December 29, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

In the Midst of Nightmares

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Hebrews 2:10–18
Matthew 2:13–23

“As yet heaven and earth are not united. The star of Bethlehem is a star shining in a dark night, even today. . . . For the Son of the eternal Father descended from the glory of heaven, because the mystery of iniquity had shrouded the earth in the darkness of night.”

Edith Stein

We are in the season of Christmastide, which in the church year begins with Christmas and continues until Epiphany on January 6—the twelve days of Christmas. So we are still singing Christmas carols today. Some of you wish we would start singing Christmas carols earlier instead of adhering to Advent hymns so we could have a longer time enjoying our favorite familiar carols about the angels and shepherds, Bethlehem and the manger. I expect some may thus be disappointed that one Christmas carol that we will sing today—the one after the sermon—is unfamiliar.

It is unfamiliar because it is based on the scripture passage I just read, which is not often highlighted, though it is part of the lectionary for Christmastide. That is probably because today’s lesson has more bad news than good. No sooner had Jesus been born than the magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. Joseph also received a warning in a nightmare, from which he must have awakened in a panic and sweat. He was warned to take his precious family and flee to Egypt because Herod had targeted Joseph’s newborn son to be murdered. When Herod realized he had been tricked by the magi, he ordered all babies under the age of two in and around Bethlehem to be killed. Jesus and his family remained refugees in Egypt until an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him to take his family back to their homeland of Israel. They go, but Joseph learned that the ruler of Judea was Herod’s son and became afraid to take his family there. After another warning through a dream—another nightmare—he took his family to Galilee instead, where he and Mary raised their son in the remote, hidden village of Nazareth.

All this is also part of the Christmas story. But who wants to hear about a terrible king determined to kill a newborn boy or innocent children being slaughtered? It dispels the afterglow of the joy and peace of Christmas. We don’t want to think about such realities. There was a time when the lectionary passages for today skipped the verses about the massacre of the children and only included the scripture verses that reported the movement of the holy family.

We don’t want to think about this part of reality, and we wonder what all this tragic suffering says about God. The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus said the slaughter of the innocent children was why he was an agnostic. He asked, Why would God allow hundreds of babies to be killed so that God’s own son could go free? He said, No wonder Jesus didn’t avoid a cross. No wonder he seemingly walked toward it and accepted it passively. He had on his conscience all of those babies. We talk about Jesus dying for us. Well, there are a lot of babies who died for Jesus (Mark Trotter, “A Letter to My Grandson,” sermon preached at First United Methodist Church in San Diego, 27 December, 1992).

The thoughts of Camus are haunting. They raise disturbing questions. But we should not avoid the reality that surrounded the birth and life of Jesus. In the High Church tradition, either December 27 or 28 is Holy Innocents Day, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Middle Ages celebrated it as part of Christmastide, honoring the infants as the first Christian martyrs. The old Byzantine liturgy set the number killed at 14,000. The Syrian Church said there were 64,000. Some have used the cryptic numerology of the Book of Revelation to deduce that Herod killed 144,000. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, in his careful research, looked at the population of Bethlehem and the surrounding area and discovered the population was less than 1,000. With its birth rate and infant mortality rate he determined there were twenty children under two years old in Bethlehem (cited by John M. Buchanan in “Christmas Realism,” sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 31 December 1989).

Twenty is the number of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School a year ago this month. Thirteen is the number of those who earlier this morning were killed by a suicide bomber in Russia. Of course, the number is not important. Just one such death is too many. Violence is far too pervasive in our broken world.

As much as we may wish to avoid or deny it, this part of the story is one we know well. In fact, of all the characters in the Christmas story, Herod the King may be the one we recognize the most. His role carries out an all-too-familiar plot of those in political power who seek to retain their authority and control at all costs, even through destructive means. The world has had far too many political leaders whose rule included punishing, jailing, torturing, and killing those they deemed to be a threat. Herod had ten wives and at least fifteen children, some of whom also wanted to be king. Herod was a realist who did what he thought he had to do, which included executing three of his own children and one of his wives. So when Herod hears that a new king has been born, a new dynasty has come to replace his own, his decision to wipe out many precious children in the hopes of killing Jesus is consistent with his previous behavior to protect and prolong his own rule.

Such destruction is not God’s will. It exhibits the evil present in our world. Many of the tragedies in our world result from human sin. Jesus’ own death on the cross resulted from the same sinfulness. Theology professor George Stroup wrote in his book, Why Jesus Matters,

Human sin manifests itself in many forms, but its most devastating form is a self-centered life cut off from the world and other people. This virulent form of pride and selfishness feeds on fear, loves the darkness of isolation, and fears the bright light of truth. Pride and fear go hand in hand, and the one reality they cannot tolerate is their opposite—a love, derived from being loved by God, that seeks other people’s fulfillment and happiness. Jesus may have been executed because the leaders of the temple feared that he threatened public order, and the Romans may have crucified him because they feared that he posed a threat to their rule. But the real opposition Jesus encountered and that led to the cross was pride rooted in power and fueled by fear. . . . He was killed by a sinful world that hates what it fears, clings to established order, and cannot tolerate a love that exposes its pride and power to be contrary to what God intends for the world. (George W. Stroup, Why Jesus Matters, pp. 68–69)

“A sinful world that hates what it fears, clings to established order, and cannot tolerate a love that exposes its pride and power to be contrary to what God intends”: This is the force at the birth of Jesus that took the lives of other children. This is the force that took Jesus’ own life later on the cross. This is the force that is still tragically with us today.

We may ask what is God doing in the midst of all these nightmares, all this suffering? Professor Ed Barrett asked that question after he witnessed the killing of students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 with tanks ordered by their ruler. He gave his own answer: “What is God doing in this situation? Suffering, of course. But that is nothing new. The Lamb is at the center of the universe” (cited by John M. Buchanan in “Christmas Realism”).

Theologian Douglas John Hall wrote,

What Jesus as savior offers us is not immunity from despair . . . but his companionship in the dark night. He has been there. He knows the way. He knows that the darkness is not all there is, and that even at its blackest the darkness itself holds purpose. For without it we cannot distinguish the light, any more than we can distinguish true hope without brushing into despair, or true forgiveness without going still deeper into our guilt . . . or true, “abundant” life without a close encounter with death in its many guises. (Douglas John Hall, Why Christian? p. 60)

This part of the story of Jesus’ birth came most alive for me when my husband and I were living in Tucson, Arizona, in the mid-1980s. I was actively working with the sanctuary movement that provided safe haven for refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador who had fled the political torture and killing going on in their own homelands, where many of their own loved ones had “disappeared” at the hand of the government. In many ways, for them Christmas was a painful time as they missed their families and lived in a strange land, not knowing when or if they would ever return home. But what struck me most as I joined some of those refugees at a Christmas gathering was not their pain but how meaningful it was to them that Jesus knew all the tragedy they had known. They identified with him as someone who, from the time of his birth, had to flee from his own country for safety; as someone who grew up many years as a refugee, who had to exist outside the establishment and was a victim of the powerful. And like some of them, Jesus had to live with the terrible knowledge that others were killed in the regime’s attempts to destroy him.

Our Savior is not someone who just shows us what God is like from a remote distance. Our Savior is one who bears what we bear. Our Savior is Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Word made flesh. Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. As Douglas John Hall, wrote, “The incarnation means God’s participation in our life, God’s identification with us, God’s sharing our creaturely conditions, our ‘flesh’—the first stage in recognizing Jesus as ‘Savior’ (liberator, rescuer, deliverer, Messiah, Christ) is recognizing him as one who is there with you, where you are, in the particularity of your life” (Douglas John Hall, Why Christian? p. 52–53).

This abiding presence of God in our lives is precisely what gives our lives meaning, even in the midst of nightmares. The reality that God is with us, regardless of our situation, dispels the gnawing anxiety we carry when we feel our lives have no purpose. Dag Hammarskjöld, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote years ago in his journal:

What I ask for is absurd: that life shall have a meaning.
What I strive for is impossible: that my life shall acquire a meaning.
I dare not believe, I do not see how I shall ever be able to believe:
that I am not alone.
(Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings p. 86)

But then, sometime later, he wrote this journal entry: “I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal” (Hammarskjöld, p. 205).

Our lives have meaning because we are not alone. Jesus has come into the world as our savior, and calls us to give our lives to work for peace on earth and goodwill to all. Jesus comes into our world as one of us, sharing in all that we experience, all human pleasures and hurts. Jesus comes into our world as a new ruler, whom death cannot conquer, bringing in God’s reign by transforming the hearts of humankind. As the whole world comes to know that we all are loved by God, no one will have reason to feel threatened: “Perfect love casts our fear” (1 John 4:18). We will turn from destructive ways, and peace will indeed come on earth. In the fullness of God’s reign, there will be no more wailing and lamentation, nor parents weeping for their children. As the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, “The wolf shall live with the lamb. . . . They will not hurt of destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” So even beyond these twelve days of Christmas, we have reason to sing “Joy to the World.”