Epiphany Sunday, January 4, 2015 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Lessons Learned

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–14
Isaiah 60:1–6
Matthew 2:1–12, 16

There is a time to be born and a time to die.
And this is a time to be born.
So we turn to you, God of our life,
God of all our years,
God of our beginning.
Our times are in your hand.
. . .
Give us the power to be receptive,
to take the newness you give,
to move from womb warmth to real life.
. . .
There is a time to be born, and it is now.
We sense the pangs and groans of your newness.
Come here now in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann
“There Is a Time to Be Born, and It Is Now”

I am not sure if you know it, but congregations teach pastors. I know that my ecclesiastical title is teaching elder, meaning that part of my vocation is to teach you, but I wonder if you know that you, congregation folk, teach us pastor-people, too.

I can easily look back on the three congregations I have previously served and sum up what each one taught me. My first pastorate taught me how the small, day-to-day things we pastors say and do can have a lingering influence, so I always need to tread gently and when I don’t, apologize.

My second congregation taught me the beauty and difficulty of living as a diverse family of faith who is bound and determined to stick together, no matter how messy it gets.

My last congregation taught me the joy of ministry and helped me claim the freedom just to be myself and to let go of any idealized caricatures of what a pastor is supposed to be.

And even after just eight months, I already know you have a lot to teach me, as well, and I’ll try to be open to learning it. Sometimes I will do that well; other times I won’t. We will just be patient with each other as we go, all of us teaching and all of us learning.

I tell you this because I want to share with you another lesson one of my congregations taught me one Christmas Eve. I had been at the church for a few years and had journeyed through several Advent–Christmas seasons already with them, so it was time to shake things up and to try some new things. In particular, I felt nudged to help all of us remember the connections between Advent and Lent, Christmas and Easter, the manger and the cross. So the lay liturgists and I highlighted those connections in a variety of ways throughout the Advent season, but it all culminated on Christmas Eve.

Now all through Advent, as we sang the last hymn each Sunday, people brought fabric from their homes up into the chancel and placed them in a wooden manger we had sitting by the communion table. It was a symbolic way for everyone—from the youngest to the oldest—to prepare for Jesus’ birth. Together we were making offerings and getting Jesus’ bed ready. By Christmas Eve, the manger was overflowing with a variety of colorful fabric and quilt squares, ready and waiting for the arrival of the baby.

We had the manger sitting near the Communion table because our Christmas Eve service always included receiving Communion before lighting the candles. So that year, on Christmas Eve afternoon, after the members of the worship committee had prepared the bread and the juice and left the sanctuary, I went in to finish the preparation. I took the loaf of bread off of the table, wrapped it up in a receiving blanket, and then laid it in the close-by, carefully prepared manger.

No one realized what I had done and I wanted to keep it that way. It was to be a moment of liturgical drama. And that night, after the carols had been sung, the homily had been preached, and all was ready, I deliberately walked over to the manger as I began to issue the invitation to the table. And taking the loaf of bread into my arms, I rocked it, like I did daily with my very young children at home.

As I did so, I noticed some confused looks on people’s faces, but they stayed with me. They had gotten used to doing different things in worship, and it usually worked out well, so they trusted me. But on this night, their confusion turned to sheer horror as I began reciting the words of institution while unwrapping the bread from the blanket. Then, at the appropriate time, I raised the baby-turned-communion-bread high above my head and broke it. I heard audible gasps.

That liturgical act proved to be just too much for some of my members. It was the only time I have ever seen looks of honest anger and real disappointment reflected back to me during Christmas Eve worship. As someone told me later, “Shannon, we love you, but breaking the baby was over the top. You could have made your point a different way. Please don’t do that ever again.”

I must admit I was naively surprised by their reaction. After all, the theological foundation of that act was solid. The manger is most definitely connected to the cross. The baby Jesus grows up and is killed. I knew the theology of what I did that night was spot on and the liturgical drama was unforgettable, if I do say so myself. And yet my church member had a valid point. I could have expressed that theological truth in a different way, in a gentler way, in a way that gave them a place to stand and didn’t force them into a corner. That Texas congregation taught me you don’t mess with the baby at Christmas. No one wants to think about the baby being broken, especially not on Christmas Eve. There is a time and a place for everything, and apparently that was not it. It is a lesson I have not forgotten.

But no one must have taught that lesson to our Gospel writer, Matthew. No one must have told him that it was just too much to link the manger with the cross, the baby with the crucified one. For while Luke’s version of the birth story is the one abounding with the colorful details of the babe lying in a manger, angel choirs singing, and shepherds searching, Matthew’s version of the birth story and the time immediately after is a bit darker, more emotionally ominous.

We see it in our reading for today, right here in the beginning of chapter 2. And though I originally planned on preaching Epiphany and focusing on the magi, as I prepared for this sermon I got stuck on the first phrase of the first sentence: “In the time of King Herod . . .” I got caught in those words, wondering why Matthew was painstakingly pointing out that Jesus’ birth happened precisely in the days of King Herod. Perhaps it was to show us, as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan write, that the shadow of Roman imperial execution hangs already and immediately over the birth of Jesus (Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas, p. 138). Or to put it another way, “the cutthroat politics that led to Jesus’ death were amply present at his birth” (Debra Dean Murphy, “Nativity Politics,” www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2014/12/nativity-politics/).

Now to understand these cutthroat politics more fully, let’s remember just who this King Herod, or Herod the Great, fellow was. If we turn to ancient historical writings, in particular from the Jewish historian Josephus, we find all kinds of stories that give us insight into King Herod’s character. We learn King Herod was a jealous ruler who was highly motivated by fear and rage. For example, he executed his favorite wife, his brother-in-law, and three of his sons because he thought they wanted his crown. Then King Herod figured that when the time came that he himself died, the Israelite people would be so glad to get rid of both him and his taxes that they would throw a big party just to spite him. The King was infuriated by that idea. Therefore he left an order that on the day of his death, political prisoners throughout the land should be killed (R. Alan Culpepper, “Matthew 2:13–23,” Feasting on the Word, p. 167). That way, he guaranteed that everyone would be in mourning on the day of his death and no one would be celebrating. (Side note: the order was not followed.)

But that, my friends, is a picture of Herod the Great. He was unarguably a force of evil who did not think twice about destroying anyone who might be a threat to his power, regardless if they were family, friend, or foe. It was just the cost of doing business. If he had to break the baby, so be it. He would do whatever he had to do to be the king, to keep his power. And Matthew wanted to make sure that we knew this was the political and historical space into which Jesus, our Savior, our baby King, was born.

And once we move through that first phrase of our story for today, we continue to see the danger of Herod’s politics of domination. In today’s story of the magi, we watch as Herod raises his national threat level to code red after meeting them and hearing their story. I cannot even imagine the way his blood pressure must have risen when the magi asked him where was the child who had been born King of the Jews. “King of the Jews?!,” he must have thought. He was King of the Jews. That is what Rome declared, and that was the way it would forever be. Matthew articulates the emotionally ominous shockwaves of his response by writing, “When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.”

Following the normal way power works in our world, the king responded to his own fear not with a spirit of openness and courage, but by holding on to his power even more tightly and deciding to do whatever was necessary to keep it. After all, he had killed his own family members in response to this kind of a threat. Breaking a baby would be easy. So when Herod learned later that the magi had purposefully chosen to avoid him on their way back home, he retaliated in a way that was normal for him. He ordered all children two years old and under who lived in or around Bethlehem to be eliminated.

Therefore, according to Matthew’s Gospel, the Christmas season in Bethlehem, the season we still celebrate for a few more days, was not a time of “Silent Night” or “Joy to the World,” but a time still lived in the days of King Herod, a time of deep grief, heartbreak, and terror. That is the time, Matthew says, into which Jesus was born. That is the time into which God’s Light came into the world.

From the way Matthew tells the story, it seems to me he was even more bound and determined than I to make sure we all remembered the links between Advent and Lent, Christmas and Easter, the manger and the cross. Perhaps he wanted to make sure we know that even in God’s story, the story that claims our lives, Christmas and danger, or Christmas and pain, are not very far apart. Sometimes, they are even part of the same storyline.

But why would this be important for Matthew to convey? Why mess up the Christmas story with all that threat and pain? Was it indeed simply to foreshadow what was to come for Jesus—to offer a hint of the end, here in the beginning? Or might it have also been something else that prompted Matthew’s decision to include the heartache along with the angel songs?

As that question sat in my mind, I looked around this week: And hidden amongst the holiday celebrations and vacation days, I found the story about the Episcopal bishop in Baltimore involved in the fatal hit and run. And I saw the pain on the faces of those whose loved ones died in the AirAsia flight that crashed into the Java Sea. And a friend of mine in California posted on Facebook that another clergyperson had taken his own life, making that the third clergy suicide I’ve personally known about in the last couple of months. And on New Year’s Day, I visited with a woman who was staying in a domestic violence shelter up on the North Side. And we received lots of calls at the church asking for help with rent as the year came to a close. And my former seminary president, Steve Hayner, wrote on his blog it was time he went into hospice care because the cancer was all over his body. And with all of those things held in my heart and being interwoven with the story of Jesus’ birth, I began to wonder if perhaps Matthew wrote it this way because he knew that in many ways, we still live in the days of King Herod. We still live in that space of already but not yet, when we trust and sometimes we even see and deeply feel that the light has come into the world, yet we also know the shadows still linger.

We still live in the time when, more often than not, powerful people or nations who feel threatened lash out in violence and hold on to their power as tightly as they can. We still live in a time when we, as a church, need to have a “Longest Night” service, a Christmas service in the middle of December designed for people who are grieving or lonely or who just feel afloat, those for whom the holidays are not happy and joyful, but hard and sad.

For many people, maybe for most people, even though it is Christmastime and the beginning of a brand new year, it is still a Christmas born into the days of King Herod, when all is not yet well and we know it. It was like that when Jesus was born; it was like that for Matthew’s church; and it is like that for us. So maybe, in addition to foreshadowing what was to come for Jesus, Matthew also just wanted to lift up the reality that so often Christmas and threat, or Christmas and pain, are not very far apart at all, are sometimes even part of the same storyline and even a part of God’s storyline.

Perhaps that is why Matthew wrote the story the way he did. He must have felt it would be important for us to see and realize that Christmas, the birth of Jesus, is not just about God coming to be with us in the middle of joyful celebrations. Rather, by inserting “the days of King Herod” into Jesus’ birth narrative every chance he got, Matthew wanted to make sure we would see and realize that Christmas is also about God coming into the midst of the worst places, into the most dangerous of times, and into the most painful circumstances of life in order to share in the suffering, to share in the tragedy, to share in the sorrows with us, beside us.

Perhaps by highlighting that Jesus was born in the time of King Herod, Matthew was pointing out that the message of Christmas, the message of Emmanuel, the promise of incarnation, God becoming flesh, is not “I have come to save you from suffering and pain,” but rather, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” I am with you always, even in the days of King Herod and I will be with you always until those days are finally over.” Matthew wanted to remind us that our baby Savior was born in the time of King Herod and into all that implies, so we might trust that our God has honestly entered into all of it, in order to embrace all of it, all of us, with holiness and love and solidarity.

Thanks be to God. For if Jesus had not been born into the days of King Herod, into times full of both struggle and joy, sorrow and grief, threat and love, his name Emmanuel, God with us, might ring hollow. So while I promise you I won’t ever again break the baby on Christmas Eve, I still thank God for all it means: Lo, I am with you always, no matter what. Perhaps that’s a lesson for all of us to learn together. Amen.