We, like the Magi, are called to seek Jesus in the world. We trust that the Triune God is leading us and knows us well enough to call us in ways that we can recognize.

Vicar Emily Beckering, The Epiphany of Our Lord; text: Matthew 2:1-12

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

All of the great wise men of history have made their discoveries. Here are a few: Sir Isaac Newton: the Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation. Benjamin Franklin: electricity. Ibn al-Shatir—not Copernicus—planetary motion.

And there is a fair share of wise women, too. Marie Curie conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. Maria Mitchell discovered a comet and that sunspots were an independent phenomenon and not a type of cloud. Barbara McClintock: the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and for microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas.

And the Wise Men whom we hear of on this and every Epiphany? They are credited for discovering the Star of Bethlehem. These Wise men—or Magi—these astrologers are the only ones, it seems, who notice this star and pay attention to what it means: a king is born to the Jews. But they are not Jews; their questions to Herod convey this. Although they understand that a significant king has been born, they do not know where or comprehend fully what this king means for the Jews. What they do know is this: a king unlike any other king has been born and only one thing can be done: they must travel to meet this king for themselves.

It would have been easy for them, upon seeing the star rise, to celebrate their own cleverness. It would have been easy for them to take credit for the discovery of this star and use it to bring themselves glory and recognition by interpreting its meaning in front of kings and rulers in their land. It would have been easy for them to record this sighting and their interpretation of the rising star, and then move on to making their next discovery. It would have been easy—reasonable even—for the Magi to do any of these things. It would have made much more sense for them to record their findings and move on, or to rejoice among themselves, than it would for them to pack up and set out to find this king without knowing exactly where they were going or what awaited them along the way. It would have been safer—smarter according to most wisdom—to stay put.

But they do not. This revelation demands a different kind of response from them; they are not content to go on with their lives as usual. They must see this king for themselves. They are moved to make a journey, and a long one, most likely, in order to be with this king. They move toward this star even before they completely understand it, even before they know exactly where it is leading them or what difficulties they might face along the way. They go out, searching, trusting, and moving forward toward the sign given to them.

By responding in this way, these Magi, these outsiders show us insiders the way of discipleship.

They teach us that the good news given to us, the good news that we have heard throughout this Christmas—that God loves us, has come to live with us, to be with us, and has made us God’s own children—all of this good news cannot stop with our hearing it. We cannot be content with cherishing this news in our hearts, or with letting its only effect in our lives to be that it fills us up today so that we can return to business as usual tomorrow. The discovery of the birth of Jesus draws the Magi out of the comfort of everything that they know, and draws them toward Jesus. They realize that they really only have one option: they must trust the sign that they have been given and follow it. They must go where this king is.

The beckoning that God extends to the Magi is the same call that we receive. There is really only one option open to us as well: we must go where Jesus is. We, too, are called out of ourselves, called out of safety and security, called out to seek our Lord Jesus in this world, and to follow where he leads us. We do not live faithfully if we do not go out where we are sent or follow where God leads us.

As is true for the Magi, responding to God’s beckoning will lead us on a path that is not without danger. By setting out to follow the star, and seeking the newborn king, the Magi expose themselves to unknown threats: threats like the potential wrath of Herod, and the dangers of robbery and exposure in the wilderness along the open road. Certainly, if we are following where God leads us, then we will also encounter the dangers of this world because the way of Christ, as we know, is the way that leads to the cross.

But following this beckoning will also lead to joy that we could not have fathomed. The Magi would not have been able to experience the joy of being in the presence of God if they had not set out on the journey or if they had allowed obstacles along the way to deter them. If they had allowed the fact that the Jews in Jerusalem and Bethlehem—this king’s own people—did not recognize him, to make them doubt the star that they themselves had witnessed, they would not have beheld the joy of being in God’s presence.

If we learn any wisdom from these Wise Men, it is that in our life of faith together, we as a congregation must seek God in the world in order to be with our Lord, even when this seeking goes against our reason, requires us to make different decisions than business models would suggest, or calls us into uncharted territory. In order to respond faithfully to the Word that Christ has come into the world, we must go out into that world to be with him.

If we take this call on our lives seriously, then the question becomes: how will we know where Christ is or where we are being led? In response to this question, the story of Epiphany gives us very good news. The way of faith, the power to move forward and to follow Jesus where he is, doesn’t begin with us. The Wise Men were given the star as a sign: God was able to call them in a way that they could recognize.

In the history of Israel, it was not typical for God to communicate God’s will or Word through the stars. Instead, God most often spoke directly through people like Moses, King David and the prophets and preferred to be known in the context of relationship with them. By contrast, astrologers, diviners, and interpreters of dreams are often spoken against in both the Old and New Testaments. According to the whole of scripture, those who study the stars or dreams for meaning are not to be trusted, and God’s people are commanded not to participate in these practices so that they will not be led astray to worship false gods. Yet, for these Magi, these astrologers, God uses what they know to draw them to the One whom they don’t yet know. God uses the stars to reach these people who study the stars. God gives dreams to warn these people who interpret dreams. God speaks to the Magi in their own language.

These Wise Men might not have known God, but God knew them. God knew their ways and their hearts, and God knew how to get through to them. God saw to it that these people from the East were drawn in close to their king and savior so that they too might know and see and love the God who loved them. It wasn’t the Wise Men who made the discovery after all: they didn’t find God. When they saw the star, they were the ones who were found.

We, like the Magi, have also been found by God and drawn into God’s own family through Christ. Although we can never comprehend the mystery of God, and we might not yet know where God is leading us or what form our ministry in this city will take, we do know that we belong to a God who knows us. We also know from the prayer and discernment of our visioning process that God is calling us to work. We don’t have to have all the answers or everything figured out before we set out into this work because God knows us and God knows how to reach us.

This is not to say that this is all about us or that God feeds into our preoccupation with ourselves. Rather, in telling us this story and giving us this gospel, Matthew testifies that the Creator of the universe and all of its stars is also the God who comes to us as this baby, and the God who has the hairs of our head counted. This God knows us well enough to know how best to reach us. As God did for the Hebrews with the prophets and with the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and as God did for the Magi with the star over Bethlehem, God will also lead us and call us in ways that we can recognize. We will know the sound of God’s voice.

God the Father is out ahead of us, ever-drawing us in, God the Son, our bright and morning star, guides us by his light, and God the Holy Spirit will give us both the wisdom to recognize Christ and the strength to follow him.

We do not yet know what the new year will bring for us here at Mount Olive or where we might be led. We know only that God is leading us, God’s love is supporting us and that our God goes out before us and with us. That is enough. With that, we can go out with courage.

Amen.

Adopted as children of God, inheritors of God: these are our titles, our promise, but in fact they are also our identity, our reality, and our life in Christ is the Spirit’s making the Incarnation live in us for the sake of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Second Sunday of Christmas; texts: John 1:(1-5) 10-18; Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-14

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Though it doesn’t always happen the same way, and sometimes there are divergent behaviors and personalities, quite often it is true to say that children grow up and are imitations of their parents.  Behavior traits, patterns of thinking, even quirks of speech, children learn and copy from those who rear them, who love them, who teach them.  It’s a remarkable thing, but the more important inheritance we receive from our parents is what we learned from them, for good or for ill, and how that affects who we are in the world, far more than any material inheritance.

We sometimes seem to forget this when we consider our claim that we are children of God.  Paul, in this introduction to the letter to the Ephesians, speaks of the believers being adopted as children, receiving their inheritance in Christ, which we sometimes think of as limited to receiving life after we die.  But if we read the entirety of this letter it’s clear that the true inheritance is not as much about life after death as it is a life lived as Christ, in imitation of and filled with the Spirit of our Lord Jesus, a life which is lived now and, in Christ’s resurrection, after we die, both.  “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received,” Paul will say later.  And, “you once were darkness, now you are light in the Lord.  Walk as children of light.”

As we continue in our celebration of the birth of the Son of God, then, we are confronted by the very truth that gives us hope: we are children of God but are called to live as if that were true.  To imitate our sibling Jesus with our lives.  And when we consider what we hear today about what the coming of God into the world is supposed to do, what we claim the Triune God began in coming in this child Jesus, we also are faced with the truth that the only way that all this will be accomplished is if the rest of God’s children start living as this Child, this Son of God, showed us how.  If we start looking like our Brother.

This is pretty important, because what Jeremiah promises today about what God is doing is something we desperately need in this world.

Jeremiah’s promise here is that God will come and save.

Salvation for those in exile – the context of these words – is restoration, the gathering of the scattered.  And that’s what God promises: those scattered all over the world will be brought back from all the coastlands far away, like a shepherd gathers a flock.

Those who are not whole – from the blind to the lame, and any other pain or infirmity, physical, spiritual, emotional, any ailment we could add – will be brought back, too.  Their brokenness will not bar them from coming.  Our brokenness will not bar us from coming.

And all will walk by brooks of water for refreshment, the prophet declares, and on straight paths so they won’t stumble.  And joy will be the word of the day: celebration, feasting, merriment, dancing.  Mourning turned into joy.  Sorrow turned into comfort.  God’s people will be brought together as one, under the care of the shepherd, and all will be well.  This is the promise.

Now it’s likely that these words were chosen to be read on the Second Sunday of Christmas because they speak of the messianic reign which we see fulfilled in Jesus.  But just as we heard such promises in Advent, and realized that we haven’t seen this yet, we see that here, too.

God’s people aren’t gathered together in joy, they’re scattered.  Even if we limit that group only to Christians, which isn’t warranted at all by this text, we are as divided as a body of over a billion could be.  Though we all confess that Jesus is God’s Son, we find much to separate us.

And all the rest of God’s people, those who don’t recognize Jesus this way, but believe in God, or don’t even believe in God, well, we’re separated from them, too, barely recognizing them as sisters and brothers at times.

So the picture of God’s children gathered together in unity, walking on safe paths, fed, fulfilled, in God’s care, well, that hasn’t happened yet.

But before we complain that God hasn’t done it, or that Jesus isn’t really fulfilling it, we should look at John’s words for a moment (keeping Ephesians in mind as well).  Because there’s something important about the Word becoming flesh that we often seem to miss.

John declares that God became one of us.  But then he tells us that it’s so we, we, can become God’s children ourselves.

John says that all who receive this Word-made-flesh, who believe in him, are given power to become children of God, born not of anything but of God.  That’s amazing.  Because we haven’t always understood the Incarnation that way.

We recognize that God became one of us, dwelled among us, literally “pitched a tent” with us.  But we usually limit that to Jesus: Jesus is God-with-us, Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus is God’s answer to the world’s problems.  And that’s true.

But in the same place that John tells us that about Jesus, he says that we, too, are made children of God.  And in John’s words what is inescapable is that we are literally children of God like Jesus.  Born not of human will or flesh and blood, John says, but of God.

Now of course we’re flesh and blood.  But John also seems to be saying that because of Jesus, God-with-us, we, too, are God’s incarnation in the world ourselves.  We have the power to become children of God.  And that means we are God’s agents of promise, we are God’s hands to heal.

The Incarnation of the Son of God seems to have been only the beginning of God’s planned restoration.  We’re the continuing of that plan, God’s Word continuing to be enfleshed in the world.

Now we say this a lot, that God works through us.  But as we celebrate the birth of the Son of God, maybe we need to use that image for ourselves more as a way really to believe what we say.

You are a child of God.  I am a child of God.  Literally.  Not figuratively.

So when God promises to heal the world, it isn’t only through Jesus.  God’s intent, God’s plan, is that all of the children of God will participate, will make things new.

And then the promises of Jeremiah start making sense.  If all God’s children are a part of the gathering of peoples in God’s love, part of the restoring of the creation, it’s almost easy to see how this new world God hopes for could come about.

Believing in the Son of God, receiving him, as John puts it, is anything but passive.  It’s never about sitting back and rejoicing at the birth of Jesus, even his life, death and resurrection, and saying, “OK, when’s this world going to be fixed?”  Even the disciples had to learn that, before the ascension.

It’s always about seeing this Son of God as the one who always turns to us and says, “Follow me,” who needs us to continue this healing, this restoration, this light in the darkness that cannot be overcome.

It’s about receiving him, literally, taking in this Word-made-flesh.  In this first chapter of John, that’s the dividing line: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him,” John says.  “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

And as for how this happens for each of us, I believe that it’s the case that God wants us to figure some of this out ourselves, and make a difference.

God needs our ingenuity, our willingness, our hands.  To make this plan truly be what God needs it to be, not imposed from above but joined in willingly by the very people God needs to save.  The only way the restoration of the world can happen is if many are involved, and all their gifts are used.

But also by involving us in this healing and new life, it becomes how we’re going to grow and mature into the people God envisions us to be.  When we live out our true calling as children of God, we are living into the fullness of what God intended in the first place by coming in person as one of us.

And I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’ve just done the easy part.  The hard part is to come.

The easy part is to recognize who we are.  The hard part is to live it.  How do we take this from here and live it?  How do we take seriously and joyfully that we are God’s incarnate children, we are filled with God’s Spirit, we are God’s answer for the world?

I don’t have all the answers, but I have a couple thoughts.  It’s a new year, a good time to make a resolution.  Here’s what God might suggest for us: when we see a difficulty, a problem, a challenge, something we’d like to see different, something we’d like God to make right, why don’t we first ask what we can do?  What options we have, what wisdom we bring, what energy we can put to use?  We’re not doing this alone: we are God’s children, and all our gifts come from God.  God will give us all we need.  But the willing heart, the joyful “I’ll help,” that God needs from us.  So we can grow and mature.  And so it all can get done.

And second, perhaps God might suggest this: that whenever we are considering how we live, what decisions we make, how we treat others; whenever we’re dealing with other people, looking at our own successes and failures, simply living, why don’t we first always remind ourselves of our true identity?  Remind ourselves that we are in fact God’s children, not anything else, and let that profoundly shape us.

The good news is God’s got a plan.  The good news is also that we’re a part of it.  But the best news of all is that John says we’re “given the power” to become the children of God we are.  The Spirit will fill us with all we need to live in this way, learn from our brother Jesus, become what we are made to be, and so change the world.  God will help us to be the children we’re meant to be for the sake of the world, that’s a promise.

So let’s be about being who we are.  That will be our Christmas gift to the world, wherever we are planted, wherever we go.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

As our time rolls on, as we move forward, God, in the fullness of time, the right time, enters our world as a child, becoming fixed in our reality, limited as we are, in order to adopt us, redeem us, make us free children and heirs of God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, the feast of the Name of Jesus; texts: Galatians 4:4-7; Psalm 8; Luke 2:15-21

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Well, we’ve done it again.  We’ve traveled all the way around the sun once more, and are starting another revolution today.

Obviously, we had nothing to do with this.  The earth in its course makes its own way around our sun, along with companion planets, asteroids, planetoids, and other space debris.  It takes our planet 365 and a quarter days to make this journey.  We’re just along for the ride.

And of course, it’s completely arbitrary that today is the day we say we start a new turn, a new journey.  Yesterday, or tomorrow, could just as easily be the first or the last day.  Or any day.  For the Chinese, the new year begins sometime between late January and late February on our calendar. For the Jewish people, Rosh Hashanah is a date on the Jewish calendar which moves in our fall months, and many other cultures have many other days which they’ve designated as the day the new year begins.

Still, this is the day we’ve all learned to call the first day of the year, and so it is.  We’ve made it another time around the sun, and we call it a year, and time rolls on like an ever-flowing stream.  We find so many ways to keep track of this flow, from the smallest of nanoseconds to millennia, because knowing where we are in time, what minute, what hour, what day, what month, what year has become very important to us.

So it’s interesting that in the reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians assigned for the feast of the Name of Jesus, not for New Year’s Day, Paul speaks of time, of all things.  “In the fullness of time,” Paul says, “God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, . . . that we might receive adoption as children.”   For Paul, part of the wonder of this Son of God was in fact his entry into our time, our counting, our stream.

As we begin a new year, then, it is good that we remember today that the God who stands outside our stream of time has entered it, at just the right time.

But first, let us say that there is in fact a wisdom in stopping on whatever day we call the new year, and not only celebrating that we’ve come this far, but celebrating the journey through time itself and giving thanks to God.  Most cultures do this, instinctively it seems, since such observances are found all the way back to the dawn of civilization.

So we join our many and varied ancestors in taking a moment today to look back and forward, and to ask God’s blessing in that looking.  To give thanks for another year lived in God’s grace, and to seek God’s presence and strength for the next year to come, should we all survive it.

This taking time to worship as we remember that we are in a time we do not control, a time which flowed before us and will flow beyond us, ages upon ages, is a wise practice, and deeply important to our life of faith.

As the psalmist has said, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”  Teach us to recognize that our time is limited, countable, and beyond our ability to control, we pray on a day like today.  We gather here today in humility at our smallness in the vast sea of time and space, marveling at the speed at which this yearly journey seems to run the older we get, grateful for God’s ever-present help in all our days, months, years, lifetimes.

But then into this remembrance, we have this odd little eight day counting today, which on the surface might seem like nothing.  But consider what we are saying.

I’m not sure we’d be gathering to celebrate the festival of the Name of Jesus if it didn’t also happen to land on what we call New Year’s Day.  It’s a very common practice for Lutherans to worship on either New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.  But as we’re considering time at this start of a new year, this other time of eight days is a pretty significant intrusion, which teaches us a great deal.

It is eight days since we celebrated the birth of the Messiah, Jesus, our Lord and Savior.  Since he was a Jewish boy, on the eighth day of his life, as Luke dutifully records for us, he was circumcised, as a mark of God’s covenant with Abraham and his family.  And at that same time, he was given his name, Jesus, “God saves.”

The Church in its wisdom has seen fit to call this a festival day, the first one counting time after his birth, but certainly not the last, as we now spend almost half the Church Year walking through the life and ministry of the Son of God.

We claim a great deal about this baby whose birth we are now celebrating, whose circumcision happened on the eighth day.  Son of God, we say.  Very God of very God, begotten, not made.  The Word of God made flesh, now living among us.

This then, is the marvel of this simple noting of eight days today: the eternal Son of the Father, present at creation, beyond all time that we can fathom, suddenly is in an earthly countdown.

Think of that.  Is there any way to count the days of the Triune God?  Annual birthdays?  Ridiculous – in the first place, God is not limited to our solar system, so a year is irrelevant.  But in the second place, the Triune God is, was, and always shall be.  So, no birthday.  How about other anniversaries?  Again, no point, with the same objection as to our solar years.

God simply exists, outside of all time and space, having created a universe that lives in its own time, marking the passage.  So while beings on other planets, should they exist, would have different years, their planets having different revolution cycles around their stars, those beings are still more like us than like God.  They’re in our time.  They’re in our space.  Their star is related to our star in some way and has its own life-cycle and time-flow.

But we gather today to say that eight days after he was born among us, the eternal Son of God was circumcised.

This is a profound mystery, if only we stop and consider it.  The God for whom time does not exist has become limited to our time, so much so that we can count the days, keep track of passing time.  The Son of God whose being is beyond understanding and transcends all dimensions has subjected himself to a surgical procedure on a human baby’s body.

Suddenly, this Son of God, existing before time, has a birthday.  Anniversaries.  Yearly celebrations.  This Son of God ages, for the first time ever.  Bleeds, for the first time, ever.  Has to light candles when the day turns to night, for the first time ever.

The God beyond all time and space is now stuck in our timeline, on our planet, along for the ride with the rest of us.  And that’s an astonishing thought to think.

So when we gather to mark a new year and give thanks to God, coinciding with this strange little remembrance, we are faced with a huge question: why would God do this?

Noting our time as it passes actually helps lift up how remarkable it is that God has entered it.  The appointed psalm for today, the familiar eighth psalm, says it so well: when we consider the vastness of the creation, of time and space, it’s beyond our comprehension that the God who made all this cares for us.

This is not human arrogance, this psalm, assuming we are the crown of all things.  This is humility in seeing how tiny we are in the massive expanse of God’s creation and wondering at God’s attention and love.

When we mark a new year, gathering here to pray for the one to come, we remind ourselves how limited we are, how bound to time we are.  That we also mark this very human event in the life of the Son of God irrevocably reminds us of the mind-bending truth that God actually did come to be with us.  That God has willingly accepted all sorts of limitations for the sake of being with us.

And it is Paul who gives us the amazing answer to “why”: that we might ourselves become children of God.  God enters our time to live with us, be on this ride of time with us, that we might in turn be heirs of God, living with God.

There was no way for us to comprehend the Triune God if God remained outside our time.  By being limited in our time, in our body, in our world, the Son of God could make himself known to us, and likewise all of who God is.  And then in adopting us as children, invite us into the life that is God’s that transcends all time.

Now we belong to Christ, and this life of God’s is ours.  Now, though we still live and know time in this limited, human way, we are joined to the life of God which lives and moves beyond time.  We know God, because God became stuck with us in the fullness of time.  And that’s our joy today.

So we look to 2014, what we call a new year, with hope and promise.

Not just because we find ourselves still alive on this January 1, and not just because we’ve arbitrarily decided it was time to recognize our yearly revolution around the sun.  Though it is good and wise for us to give thanks to God for this.

But chiefly because in this child born to the world God has entered our time and become known to us, and we have found light in the darkness, hope in the despair, and joy in the sorrow of this time-bound world.  We have been joined in Christ’s death and resurrection to eternal life, life beyond time, and so we now are living as people in time and out of it.  People bound to this stream and joined to a deeper, richer, life-giving stream of God’s eternal time.

And now we continue in our time as children of the God of eternal time, and in us God’s involvement with our world, God’s connection and grace and light for our world continues.  God continues to be stuck with this world, in this time, through us.

So perhaps it’s about time, perhaps it’s now the fullness of time, that we got about our business as God’s children.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

In the midst of the horror of the massacre of the holy innocents, God is at work to save all the world from precisely this evil. God does not do this by destroying or overpowering evil, but by entering into the very heart of suffering and pain in order to bring healing and a new future.

Vicar Emily Beckering, First Sunday of Christmas, year A; texts: Matthew 13:13-23; Isaiah 63:7-9 (added Jeremiah 31:15-17 as well)

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

How horrific it is that in the wake of the birth of our savior, so much evil and death follows.

And yet, it also makes sense. It makes sense because we know from our own lives that we live in a cruel and dangerous world. We know that atrocities like the death of the baby boys of Bethlehem continue to happen in our own time.

All we have to do to be reminded of this is to turn on the TV, open a newspaper, or log in and read our news feed.  We live in a broken world where suffering is widespread and where evil still runs rampant.

The birth story of Jesus does not pretend that the world is any different.

It is not a magical story where God comes to us in the form of a baby and suddenly everything is sunshine and roses. That is not the story of the nativity because that story would in no way address the harsh realities of life lived in this world.

Instead, God comes to us and to the world by entering into the very worst that it has to offer: into a world that does not recognize him or relish in the goodness that he brings, but instead pursues him and attempts to wipe him from the face of the earth.

In Herod’s attempt to destroy his Messiah, he destroys the lives of the children of Bethlehem and their families. We need to be clear about one thing: the death of these children was not God’s will. God did not orchestrate their murder as a part of God’s plan. The slaughter of the innocents did not happen in order to fulfill God’s Word spoken to the prophets.

The fulfilled prophecies show us that in Jesus Christ, God is doing what God promised to Israel by coming as their Messiah to deliver them and give life. God the Father provides carefully for Jesus, the Son, so that this mission might be lived out.

God is at work in this story to bring life, not death, for God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

The violent death of these children depicts the polar opposite of God. Their deaths result from evil, brought about by human fear and anger. Their deaths are Herod’s desperate and disturbing attempt to hold onto his power and position at all costs. These children are destroyed because they resemble Christ. They are persecuted because they match the description of the expected Messiah: a male child born within the time frame of the appearance of the star. The church has traditionally named these children as the first martyrs because they are murdered in Jesus’ name: they are sought out and destroyed because they reflect Christ.

Their martyrdom, however, is not to be celebrated. Those who are left behind in Bethlehem bring their grief in lament before God “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.” This is a direct quotation from Jeremiah 31:15, which voices the cries of Israel, exiled into Assyria.

These words from Jeremiah are our entrance into this story.

We may be left feeling like Israel, exiled to Assyria. We may look around us and see all the evil and suffering: the violence of wars, the destruction caused by hurricanes and tornadoes, the murder of children, or the horror of a slave industry that still holds millions captive and be left feeling like this depiction of Rachel: weeping for her children, refusing to be consoled.

We may find ourselves refusing to be consoled, refusing to be comforted by this birth of Jesus if it means that innocent babies will die, that the Herod’s of the world will still win, and that evil gets to go unchecked.

We hear the cry of Rachel, the cry of Israel in exile, but because Matthew takes this prophetic word out of Jeremiah without giving us the context, we do not hear God’s response to Israel’s refusal to be consoled. This is what follows the cry of Rachel in verses 16 and 17: “Thus says the LORD: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the LORD: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the LORD; your children shall come back to their own country.” God promises Israel that exile is not the end because God is still at work for them to bring them into a new future, a future filled with hope and the presence of their God.

This is also the promise that we find in the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. God says to Israel and to us: we do not need to remain inconsolable in our grief, in our suffering, or in response to the world’s condition because what we think is the end, is not in fact the final end.

Israel is told that they will return home because God will bring them home. And though all that the people of Bethlehem might have been able to feel at the terrifying, horrendous slaughter of their children was inconsolable loss and abandonment, they were not, in fact, abandoned! God was at work for them, in the very midst of their terror, bringing to them a savior, working out God’s plan to free them from such forces of evil.

There was hope yet for them, and hope yet for us.

The hope is this: that in the person of Jesus Christ, God experiences the depths of our fear and our suffering and we do not face them alone.

This is precisely why Jesus Christ came!

He came because we are broken people who live in a broken world: a world where kings are able to wipe out the offspring of an entire village in order to maintain power, a world where children are gunned down in elementary schools, bought and sold as slaves and starve to death, a world where neighbors kill neighbors with machetes and where 11 million people are systematically destroyed because of their ethnicity.

In this baby, God enters into the very midst of that brokenness, is born into the same terror, and lives under the same threats to which we are vulnerable.

On the cross, God does not send an army of angels to overpower the Romans and prevent the crucifixion. This is not God’s way. We see this not only at Jesus’ death, but from the very onset of his birth. God does not destroy evil with fire, use angels to overpower Herod, or retaliate Herod’s evil with punishment by death.

God is not like Herod.

In Jesus, we meet a very different kind of king.

Instead, our Lord Jesus Christ enters into the danger himself: into the heart of the evil and destruction and pain in order to heal us from the inside out. And in the face of such horror, God is carefully and intimately involved in order to fulfill the promises made and to bring about a new future.

So what shall our witness and our response to this story be? When we look at the world and see only death, and it seems that evil has the upper hand and is winning, our confession is that this is not the whole story. God is still at work in this world and in our own lives.

 God is with us in the very midst of our pain and our suffering and our fear, working to bring life and healing on the other side of it.

We are to live knowing this is true. We are not to live as Herod, making decisions out of fear, or anger, or self-preservation. Because when we do, we wreak havoc and cause terrible suffering for those around us. Instead, we are to be the people who trust that God is at work. We are to be the people who look for where God is working and ask God how we can be a part of it.

We need not be paralyzed in the face of suffering, or attempt to take matters into our own hands because our hope is that our God is still at work.

Our hope is that though the children of God will experience suffering as a consequence for resembling Christ in the world, the most vicious plots of Herod or Pontius Pilate or even our own hearts cannot prevent God from reaching God’s children, healing us and bringing us new life.

Even when all we can see is darkness and all lights seem snuffed out, when we are surrounded by suffering and death and all seems lost, we confess in the presence of one another and of a hurting world that this darkness and suffering are not the ultimate realities and will not have the final word. God is still at work and God is still in our very midst, coming with healing in God’s wings, working to bring about a new future for all.

In the end, the story of the massacre of the Holy Innocents is the same story that we heard today in Isaiah: “God became their savior in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them.”

The children of Bethlehem were not saved by an angel or a messenger, but by God himself who came in full presence to save them and all of Israel, us and the entire world. God became our savior in all of our distress. It is God’s very presence that we are promised, and this presence by which we are saved.

Amen.