes a rallying cry.

This is our Brother Martin Luther and his 95 Theses.

The church needed reforming in Martin Luther’s time.

He and others were right to point out the sins of the church and say, 

“Friends, no, this is no good. Let’s try again.”

But it wasn’t that easy.

His 95 Theses read as a dry topic sentences for academic discussion.

What he was saying was,

“we are hurting each other the way we’re doing things now.

We’ve lost our way.”

But as the internet tells us in its infinite wisdom,

“When you have power, equality looks like a threat.”

Even though the reformers spoke truth,

those in power felt threatened.

Change the way we operate on a daily basis?

Change our theology about Purgatory and really eternity itself?

Consent to the people hearing scripture in their own languages

and being involved in its interpretation?

This is terrifying. It means we in power lose the power we had.

It means we’re not in control any more.

It’s not like the Pope and the Magisterium

held that power for evil purposes, mostly.

They, like so many others, understood themselves

as helping, as upholding sacred practices

and understandings of God.

It’s not that they were caught out in intentional greed,

but that they understood themselves as righteous,

like the people Jesus was talking to in last week’s gospel.

It says he spoke to

“some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.”

This may be the lasting lesson of the Reformation.

Not the party but the invitation to examine ourselves.

Do we trust in ourselves that we are righteous?

Maybe we’re not selling indulgences any more,

but what do we hold tightly in our fists,

thinking we’re doing good

and in reality hurting each other and the message of love

Jesus came to give us?

The lasting lesson of the Reformation, what we’re celebrating today,

is of repentance.

Repentance, matanoia in Greek, is a turning away from the thing.

My dad used to say to us as kids,

“I don’t want your sorrow, I want your repentance.”

He meant, he didn’t just want us to regret the thing we’d done,

because regret isn’t transformative.

It just sits there making us miserable.

Repentance is a change in posture, a change in direction.

Repentance may indeed happen often,

like the process of getting sober

or the way we need reminding to be kind to someone.

Turning away from something hurtful may happen so many times

that it looks like we’re spinning in circles,

but it’s a real change each time.

Maybe a better word for it is a practice,

something we do regularly that shapes us,

something that in trying over and over we get better at. 

I practice forgiving and having patience

with one of my husband’s childhood friends

over and over and over.

I think I’m better at it now than I once was.

And I think I have to keep practicing, keep reforming.

Re-forming.

Pastor Larry was all about that version of the word,

do you remember?

He understood it to be about re-shaping ourselves

in a different image,

or, more likely, God re-shaping us into the image of God.

Imago dei, our original state.

We can’t ever get there by ourselves, not really,

but we can continue to turn towards it.

I did something like this the other week.

I’ve been miserable about how we speak to one another any more.

Maybe it’s not different now then it ever was,

maybe I’m just newly aware of it.

But so much of the conversations online, in speeches,

even between church members,

is so rude and ugly and hateful.

UC, like most college campuses,

has street preachers every few weeks

who carry signs and preach sermons over megaphones

about how we are all of us going straight to hell.

Sometimes they’re decent to talk to,

most times, it’s a mess of judgment.

 So I invited some students and colleagues

and took the Edge House’s own megaphone onto campus

to do some positive street preaching.

The others in the group weren’t comfortable speaking yet.

I ended up confessing our sins. Our collective sins.

I didn’t plan anything particular to say and it was really hard,

but I began to confess the ways

that we ourselves need reforming.

How we have treated native peoples over the centuries.

How we have treated Jews and Africans.

How we have treated each other

when our beliefs were deemed heresy.

How we have consistently chosen to see

our brothers and sisters of whatever

orientation or gender or color or status

as less than because it is politically expedient.

Afterwards, because I stumbled over my words and thoughts,

I asked on Facebook “what are the sins of the church

you would like to hear confessed/apologized for?”

I got so, so many responses. Pages and pages of them.

Friends, we are absolutely justified by faith,

we are absolutely saints and saved and living in the Kingdom.

And also we are still sinners, needing to turn back to God.

What needs reforming now?

What is the theme about which we could write 95 theses?

Probably we can think of lots of things out there that need reforming,

but what in here needs reforming?

What is the speck in our own eyes that needs to be removed?

Within the ELCA?

Within Good Shepherd?

Within each of us individually?

We participate in the world, in voting, in civic pride,

but do we put our faith in those systems and leaders?

Do we think that if we put enough money and energy

into the process the country will become Christian again?

As though it was better 50 or 200 years ago?

Perhaps our reformation involves intentionally listening

to the voices of the marginalized

—whether by race, sexuality, youth, status.

Whose voices do we discount?

Or is it simply that we have arrived at this point in history

without meaning to,

doing what we’ve always done because we’ve always done it?

This is what the Reformation is about

—seeing God’s desires for unfettered, active love,

and naming the ways that we block that love.

And we are not about a single Reformation

         as much as a call to constant reformation.

Re-forming.

Whether we know it’s happening or not.

Martin Luther didn’t intend to start a new church.

He didn’t want to destroy the church but to call it to account.

He leaned into his challenge to the church because he loved it so much,

because of his respect for the institution

and the people and for Jesus himself.

Whatever we do now to identify the truth of things,

to name our own privilege and to sacrifice power

is because of our love and respect for the church and for people.

We don’t do it because our works will bring the Kingdom here

but because when we repent, when we open our arms in love,

that is the Kingdom here.

I'll close with a video from Britain’s Got Talent. At the beginning, look for the judgment. Then look for the moments of turning. As they see what they've done, look for the Kingdom of God on their faces. Look how beautiful, how loving it is to repent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk