How Shall I Rise in Brightness? A Christmas Sermon

     At long last and with great joy, we say, Merry Christmas! Joy to the world, the Lord is come and we celebrate and rejoice. After the long and cold weeks of waiting through the season of Advent, where we focused on the small but potent image of the seeds of promise – the seeds of Hope, and Peace, and Joy and Love – we’ve come to the season of Christmas.

He is born the holy child
Play the oboe and the bagpipes merrily!
He is born the holy child
Sing we all of the Savior mild.
    (French 18^th century)

    With lights and songs, with gifts and feasting, with laughter and family, we’ve come together, in our own homes and in our own ways, to celebrate the joy and wonder of this day, to celebrate the gift of God, redemption and salvation from heaven. The word became flesh and lived among us. And we have seen his glory – the light that shines into every darkness. Praise God and celebrate, amen!

    I want to say more about the festivities and the celebration. I want us to linger in the light and laughter, and love of this day but we cannot. I’m sorry. Our scripture reading for this morning sends us wham and whiplash into terror and screaming and slaughter. We are dragged from delight into danger. We are dragged from the light back into the darkness.

    After the departure of the magi, who’d come to give homage to infant prophesied to be the King of the Jews, King Herod realized that he had been fooled. The wise men did not return to him to tell him what they had found and where. And he furious, full of wrath. He sent his soldiers to kill all the youngling boys in Bethlehem.

    In some Byzantine liturgies, we are told that Herod’s soldiers slaughtered some 14,000 of Israel’s sons. In a Syrian text the number is 64,000. In some medieval texts the number is expanded to 144,000 to match those martyrs of Israel described in the book of Revelation, sealed and preserved by God. But these are unnecessary embellishments. Bethlehem in the first century was little more than a hamlet, a few miles south of Jerusalem. The number of slaughtered innocents could scarcely have been more than 20 at most. (Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 204) But even twenty is an incalculable tragedy. One slaughtered innocent is too many to endure.

    Saint Augustine called these murdered children “the Church’s first blossoms, matured by the frost of persecution during the cold winter of unbelief.”

    We have no historical evidence of this cruelty. Josephus, the Jewish historian of those times, doesn’t mention it. There is no other contemporary account of the slaughter outside of the book of Matthew. But it certainly fits within what we know from other historical records of King Herod’s character. He was a murderous and vengeful king, who was fearful and paranoid and willing to have even members of his own family killed in order to keep his grasp on the throne of Israel. He ordered the deaths of chief priests and scribes and members of the Sanhedrin, as well as his own brother, his own sister and her husband, three of his sons, and his beloved wife Mariam. And years later, when he was ill and knew that he was about to die he ordered that several prominent Jewish leaders be rounded up and executed at the moment of his death, so that the people of Jerusalem would have reason to mourn his passing.

    It’s a story that leaves us uncomfortable – and it should. There’s no historical record of the slaughter of the boys in and around Bethlehem. And we certainly don’t sing about it. Not often anyway. We have hundreds – even thousands of Christmas carols, songs, and hymns but how many of them are about this part of the Christmas story? The Coventry Carol is somewhat familiar

    Herod the King, in his raging,
    Charged he hath this day,
    his men of might
    in his own sight
    all young children to slay.

    Then woe is me, poor child for thee
    and ever mourn and say
    for thy parting
    neither say nor sing
    by, by, lully, lullay.
        (English 16^th century)

    But that might be the only one that most people know. After a bit of digging around I found a Catalan carol entitled El Rei Herodes.

    One day Joseph resting, the Child by his side
    heard shouting and tumult that evil betide;
    The wicked King Herod has made a decree
    for soldiers to kill ev’ry infant they see.
        (Catalan Traditional)

    There are a few others, but not many – and none that are a part of our usual Christmas festivities. We are reluctant to sing of this cruelty. We rarely bring it to mind. We sing of the angels, and the shepherds, and the star, and the magi. We sing of Joseph and Mary. We sing of wassail and figgy pudding. We sing of holly and ivy. We sing about partridges and pear trees and the whole assorted list. But the slaughter of innocent children by a mad bastard of a king – no. We rarely sing of that.

    The Slaughter of the Innocents

    When the solders came with sharpened swords
    obeying orders from a paranoid and murderous king
    the holy family fled across the sands to a pagan land.
    Mothers screamed into the silent starry night
    as their tiny infants bled out and died.
    Rachel weeping for her children would not be comforted.

    When heavy booted soldiers come again with rifles and grenades
    obeying orders as patriotic soldiers always do,
    when refugees flee across barb-wire borders
    when innocents are crushed beneath the rubble
    when mothers scream into satellite skies
    how will they be comforted?

    Matthew connects the story of Herod’s slaughter with a text from the prophet Jeremiah

    “A voice was heard in Rama,
    weeping and much grieving.
    Rachel weeping for her children,
    and she did not want to be comforted
    because they were no more.”

    How dare we sing of Santa in the face of that grief? How dare we sing of flying reindeer, and magic snowmen and all the other innocuous traditions of the holiday when Mother Rachel is crying out for her dead children?

    And she is still crying even today. Still refusing to be comforted for her dead children. Her weeping has not been stilled; her grief has not be silenced. She is weeping in the face of war in the Ukraine. She is screaming against the genocide in Gaza. She is keening in Cambodia and Thailand after another explosion. She is shrieking after every mass shooting in the United States. In the gospel story, Mary and Joseph take the infant Jesus and flee into the safety of Egypt. The immigrant family, refugees from horror and death. But immigrants and refugees still face that horror here and now.

    How shall I rise in brightness while Mother Rachel weeps?

    There is no magic escape here. There is no hallmark happy ending. The children are slaughtered. Mary, Joseph and Jesus flee into the night, barely escaping the violence themselves. They traverse across desert terrain to the relative safety of a foreign land until they hear that Herod the King has finally died himself.

    But take comfort there. Tyrants die. Their power is not forever. Their empires crumble. Their thrones are pulled down in disgrace.

    And we sing the songs of despair. Lament is not faithlessness. Lament is resistance to tyranny. We refuse to normalize the slaughter. We refuse to accept the violence. We refuse to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to Mother Rachel still weeping today in every land, across every border.

    This mystery of glory
    that joy and pain come mixed
    is like frankincense perfume,
    a bittersweet fragrance.
    O Lord of light and glory
    bright shining star of dawn
    the myrrh that anoints in death
    gives way to heaven’s gold.

    Jesus, the word of God become flesh and living among us, inhabits the lowly plains of this dark world with us. God with us. God with the mothers of Ukraine. God with the mothers in Gaza and Thailand and Cambodia and in a hundred other places. God inhabits our tragedy with us. God is here, the light that shines into every darkness.

    We will sing another couple of hymns this morning. We will pray our prayers and go back to our lives. Back to our homes. And we will go back to the joy and celebration of Christmas. And we should. This is indeed a time to celebrate and merry – even if that delight is mixed with pain and grief. Sing the songs of joy. Sing the songs of woe. God hears them all.

    How Shall I Rise in Brightness

    How shall I rise in brightness
    while mother Rachel weeps?
    And how accept the gifts
    of magi from the east?
    O Lord of light and glory,
    bright shining star of dawn,
    bring light to those in darkness,
    bring light to all our hearts.

    This mystery of glory
    that joy and pain come mixed
    is like frankincense perfume,
    a bittersweet fragrance.
    O Lord of light and glory
    bright shining star of dawn
    the myrrh that anoints in death
    gives way to heaven’s gold.