Like many of you, we had a house, blessedly full, over Christmas.
Today, the sneezing, coughing grandkids have gone home with their Christmas gifts and left a few gifts of their own behind.
I have a sore throat, sinus congestion and at worship last Sunday, I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish the service. My voice was a dry husk by the time I finished reading the Gospel. If it weren’t for Ricola lozenges, I’d have never made it.
Now, it would have been unthinkable to turn sniffling grandkids away at Christmas. Who could do that? Love involves embracing exactly this kind of messiness. Bringing it into your home. Living with it. Giving it a bath and kissing it goodnight.
Trying to guard against the germs that go with ‘Love’ is to risk a more fatal disease. Soul paralysis. A cancer of the spirit. The heart constricted until it is incapable of supporting life. Even if you do manage to stay healthy enough to get through the Gospel reading. The cost far outweighs the benefit.
So, I croaked my way through Matthew’s account of Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt, and Herod’s subsequent slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Events that could have been pulled right out of the dyspeptic, authoritarian headlines that greet us every morning.
Refugees and children’s suffering is the story we are living in 2019 and will almost certainly follow us into 2020.
In a sense, just re-telling Jesus story today is to resist this awful moment we are living in. To condemn the sensible reasons many concoct for doing the exact opposite of what our Gospel faith demands of us.
I thought of naming the Innocents who have died in US Detention Camps during the Prayer of the Church Sunday: Juan, Darlin, Jakelin, Felipe, Wilmer, Carlos. I didn’t. It seemed unbearably dark somehow, when Matthew’s Gospel was stark enough. I posted their names on Facebook instead. And I continue to hold them and their families in my prayers.
If we were paying attention though, the story of today’s Innocents was also told by Saint Matthew. Their story is the story of Mary and Joseph taking their baby back to Egypt to keep the baby Jesus from being murdered by the cruelty, deceit and vindictiveness of Herod.
Today, that cruelty and vindictiveness, goes by lots of other names. Wielded by a new cast of political characters and tin-horn despots. But its essential nature remains the same. Fear. A desire to maintain power. The need to crush and cower resistance. A rose is a rose is a rose, after all.
And so, it is no surprise that the wailing and lamentation from Ramah that Matthew referenced has only grown louder over the years.
Today, the wailing comes from the home of a Hasidic Rabbi in New York, where a mentally ill man stabbed and slashed Jewish worshippers with a machete. The latest in a string of anti-Semitic attacks across the nation.
This time, the victims were gathered on the seventh day of Hanukah to celebrate the Festival of Lights. The light dimmed by the spilling of Jewish blood. An old story that history never seems to tire of telling.
As if that weren’t enough, the wailing from Ramah rings out in Texas, where a shooting in a church took three lives this past Sunday. A gunman opened fire before communion and killed two individuals before being shot and killed by a member of the congregation’s volunteer armed security team.
Hard to know whether to rejoice and give thanks that a potential tragedy of monumental proportions was averted, or just add to the list of things to wail about, the fact that this congregation gathers for worship every Sunday under the watchful eye of its own armed security detail.
The juxtaposition of security and vulnerability is especially jarring in this holy season, marked as it is by the vulnerability of God’s Love given us in Emmanuel. God with Us. As much as we’d like God to be with us in our invincibility, God chooses vulnerability instead.
And so, the wailing and lamentation from Ramah grows stronger as singing of the Herald Angels fades into the starry night. As the lights on houses are struck for another year, and the Christmas trees are stripped and hauled to the curb.
The wailing from Ramah is the wailing of every person of faith who yearns for what is good and decent in the face of the indecency that seems better suited for the “dog eat dog” world of our making.
Whether it is by turning away refugees and caging their children, or targeting Jews, or Muslims, or anyone deemed to be different. The Gospel continues to stand as a sharp rebuke to such cruelty, even as the wailing lamentation rings out across the ages and people reject the Light that shines in the darkness. (John 1:5a)
The wailing from Ramah is as much a part of God’s Incarnation as the Star that guides the Magi to a smelly stable, where is found the enduring, nonsensical presence of God’s eternal love. Helpless in its bed of straw.
Every year, we return to that stable, follow that star, half expecting to discover something different. Something more useful for our security. More in keeping with our understanding of the way things work in the world.
But each year, this little baby—Emmanuel—waiting to be held and cared for, is all there is to see.
Charles Oberkehr 