The Tragedy of Christmas

“The Tragedy of Christmas” Jason D. Whitt DaySpring Baptist Church January 1, 2017

Welcome to 2017. Welcome to a new year with all the hope and excitement that it brings—the promise of a new beginning and the expectation that things must get better. If internet memes are to be believed, then certainly we can’t get 2016 behind us fast enough. The list of losses was long. Pioneers, entertainers, leaders … and for many of us, far more personal. There were terrible events. Life changing moments. And even the bizarre (an election featuring the two most polarizing, least-liked candidates in American history). Just before Christmas, a friend texted me to tell me that Manny’s had closed. My friend and I went there every week for lunch. I texted to my wife, “2016! What more can you take from me?” And then Princess Leia died. I read that someone had started an online fund to protect Betty White through the end of the year. If we were a church that used screens, I would love to show the video of 2016 made into a horror movie. It is safe to say that 2017 couldn’t come soon enough. May put this into the category of “It can’t possibly be worse than this.”

It seemed that 2016 refused to go out with a whimper, but continued to offer its challenges right up to the end. As many of you know, we spent Christmas in the hospital with Camille. It wasn’t the greeting card kind of holiday that has been set as the standard for the season. Maggie and I were trading nights at the hospital, going between Waco and Fort Worth. I realized suddenly that we would be one of those families that you see on the news when the Christmas day fluff pieces come out on how various groups try to bring holiday cheer to children in the hospital. We were now one of those families.

One of the kindnesses of the staff was to move those of us who weren’t going to be discharged and would be there for a while to rooms with a view. We could look out our 4th floor window onto the entry to the hospital. It was festive with trees wrapped in dancing lights of shifting colors, garland wrapping light poles, and a giant Christmas tree with a gleaming star greeting everyone who drove up. As I sat on Christmas Eve looking out the window at the twinkling lights, I was struck that behind me my daughter lay in bed also surrounded by twinkling lights. Interestingly, they were the reds and greens of Christmas, and offered their own mocking holiday adornment to the room.

There is a certain timelessness to a hospital room. When you stay for any amount of time, you begin to realize that you inhabit an unchanging now. There is no movement or change signifying the progression of time. 2:30 in the afternoon feels no different than 11:45 at night. The only real change is the turnover of nurses from one shift to the next. But even they seem hardly any different. I began to realize that this is what “interminable” describes.

1 Christmas was just another shift change. This was not a Norman Rockwell picture with presents around the Christmas tree, a big family meal, laughter, lights, and all that has come to mark the expected Christmas celebration. It was simply more of the same. And with the same were the fears for what was and what might still be coming.

The longer we stayed in the room the more I came to the realization that this was the experience of many: lives marked by fear, hurting, heartache, violence, hunger … a winter where Christmas never comes and the changing of the calendar offers nothing new.

With all this in mind, the lectionary points us to Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus. This isn’t Luke’s Christmas story. Luke has a holy family, a silent night, angels proclaiming peace and shepherds keeping watch. Matthew is restrained. Mary is pregnant. Joseph is told not to ditch her. Then the baby is born in Bethlehem and named Jesus. That’s what we get. That and wise men. And Herod.

At least one of Matthew’s goals is to explain that all that’s happening with Jesus is to fulfill the prophecy of the Old Testament. This is the one promised from of old. This one is who scripture has been pointing to all along. But Matthew also needs us to see what this birth really means. He needs us to see the world into which Emmanuel is born. They make Christmas cards with the wise men on them, and nice quotes about the wise still seeking. They don’t make cards about what follows. What Matthew makes sure we see… what happens when the wise men leave, don’t go back to Herod, and Herod is frustrated in his desire to eliminate the one born king of the Jews who might challenge his position.

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

None of the other Gospel writers record this event, and there doesn’t seem to be any contemporary record of such a massacre, but it also isn’t out of character for Herod. And really, why would any contemporary chronicler bother recording it. Perhaps 20 or so children killed in an unknown village on the edge of a vast empire? This would hardly be a blip in the grand scheme of events taking place. Their deaths meant nothing to what really mattered.

But Matthew doesn’t let this tragedy go unnoticed.

2 Matthew tells us, of course, that the child is saved because Joseph obeys God’s message and flees to Egypt with his family. It also fulfills the prophecy that the child will be called out of Egypt to his work.

But here is where Christmas collides with the harsh realities of the world. Jesus is saved, but he is born into a world where children are still killed because others seek power. Matthew allows none of the saccharine sentimentality that we often associate with Christmas. This is the world Jesus enters, and it remains so still. 2016 brought us enough news and images of the ways in which children still suffer at the hands of powerful forces that can’t even see them. Images of children of Aleppo. Iraq. Sudan. Chicago. And how many other places? Children dying of hunger, violence, neglect. Disease. The world into which Jesus appeared continues in its ways. And like the children of Bethlehem, more often than not, their suffering and deaths don’t even make the evening news.

“Don’t be surprised,” Matthew seems to say. Even this he tells us is to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

Perhaps most striking in this word is the refusal of consolation. Rachel as the personification of Israel, really of all mothers, those in Bethlehem who have seen their children killed with no recourse to justice, weeps. There is no end to her grief. And there’s nothing to be said that will make it right. There is no reason. They are no more because they were literally born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What does Christmas mean for this grief? What offer does the turning of the calendar hold for them? Or the voices of Aleppo. Sudan. Iraq. Chicago. Waco. All the places where voices are lifted in lament for lives that are no more because we have a world that too often seems determined by violence, brokenness, disease, hunger, and loss. Suffering seems ever present for so many.

These are the places and events, the moments of life where time seems to stop. An interminable now with no possible end to be seen. It’s hospital rooms, but it’s also city streets, war torn countries, cancer diagnoses, lonely rooms, and empty cupboards. It’s all these places and more where Christmas is simply one more day.

Jesus is born into a world where children die because they are simply in the way of those who are powerful and fear any loss of their power. They die because of hunger. They die because of disease. They die because of what they have done and what has been done to them.

And here’s the really hard thing about that: the birth of Jesus didn’t change it. The savior of the world comes, and Herod kills children to protect his throne. And as we celebrated Christmas, families still wept for their lost children. They still fled from 3 violence and warfare. They hoped for cure for disease. And they sat in hospital rooms and kept their vigil.

As I sat in my daughter’s hospital room during Christmas, I began to wonder about how we make sense of the world. What stories we tell. I have for many years taught on disability and how we understand what it means to be human. Deeply rooted in my own conviction is that Camille is exactly as God created her to be. It is only the world’s story that values the ability to do and produce, that affirms earthly power and gain, that measures her life and finds it faulty.

Yet, my conviction bumps up against the reality that despite our best efforts as parents, her life still has more suffering than most people will ever experience. Watching her hurt for over two weeks was terrible. How is such suffering to be accounted for? I began to realize more than I had before that our experience wasn’t singular, but was shared with millions around the world who every day encounter suffering as a constant reality.

What the coming of Christ allows is the possibility of speaking truthfully about the world. We might offer true lament. Our grief and anger are protests against the suffering because we know this isn’t the world as God intends. It is a world that does need a savior. Matthew refused to let the killing of children go unacknowledged as one more instance of what “just happens” in the world. Jesus was born into such a world where children were killed and in a world where it still happens. Even more, because Jesus came as one of us, we may not only say that this is the world, but it isn’t as it should be.

Christ’s nativity challenges the story the world tells as a false story. All children are to be welcomed as lives that matter. Violence is not the basis of our world, but it is the peacemakers who are blessed. The poor, the forgotten, the weak and powerless all have infinite worth.

Matthew never weaves the killing of the children into the Gospel story. He tells us Jeremiah warned that this would happen, but their deaths are never given purpose. They died because a tyrant was fearful of losing power. But Joseph escaped with his family. There’s no greater good for their deaths, and this, perhaps more than any other reason, is why the voices of lament refuse to be consoled. There are no words that will make sense of what has happened. Matthew doesn’t let us off that easily.

Matthew can tell this story, must tell this story, because he has already told us that the child who is born is Emmanuel, “God with us.” God has not abandoned us to this world. Therein lies our hope. But it isn’t a hope that if we just have faith, all goes smoothly, diseases are healed, bullets and bombs land elsewhere, and tragedy never happens. This isn’t the gospel.

God is with us in this and all things. He has not removed himself from our world, but has entered it himself, sharing the flesh and blood of our lives.

4 The writer of Hebrews reminds us that the savior who brings salvation was perfected through suffering. Jesus entered the life we live to embrace the fullness of human being. Because he endured suffering, he is able to serve as the merciful high priest who is with us in our own suffering. And here we discover that this is enough. In the midst of despair, with the heartache of loss and deep suffering, we are met by the God who is with us. But this is no cheap thing. He can meet us because he himself has suffered as we suffer. This is the mystery of Christmas: that God remains present with us where there seems to be no hope beyond.

Even more, because the one born is the savior of the world, we do lament the tragedy. Rachel weeps for her lost children because this isn’t the way the world is to be. Christ’s coming offers a new story, or rather, a way of telling the story truthfully. We cry, we protest injustice, we hold out a different picture of the world as it could be because in Christ we know that God isn’t finished.

The birth of Jesus doesn’t put an end to the sufferings of this world. The coming of the King doesn’t yet set aside all tyrants, or all those who grasp at power. They still cause suffering and injustice in a world that longs to be otherwise.

But Christ’s coming does create a people who witness to a different way of living. Because we have seen a vision of God’s kingdom, we can see clearly to name the places and actions that are contrary to the way the world was made to be. We can name suffering for what it is. We can walk with one another through suffering, and embody a life that is marked by mercy and compassion.

Matthew demands that we see the world as it is. By not allowing the deaths of children at the hands of the worldly powers to be ignored, he points to a right seeing that God’s presence opens for us. Because we have seen the vision of God’s kingdom and his righteousness, our eyes are opened to the many ways in which our world isn’t. Too often these are ways that we simply accept as how things are.

But the challenge is that our sight is always limited. Even as we begin to name injustice in one direction, we become blind to the ways in which our own lives are short of who we are called to be. Matthew notes that when the wise men came announcing a new king, Herod was full of fear, but not him alone. Matthew notes that all of Jerusalem was also afraid. Christ challenges us to see the world rightly, but perhaps hardest of all is to see ourselves truthfully—to see the ways that our own fears and weaknesses determine who we are becoming and how we encounter the world around us. Logs and specks in eyes and all those things.

This is why the vision for the world cannot finally be our own. It isn’t going to be social justice movements or political campaigns. It won’t be because we are more enlightened or tolerant, or because we have finally progressed enough. All these can be very good, but they can also be more ways of deceiving ourselves. We only see truthfully when we begin and end in Christ. 5 When we come to the table, we are invited to live into the challenge to the world that Christ’s coming announced. Here we gather to share a meal, together, as a community of people who proclaim the goodness of Christ in the midst of the darkness. To be the body of Christ for the world.

Around the table we bear witness to who Christ is and to the community he is forming that can bear the sufferings of one another as well as celebrate the joys. Here we receive the foretaste of God’s coming Kingdom and long for its fulfillment in the day when there is no more weeping, no suffering, when warfare has ceased and all gather around the throne of the Lamb.