St Luke’s, Havelock North – Christmas 1, 2007 - Sermon

“For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.”

“For it is clear …” Paul’s confident statement in his letter to the Hebrews may have been perfectly accurate at the time, but I’m not so sure it is now. The cynic in me suspects that today most people believe Jesus came precisely to help the cause of the angels, and the shepherds, and the wise men, and Santa and his elves and all the other cute and cuddly images we have of Christmas. That, after all, is the Christmas we want and it’s the Christmas that most of us celebrate. It’s most definitely not however, the Christmas we get in today’s readings.

I feel kind of like I should apologise to Charlotte and Tom and Harry’s parents. You see last week we had the Christmas pageant and all the nice, pleasant stuff from the manger story, while today, just as you bring your children for baptism, we get this other Christmas story which really isn’t very child-friendly at all. Sorry about that.

But let’s be clear, this is still Christmas. The old tradition of celebrating the twelve days of Christmas was meant to highlight that. After the best part of a month at Advent having just the one day of Christmas seems a little rough, but we don’t. Christmas is a season, not just a day. Granted, it’s not a very long season – only a couple of Sundays at the most – but a season nonetheless.

This year, of course, we get a particularly short Christmas season, with Epiphany only a week away now, complete with confusion as we go backwards in the story next Sunday to get the beginning of the three wise men tale. But the fact remains, today is still Christmas, and this morning’s gospel reading – Matthew’s story of Herod and the slaughter of innocent children – that’s still Christmas too.

It’s not quite the Christmas we’re used to of course. This is the flip side of the fluffy, nice story we heard last Tuesday. This is the Christmas that doesn’t quite make it to the cards and carols, although that hasn’t always been the case. As recently as Victorian England in fact you could find plenty of Christmas carols featuring blood and gore alongside their shepherds and angels, but that was then. Now the laughing face of jolly old Santa is the true face of a 21^st century Christmas, and I say, ‘bah humbug!’ The time has come to take the Santa out of Christmas and put a bit of Herod back in.

Like the whole of its version of the birth of Jesus, Matthew’s gospel carefully constructs the story of Herod and his dealings with the wise men. It’s a story deliberately loaded with symbolism; Mary, Joseph and Jesus go down into Egypt, fleeing the dangers behind them, only to be brought back out a little later in their own private little exodus. Herod, meanwhile, like a latter day pharaoh orders the children killed and immediately we’re left thinking of little Moses hiding in the bulrushes.

None of these allusions are an accident. Matthew is deliberately painting a picture that sets the scene for what it to come. Jesus is there to do what Moses did and lead his people to the promised land – history repeats and repeats again.

And it all happens in Bethlehem.

No doubt some of you will have been to Bethlehem? How did you find it? There were reports this Christmas of tourists finally being able to attend worship services in Bethlehem in relative calm. For the most part though Bethlehem remains quite a dangerous place, a violent town, packed with tourists and all the dodgy dealers that go with them, not at all like the picturesque Bethlehem we imagine when we hear Luke’s nativity story, complete with soft-hearted innkeeper, tidy stable, pleasant shepherds and a lovely silent night.

Matthew’s Bethlehem, on the contrary, is far less peaceful and far more realistic, a place of corruption and danger and the most horrendous and horrific violence.

This is Matthew’s Bethlehem and its Matthew’s Christmas, and if we were to look at where the story goes from here, Matthew’s is probably the more honest account. In Matthew’s Christmas Jesus is immediately identified as a threat, a danger to the status quo and those who profit from it, the sort of person who might be hated by the authorities and eventually executed by them. In Matthew’s Christmas the story ends not with the songs of angels but the wails of women who have seen their children killed – not unlike the wails of other women at the foot of a cross about 30 odd years later. In Matthew’s Christmas we have death and violence and grief and bitterness, and thank God for that!

On Christmas morning at 10 o’clock we heard again those incredible words from John chapter 1; ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. In a similar way Paul makes the point in our Hebrew’s reading this morning; ‘Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things.’ The Christmas story isn’t a nice fairy tale about angels and shepherds and a cute little baby. It’s the story of the Word becoming flesh, of God becoming one as and with us, well, kind of with us.

In reality the Christmas story is the prelude for the real gospel, the gospel that isn’t so much about offering warm fuzzies to the comfortable middle classes as it is about promising new life to those at the bottom of societies heaps. As Matthew will go on to tell us in weeks to come, the gospel is about proclaiming blessings to the poor and the weak and the hungry and the downtrodden, how appropriate then that today’s Christmas story features anger rather than angels, murder instead of a manger and destruction rather than dainty shepherds.

Let’s be honest, much as we like to imagine a picture perfect world at Christmas, in reality our world is much more like today’s gospel than Tuesdays. We live in a world where there is far too much sadness and suffering, violence and bitterness, death and destruction. We live in a world where thousands of children still die, every day, in horrific and horrendous ways. We live in a world where Rachel still weeps and wails for her offspring.

Personally, I believe, is the Word is going to become flesh, if God is going to come among us, those are the places we need him most.