Sermon: "Danger in the Manger"

Scripture Intro - Matthew 2:13-23

Our text this morning is often titled: “The Slaughter of the Innocents” – and you will soon understand why.

In this story an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and urges him to flee with his family to Egypt. King Herod has heard that the Messiah has been born, and he has ordered the killing of every child in Bethlehem under the age of 2.

We may wonder why this story is included in our lectionary so soon after Christmas. This is supposed to be a season celebrating joy and hope, and a scripture text that centers on the killing of children appears to have none of that.

We may wonder where the Good News is found in this Christmas story.

But before we read this story it’s important to know something about its context.

This story about Herod appears only in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ birth.

The gospel of Luke mentions nothing about the holy family traveling to Egypt or the slaughter of children.

It’s also important to know that Matthew as a writer borrows elements from other stories that the people of Israel knew well and uses them to present Jesus as the next great prophet, the new Moses, the one who had come to set them free.

There are many ways in which Jesus’ story in the gospel of Matthew parallels the story of Moses.

Jesus gives a sermon on the Mount, just as Moses delivered the law from Mount Sinai, Jesus fasts for 40 days and nights in the wilderness just as Moses did, and the baby Jesus, like the baby Moses under the Pharaoh, escapes a slaughter of the innocents, when all children under two have their lives taken from them.

When the danger is over, Jesus comes up out of Egypt and returns to the Holy Land to lead the people to freedom, just as Moses did hundreds of years before him.

As we often discover, the message of hope we find in scripture is not necessarily found in the factual details of the stories but in the outcome.

Love wins. Fear does not.

Because love will set you free. 

The Rev. Maureen R. Frescott

The Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

January 1, 2017 – First Sunday after Christmas

Matthew 2:13-23

“Danger in the Manger”

Welcome to the year 2017.

Well, according to our modern Gregorian calendar this is the year 2017.

If you’re using the old Julian calendar, today is actually December 19^th

and New Years Eve is still 12 days away.

Which is why our Eastern Orthodox friends will celebrate Christmas this Friday.

If you favor the Chinese calendar, we’re currently in the year 4714,

and the New Year doesn’t begin until January 28^th.

It will be the Year of the Rooster, in case you were wondering.

And if you follow the Hebrew calendar, like our Jewish brothers and sisters, we’re currently in the year 5777, and the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, won’t roll around again until September 20^th.

So, if you’re like me and break your New Years resolutions by the end of this week, no need to worry, we have several opportunities to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. 

One thing we learn as we mature in life, is that time is arbitrary.

Which is why it’s amazing that for the most part our entire world has agreed to follow one calendar and celebrate today as New Year’s Day.

While we owe our current way of tracking time to the Italian Pope Gregory, who corrected a slight miscalculation in the old Julian calendar,

it’s really the Romans and Julius Caesar who we have to thank for the 365 day, 12-month year that is linked to the movement of our sun.

Prior to Julius, the Roman calendar followed the waxing and waning of the moon, much like the Hebrew calendar still does.

But this resulted in a year with only 355 days – leaving it 10 days out of sync with the seasonal changes dictated by the sun. 

To account for this discrepancy and to bring things back into sync, every 3 to 4 years the ancient Romans added an extra month to their calendar.

They called it Mercedonius and wedged it between February and March.

(and those of you born on February 29^th thought you had it bad – imagine being born in a leap month)

The decision of when to add this extra month and when to leave it out was left up to the chief astrologers, who also happened to be politicians.

These elected officials would often arbitrarily add an extra month in back to back years to extend their term in office, or eliminate it in years that it was scheduled to occur, to shorten the terms of their rivals.

Having a calendar that could be changed on a whim caused mass confusion and frustrated Julius Creaser to no end, so he declared that from the year 45 onward, the yearly calendar would have 365 days and remain aligned with the seasonal movement of the sun, without any human intervention.   

Time may be arbitrary, but people – and politicians - remain the same regardless of the age.

Which brings us to King Herod – and the place that he holds in our timeless Christmas story.

As many of you know, only two of our four gospels have an account of Jesus’ birth.

Matthew and Luke.

And the Nativity story that we tell every Christmas weaves together the individual elements of both these accounts.

When we look at a traditional Nativity scene we find Mary and Joseph, and Jesus in the manger, with shepherds and angels and Wise Men gathered all around them.

Most of the elements that we know from the traditional Nativity story come from the gospel of Luke –

the census that had Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem,

the gruff innkeeper who turned them away,

the baby Jesus lying in an animal feeding trough.

Missing from this scene is King Herod.

Yet, when we read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth we see that Herod is as much a part of the story as any of the others.

For Luke, who mentions Herod's name only as an aside, Jesus’ birth is heralded as a joyous event that was witnessed and celebrated by many.

But then curiously this new born King is whisked away to the small town of Nazareth where he seemingly lives a life of anonymity,

and no one gives him a second thought until he’s a full grown adult.

Matthew’s version of the story is quite different.

In Matthew’s gospel there are no kneeling shepherds, no heavenly chorus of angels singing Hallelujah, there’s no Little Drummer Boy playing “Ba Rumpa Bum Bum.”

For Matthew, Jesus’ birth itself is pretty uneventful, in fact he doesn’t include any details other than Jesus was born in a house in Bethlehem, presumably because that’s where his parents were living at the time.

Matthew is more concerned with what happened after Jesus was born –

As much as 2 years after, when Magi arrived from the East following a star, and looking for the child who was said to be the “King of the Jews.”

The news that a new king had been born proved to be very disconcerting to the current King of the Jews – Herod.

We know from historical records that Herod was a polarizing leader to say the least.

He’s been championed as the greatest builder in Jewish history –

he rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem so that “he would have a capital city worthy of his dignity and grandeur.”

In fact many of the buildings erected in Herod’s name still stand and serve as tourist attractions to this day.

But Herod’s taste for wealth and luxurious living are often cited as one of the reasons why the people he ruled lived in such poverty.

He built his empire on their backs and they were given little compensation in return. 

And then there was Herod’s even darker side.

Herod’s critics have described him as "a madman” who was "prepared to commit any crime in order to gratify his unbounded ambition."

At varying times, he accused his wife, his sons, and his mother-in-law of plotting against him and one by one he had them killed.

Any rabbi who disagreed with him or mocked him met the same fate.

Jewish historians have called him "the evil genius of the Judean nation."  

This is the man that Matthew placed at the center of his Nativity story. 

Because like Luke, who had the pregnant Mary singing about the powerful being brought down from their thrones, Matthew was leading with the idea that the birth of Jesus was a radical and world changing event.

Not in the sense that heavenly angels gathered over his birth and everyone held hands and sang Kumbaya, but in the sense that those in power –

those who had the most to lose – were frightened to their core at the thought of this Messiah existing in their world.

The two accounts of Jesus’ birth that we have in our gospels may differ in many of the details, but they agree on this:

The Christmas story – the story of Jesus’ birth – is not just a feel good story, it’s meant to be a story that is challenging, and life altering, and dangerous.

One that has us imagining the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt to protect the precious gift that had been entrusted to them

One that has a madman slaughtering innocents in his desperation to hold on to his wealth and his power.

One that is rooted in the belief that this tiny baby represented a dire threat, because he alone would hold commoners and Kings alike accountable to the core teachings of their faith – to love God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.

This is a dangerous idea, because if enough people start believing in a loving and merciful God, and start living as if they were created to be vessels through which God’s love, compassion, and grace flow into this world –

then the world IS going to change.

There’s no doubt about that.

We can’t crawl inside the minds of the Herods of our world and change who they are.    

But we can change who we are.

We can change how we react to the injustice that they create and feed off of.

We can change how we respond to and treat those who are marked as threats by the Herods of our world and resist being used as vessels for hatred and bigotry and fear – and instead allow God to use us as vessels of love, compassion, mercy, and grace.

You may have noticed that the title of this sermon that’s printed in your bulletin is “Dare to Dream.”

That’s partly because I had to come up with a title two weeks ago to meet our holiday printing deadline.

And at the time I thought we might focus on the dreams that Joseph had regarding his families future, and how they connect with the dreams that we have for our future here on this New Year’s Day. 

Yet when I sat down a few days ago to write this sermon and further reflect on this Nativity story from Matthew, the actions of Herod kept rising up for me, and I wondered if a better sermon title might be “Danger in the Manger.”

It’s certainly one that grabs our attention and gets us to slip out of autopilot as we pack away our Nativity Sets and Christmas decorations and think again about what a radical story this was in its time.

And how it’s still a radical story in our time.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year – this year 2017 –

may we continue to reflect on this timeless story of Danger in the Manger. 

This story of a baby who came to change the world.  

And allow it to seep into every word,

every action,

every darkened corner of our lives –

and dare to dream of a better future for us all.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.