2nd Sunday after Christmas Sermon
There’s a difficulty in preaching today – a difficulty in tone, you might say. On the one hand, it’s still Christmas. It is, in fact, the twelfth day of Christmas, which – in various cultures over the years – has been a day for frivolity and all sorts of whimsical traditions. And here, we’re still singing Christmas carols; the angels are still swinging above our heads. But, on the other hand, there’s a solemnity to this day rooted in the gospel reading: the tyrant king Herod is on the move; the Holy Family is fleeing his wrath; innocent children are being slaughtered. It’s hardly the stuff of holiday mirth.
But, of course, beyond the sentimentalities of Christmas, what makes Christmas a feast of such worth is the very fact that God in Christ has joined us to this life – this life that is filled with mirth … and with terrible pain. God is with us as participant in the whole thing. And that matters. Deeply.
I remember a few years ago when I perceived this most poignantly.
I was at the Vatican Museums with Kathryn. We didn’t know what to expect. We hadn’t planned or researched anything – we were just stumbling upon one glory after another, which eventually brought us to the Tapestry Gallery. It’s this big, long gallery, flanked on either side with these amazing tapestries. And on one side there’s a series of tapestries from the 16th century that depict the life of Christ. But what was so fascinating about them was that – of the eight tapestries the artist designed to tell the story of Jesus’ life – three of them are all depictions of the same moment: the Slaughter of the Innocents, when Herod had the babies in Bethlehem killed.
It seemed so out of proportion to the actual life of Christ. Of the four gospels, this story only shows up once, and is told in just three short verses. And yet here, in this series, it’s the most prominent story – depicted over and over again. There isn’t even a tapestry of the Jesus on the cross – just these babies being killed. And because the tapestries are so skillfully woven, the impact is all the more hideous. You can see, in mother after mother, the horror and terror in their contorted bodies and faces. And then there’s the children themselves. It’s awful.
And as we were slowly making our way past them, I looked at Kathryn, and saw we were both crying. I can’t be certain what the artist’s intention was, or why the person who commissioned the tapestries was willing to invest such wealth in this story being emphasized three times. But what I perceived in them was that the Slaughter of the Innocents was being used as a metaphor for the entirety of human suffering. All wars, all violence, all enmity, all pain of every sort: it’s all there in these innocent babies and their senseless murders, and the anguish of those who love them. It is the whole human story of depravity and pain. Which means, it is each of our stories as well, wherever we have suffered or continue to suffer.
And in the face of suffering – be it in our lives, in these tapestries, in the more than 12,000 children who have been killed in Gaza in the past fifteen months, or in the fifteen people killed this week in New Orleans – in the face of suffering, any thinking person at some point (or many points) will ask, “God, what are you doing? If you are all loving, and if you are all powerful, why don’t you stop this pain?”
And, to be clear, this is no faithless question.
It is, in fact, one of the underlying questions for all serious theological inquiry – in Christianity or any religious tradition. “Who are you, God, to allow such suffering to carry on?” And, I must warn you, there is no fully satisfying answer to this fundamental question we humans have always asked.
But there is wisdom.
And it is this wisdom I encountered afresh as we made our way through the Tapestry Gallery. For it seemed to me the artist was answering this same question. In his telling of the life of Christ, he moved straight from the Slaughter of the Innocents to the Resurrected Christ. He omitted Jesus’ whole ministry (including the cross!), so he could rush to Jesus standing triumphant before his opened tomb – boldly and confidently, but also with this delightfully relaxed look on his face, like, “Look. I did it!” And the most prominent feature of his body was the stab wound on his side. It looked, in fact, identical to the stab wounds of those slaughtered babies. Their wounds were his wound. His wound was theirs. And as he was now risen, they were now risen with him.
Why doesn’t God stop the suffering? I don’t know. We don’t know. But this we know, in faith: God in Christ is with us in all our suffering. God is not removed from it. God is not inattentive to it or even merely witness to it. God is in it with us. Completely.
For this we believe of Christ’s incarnation: as Christ is one with God the heavenly Father, so Christ is one with us, God’s earthly children – fully and without division. This is the nature of God. And so we rightly say of Jesus: He is fully human and fully divine. And by this union, our suffering must be Christ’s suffering, which means it must also be God’s suffering. We do not know why God does not simply eradicate evil. What we know is that God suffers with us. And, as we see outside the empty tomb, God in Christ has overcome death. Suffering and evil do not have the final word. That final word is life, a life that overcomes the grave.
We would, of course, always prefer a life without pain. But beneath our natural desire for comfort and ease beats a deeper desire within the depths of our souls. And it is to know the reality of our union with God. “God, I want you; and I want you to be with me.” There is nothing more needful than that, than to know that God is with us, and that we’re okay.
I was talking to someone just a couple days ago who’d been going through a rough stretch of despair and isolation. And they told the story of going out for a walk and praying, “God, I’m not sure I can make it through this.” And right when they needed it most, the sign came. The details are too private to share. But in their life, there’d been one symbol – one experience – that most epitomized their assurance of God’s presence with them. And right at that moment, they turned, and – against all odds – there was that symbol again. The conditions of their life did not make a sudden change. What changed was their despair turned to hope, and their hope was this: God was with them.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. In fact, as time goes by, it is this assurance of God’s presence and God’s love that I’m discovering, for me, to be the most essential aspect of prayer. Prayer can be a lot of things – a way to love others as we pray for them; a way to give expression to whatever range of emotions we’re feeling; a way to worship – all of this is prayer. But at its core, what do I want from prayer? I want to be with God and, in God’s presence, to know God approval. And I don’t mean approval of my performance, but something far more elemental. I want to know God’s approval of my person – that who I am is blessed by God, is desired by God, is at home – peaceably – with God.
So the way I’ve been thinking about prayer lately is as a kind of room that I enter. And that room is God. And as I go into prayer, I picture myself standing outside a door and first taking off my shoes – just like you’d do when walking into a Japanese house. You take off your shoes so you don’t track dirt into their clean home. In this case, the dirty shoes are all the messy things in my life – my sins, my fears, my inadequacies, whatever! It’s not to say those things don’t exist. They do. And I’ll keep struggling with them because I’m human. But when I walk into that room, I can leave those shoes outside the door. God is holy. And so am I, because I am made in the image of God and we belong together.
Whatever struggles are ours to bear, whatever shoes are ours to wear as we trudge through this life, that’s fine. We’ll do what we have to do. But those struggles do not define us. We are free to take off our shoes, to walk through the door, and to be in God. We are in God and God in us. There is a holiness in God and in our union with God. And there is nothing in this world that has the right or the power to invade the sanctity of that space.
I remember, years ago, walking into a church. It was very old and very spare and lofty – just simple stucco walls. There wasn’t even glass in the windows – just arched openings that let in the light and the fresh air. And there were birds flying around the nave and above the altar. It was, perhaps, the most perfectly beautiful moment I’ve ever known in church. No liturgy, no priest or other people. Just these birds: alive and at home in the spaciousness of God’s house. And to be such a bird – that has been my desire, ever since.
How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts!
My soul yearns for the courts of the Lord;
my heart cries for the living God.
The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young;
by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
Happy are they who dwell in your house! (Psalm 84:1-3a)
We cannot remain in this house – in this room. At least, not yet, on this side of the tomb, outside the womb. This life is lived outside the walls, with soiled feet, in this Herod-filled world – Herods without and Herod’s within. And it is our duty to live in this world, bringing life and hope and compassion as Christ did in all those years (overlooked by the tapestries).
But that room is always ours to return to, where Herod has no place.