Just a few days later, the needles are falling, the poinsettias are drooping, and the cookies are stale. How do we hold onto the feeling? How do we hold onto the warmth, the wonder, the welcome of Christmas?
- Christmas letters - offering graceful glimpses of old friends;
- That rare mother/daughter afternoon, creating the most perfect Christmas of our lives;
- American soldiers sharing Christmas with war-scarred children;
- Virginia neighbors sharing love with a Pentagon widow;
- A Christmas pageant, so full of joy and giggles and energy, that I know God was smiling;
- A rippling harp lifting human voices to heaven;
- That sea of candles, shimmering with hope and memory, in the dark womb of this sanctuary.
Yes, my friends, if we try, we can hold onto the feelings, the images, the memories. But we will need to struggle to let this fresh incarnation, this tangible, touchable God carry us through the rest of the year. For the way things really are has already come crashing down upon us. This morning, before the baby has even digested his first decent meal, the gospel writer has us running - fleeing from danger and death and despair. Yes, Matthew forces us to deal with the rest of the Christmas story. And the reality is that the incarnation of good, of God, leads quickly to the incarnation of evil - not only 2,000 years ago, but today, here, now.
The slaughter of the innocents is one of the most unsavory stories in all scripture. In fact, for years the appointed lectionary passage for this first Sunday after Christmas intentionally left out verses 16-18, the actual murder of all the baby boys under two who lived near Bethlehem. The lectionary scholars assumed that our delicate Christian constitutions just couldn't deal with the raw evil of Herod. But, let's face it. Since our daily newspapers regularly report the slaughter of innocents all over the world, why should we pretend that Jesus is immune from such terror? Just substitute the name Hitler or McVeigh or bin Laden or Hussein for the name Herod, and you have a thoroughly modern tale of murder and slaughter and hatred.
Several years ago, in Bethlehem, the following version of "O Little Town Of Bethlehem" was sung (written by an American from Littleton, Colorado, and circulated on the internet):
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;
Above thy deep and restless sleep, a missile glideth by;
And over dark streets soundeth, the mortar's deadly roar;
While children weep in shallow sleep, for friends who are no more ...
O sing for wholly innocents, who hurled a hopeless stone.
Who ran from tank, who, wounded, sank in gutters all alone.
Their eyes by bullets blinded, their lungs by gasses burned
In sad exile, the Holy Child knows Herod has returned.
- Don Hinchey
Of course, such pain and destruction and despair could also be echoed by Jewish teenagers bleeding in Tel Aviv, by children rendered fatherless in the ashes of Ground Zero, by starving Christians dying in the Sudan, by hungry, haunted mothers, homeless in Afghanistan or Liberia. Refugees and victims of violence do not wear just one political brand, or bear one national identity. They speak every language. They worship every name of God. They bleed out of every color body. For we human beings are imperfect creatures; no country or creed or political system is completely righteous; all corners of God's fragile world are broken and incomplete. And it is into this reality - this brokenness and imperfection and sin - that Jesus has been born. He comes not to escape the tribulation, but to enter it with us, and to love us and this world into wholeness.
In his eloquent oratorio "For the Time Being" the poet W. H. Auden has a section called "The Flight to Egypt." Amid leftovers and dismantled trees, broken ornaments and bored children, Auden remembers "... the Stable where for once in our lives / Everything became a You and nothing was an It." Yes, he remembers those moments just a few days ago when the ordinary was suffused with divine glory - and God and creation were one. Auden, then, goes on to bemoan our lack of imagination, for "... we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more than entertain it as an agreeable Possibility." Instead, we are left with the Time Being - the in between time - between the birth of Christ and the completion of Christ - which "... Is, in a sense, the most trying time of all ... a tired, tawdry, tedious time, where the streets seem narrower, the office more depressing ... a time when we must pay the bills, repair the machines, learn irregular verbs." And the challenge is clear. We, as the remnant of God's grace on earth, must figure our how to redeem this Time Being - this present time, how to "redeem it from Insignificance." Yes, when the Herods of this earth strike terror, when danger and anxiety drive us into the exile of Egypt, when the birth has turned from wonder into hard work, when, according to Auden, our "souls must endure God's Silence," how do we hold onto the star, the promise, the holy innocence of God, alive and fresh, in our midst?
As is so often the case, the ordinary folk in scripture are the ones who show us the way. And today, it is Mary and Joseph and an ancient matriarch named Rachel, who model faithfulness for us. They invite us to weep. They invite us to dream. And they invite us to trust. Yes, first they invite us to weep. For it is in our emotion and our empathy that we feel God's heart beat. Then they invite us to dream. For it is in the intuition and imagination of our minds that we most clearly hear God speak. And, finally, they invite us to trust, for it is in the offering of our lives, unfettered by anxiety, that we find the grace of God.
The allusion to weeping in Matthew's story is an obscure one. Tradition suggests that Rachel, Jacob's second wife who died long ago in childbirth, was buried near Bethlehem. And centuries later, when the people of Israel were dragged into exile - refugees cut off from all that was precious in their lives - it was then that Rachel was heard weeping from her grave, mourning the pain of loss and failure and despair, which seems to be at the heart of every human story. And so it is today as Jesus, the embodiment of the new Israel, is again exiled, dragged into oblivion and danger by the very real evil of a very real world. Again Rachel weeps and invites us to weep with her, acknowledging the way things really are and discovering a God who holds us while we weep - a God who holds us and comforts us and yes, weeps, inconsolably, with us.
Sometime in the 1980s, a group of psychotherapists were meeting in New York to learn about Carl Jung's theory of dream analysis. As part of the symposium, real dreams were described, and then a panel of experts, including Carl Jung's grandson, dissected and discussed the meanings of the dreams. One of the horrific dreams described that day was a recurring image in which the dreamer was stripped of all human dignity and subjected to Nazi atrocities. Immediately, the audience began to formulate their own theories and symbolic explanations of the dream, while waiting for the experts to respond. But the response of the panel was unexpected. Instead of analyzing the dream, Jung's grandson asked the audience to stand. And then, he invited them to remain standing in silence. As one analyst explained, "... there is in life a suffering so unspeakable, a vulnerability so extreme that it goes far beyond ... explanations and even beyond healing. In the face of such suffering all we can do is bear witness so no one need suffer alone."1
So, the first thing we are invited to do today is to weep - to weep for all the innocents of all times who are slaughtered in God's world. We are called to honor their pain with the pain of our own hearts. But the second thing we are invited to do is to dream - to listen to our dreams of life as well as our dreams of death. Yes, after we weep for the way things really are, we can, we must, imagine the way things can be. We, like Joseph, must pay attention to our dreams, for dreams, like tears, are the voice of God. It was in a dream that God explained to Joseph the importance of the baby that Mary was carrying. It was in a dream that Joseph was warned to go to Egypt - fleeing from the infamy of Herod's sword. And it was in a dream that Joseph was told that it was time to return - to return to the familiarity of his hometown of Nazareth.
Which leaves us with some questions. Today, in the dangers, the deserts, the dreary places of your life, where are your dreams? What are your dreams? And who are you in those dreams? Not just the dreams of deep sleep, but the daydreams that dance around the edges of your daily life? Learn this day from Joseph. Learn to listen to your dreams. To honor your dreams. To trust your dreams. To follow your dreams. To make your dreams come true. For the very life and innocence of our living God depends on it. Yes, the rest of the Christmas story depends on you and depends on me - depends on all of us - weeping and dreaming and trusting, returning to life as usual but with a hope that is unusual - returning to the way things really are, but with the courage to redeem this Time Being from insignificance.
Years ago King George V sent this New Year's blessing to his British subjects:
I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
Give me a light that I might go safely out into the darkness.
And he replied, Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be more to you than a light and safer than a known way.2
Weeping. Dreaming. Trusting. With our hands in the hand of God. My friends, this is the safe way - the known way - the way to redeem this time - to redeem our time for significance and for salvation in God's name.
May it be so - for you and for me. Amen.
1. R. Remen, My Grandfather's Blessing (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000), p. 105.
2. Ibid., p. 376.