Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, Pastor
Dec. 26, 2010 Christmas 1
Matthew 2:13-18
As we gather here on this first day after America's most exhausting holiday, my usual bench of reliable biblical scholars are all out of town. Dr. David Trobisch is still visiting family in Germany. Dr. Charles Hedrick is in Kansas City playing the role of family patriarch with his daughters and their families.
I am confident, however, had we been able to meet for a salad at MSU this week and discussed this reading from Matthew before us today that they would side with New Testament scholars the world over who say that this account of Herod's slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem is not a historical account. They would say, and I would agree, that Matthew constructs this story as part of his rather insistent view that Jesus was the new Moses. Just as Moses was born at a time in Egypt when the Pharaoh was having all male Hebrew children killed, Matthew wants to begin his account of Jesus' life with the same sort of peril from an oppressive, evil king.
Hedrick, Trobisch, and any good seminary text book on the New Testament would say, in fact, that Jesus was probably born in his parent's home in Nazareth and both Luke and Matthew create entirely different accounts to place Mary in Bethlehem at the time of his birth in order to make Jesus more convincingly an heir of King David.
The text books would point out that there is no historical record of such a slaughter during Herod the Great's rule. The first century Jewish historian, Josephus, certainly catalogues other murders and outrages of Herod's time.
Scholars agree that if Herod had ordered the execution of dozens or possibly hundreds of infants that Josephus certainly would have talked about it.
I am recounting the scholarly view on this passage, not because I disagree with them..... fundamentally, I find their conclusions to be entirely reasonable but I will add this one caveat: if archaeologists should unearth some bit of evidence to suggest that it really did happen exactly the way Matthew described, I would not be surprised. Certainly, more biblically conservative scholars have for years pointed out that the slaughter of the innocents would not be out of character for Herod who regularly had members of his own family put to death and ordered the execution of dozens of people at a time in order to safeguard his grasp on the throne which was complicated by an extreme paranoia.
And, yes, first century Palestine was a dangerous place and Herod was a dangerous ruler and even an enthusiastic historian like Josephus could not possibly chronicle ever evil deed committed during that time.
But more than that, I could easily be persuaded to believe that dozens of children might have been killed for political reasons and no one said much about it because, I'm afraid, that sort of thing happens all of the time. Children don't vote.... They rarely own property. They are not veterans.... They can lift neither sword nor rifle, they can't write, or drive or command an audience. They disappear quietly. They are warehoused in homeless shelters, daycares, and poorly equipped schools.
In Greene Co, the newspaper will occasionally latch onto a particularly heinous story of child abuse or death through violence or neglect, but not often.
In 2003 there were two children killed in Greene Co. by abuse or neglect. In 2004 there were 4. In 2005 there were 5. Only two of those 11 deaths caught even remote public attention..... most were buried in obscurity.... Bad boy friends and negligent mothers quietly went to jail and the conditions which keep creating violent and negligent homes goes unchanged. It goes unchanged because children can't vote, they can't lift a sword, or write, or drive, or command an audience. They depend on other people to do that and what those other people do is to warehouse them in homeless shelters, daycares and bad schools.
In 2004 and 2005 we had about 800 children each year removed from Greene Co. homes because of abuse and neglect. In 2006 we had big state budget cuts and the number of children placed in foster care was cut in half but not because abuse and neglect was cut in half, just our ability to do anything about it. So we leave the children where they are and we never hear about them.... Because they can't vote, they don't own property, they can't write..... and a lot of them will never learn how to.
You would have to be fairly Pollyannaish not to be aware that the numbers of children in poverty and in danger are on the rise. Accurate accounting of such things is not as easy as just looking it up on the Chamber of Commerce website but I can tell you from the perspective of working with poverty related programs at Crosslines and Ozark Food harvest that the number of people served each month has doubled in the past seven years.
So, is it possible that mean old King Herod might have ordered the slaughter of the innocent children who lived in the area of Bethlehem early in the first century and no one bothered to record the horrible event? You bet it is.
We know it is possible because it happens every day and it goes almost entirely unnoticed, even in 21st century Greene Co. And so we keep this story in Matthew and we read it aloud in church every year.
I and my academic peers and friends in biblical studies will push around the theological themes and even though we will disparage incarnational theology, I do not disparage the claim that the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was a holy and divine event. What I want to emphasize though, is that the birth of Miguel and Christine de los Angeles, and Mufasa and Nadia, and Tyrone and Chaquita, and Luke and Nola are also holy and divine births.
That Jesus was born into poverty and was almost immediately a refugee from a cruel government is not significant to repeat unless recounting that story also teaches you to let your heart be broken when I tell you that there are 10,000 children on Medicaid in this country...... 10,000 children also born into poverty and at danger in a cruel and indifferent world.
The reason that I have not given up on church..... the reason why I continue to do this.... To keep coming here.... Keep preaching and teaching and writing.... Lifting my sword and casting my vote is because the world needs a voice of compassion, of love and sacrifice, of caring and of interceding for those who cannot act to save themselves.... The ones who are waiting for the spirit of Christmas to be born into our world.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunities which came to me many years ago to study theology at Vanderbilt and later at Harvard.
I feel like a man who won the lottery, being able to go from a poor rural Kentucky background to those wonderful institutions of learning. But I will tell you that the most important theological lessons I learned early in life. I learned it in a song I was taught to sing, sitting on a little painted wooden chair in a basement classroom of the 1st Christian Church in Glasgow, KY. If you remember it, sing it with me:
Jesus loves the little children
All little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
So, mothers.... Fathers.... Grandparents..... I believe that your children carry within them something which is holy, divine, important, and powerful. I believe that the entirety of the future of the human race is in them. And so, I charge you to love them, protect them, provide for them..... teach them love and compassion.... Give them a meaningful spiritual context so that they will also be passionate about justice and so they will be willing to show mercy.
If you are fortunate enough to have a child in your life, receive them as a gift from God and cherish them.
Love your children until you are so good at it that you find that you are able to love children you have not met yet..... children whose parents are in prison.... Children who are in foster care to protect them from abuse.... Children who live in impoverished circumstances .... Who have no one who reads to them, no one who takes them on trips.... Who never get to go swimming, whose meals are irregular and unreliable.
The problem is, you see, that children can't vote. They don't have jobs, incomes or property. They cannot write or draw an audience or lift up either a sword or their voices and so they are waiting for you to do those things for them. I hope that they have reason to believe in you.
