Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Matthew 2:13-23
Epiphany Sunday
January 4, 2014
Epiphany Sunday
January 4, 2014
Rev. John M.
Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Today we celebrate Epiphany and bring the Christmas season
to a close. It isn't actually Epiphany
today; it's only the eleventh day of Christmas, but it would be a tough sell to
try to have a service on Tuesday, especially if we tried to claim that it was even
more important than Christmas Eve. In
both the Eastern and Western traditions of Christianity it is in fact
more important, but don't try to convince us of that.
We associate Epiphany with the visit of the Magi. If you were here last Sunday, you might
recall that we talked about the Magi then.
Today, for this important festival—and we can call it a feast since we
are in fact gathering at the Table—we have the rest of the story that our
tradition has called "the slaughter of the innocents" that gave rise to a holy day that is called “The
Feast of Holy Innocents.”
But the text is an odd choice for a festival that celebrates
the revealing of God's character in Jesus of Nazareth. We'd rather not talk about dead babies any
time of the year, but especially not just after Christmas with its mystifying
sentimentality around childhood.
To be fair to the reading, though, Matthew doesn't draw any
lines here between the appearance of the star, the arrival of the Magi, and
Herod's violent and vicious reaction. It
seems that for Matthew all of this has something important to say about God and
about God's ways with us and with the world.
So, reluctantly maybe, we'll draw a little closer and dare to take a
peak into the story as Matthew tells it.
To begin with, let me tell you that historians at least do
not believe that these events actually happened. Rome allowed its client kings to get away
with a great deal as long as the taxes were paid. And, to be sure, children have always been victims. Herod's Judea was no exception. Neither is our own time. But this massacre was the sort of thing that
the people just would not have taken. There
would have been disturbances in the cities, and riots in the streets. News would have come to Caesar. A legion or two of troops would have to have been
sent to put down the unrest. That was
expensive and, if there was anything that the Romans hated more than not
getting their taxes, it was spending money on military actions because some client king behaved badly and
couldn't keep the peace. An event like
this massacre would have been remembered and recorded in the annals. It would have come down in history. Outside of Matthew's story, it didn't.
So if it isn’t history in the strict sense of the word, what
is it? Well, I’d say its closest parallel in our world would be the political
cartoon in which there are no characters, only caricatures, and reality is
distorted just enough so that we can begin to see what it really looks like. Like
a political cartoon, this story is a fiction that tells the truth.
So what was the truth Matthew is telling in this story? To answer that, we have to zoom out a little to
see the pattern of the early chapters of his gospel. When we do, we see that this story is set into
another story, one well-known to Matthew's readers: the story of Israel's
origins as a captive people brought out of Egypt to the land of promise. The story begins with Joseph. Joseph is a dreamer whose dreams are messages
from God. Joseph in Genesis is also a
dreamer whose dreams come from God. In
his birth and early childhood, Jesus repeats the story of the Israelites. Jesus goes from Palestine to Egypt and comes
back. The visit of the magi who
recognize that there is something precious and worthy of respect in Israel and who
bring tribute echoes a theme that runs through the Old Testament. A ruler tries to destroy Jesus just as a
ruler tried to destroy Moses. In both
cases, this took the form of a mass murder.
What does Matthew want to say with all this? Well, at least this: In Jesus as in the
Israelites of old God has acted to create a new people. Along the way, God has had to overcome the
resistance of the powers that be in order to redeem and rescue. Herod's fury at being deceived by the magi (that
parallels Pharaoh's fury at being outwitted by the midwives) and the violence
he unleashes is as much a part of this story as the Star of Bethlehem and the
gold, frankincense and myrrh.
But that still leaves us with a problem. This is literary rather than literal
violence, but it's still violence. It is
still a story about a ruler's willingness to act violently in order to
safeguard his power. Herod (in the
story) may rationalize his choice to kill the male infants of Judea as needed
for the security of the state, but the reality is, it is his own power that he
protecting. It's a feature of the story
and we're stuck with it.
It’s a feature of our world, too, let’s face it. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be so reluctant to
face Matthew’s story. It points, as
political cartoons often do, at things we would rather not know about.
I could give you cases that are, sadly, countless, from the
unintended but nonetheless calculated deaths of children who are killed in our
drone warfare program to the sixteen hundred children who die of neglect or
abuse at the hands of their parents or other care-givers each year. After I had written a pretty good sermon that
focused on these, I remembered something else.
Very early last Sunday morning, a seventeen-year-old young
woman named Leelah Alcorn was struck by a tractor-trailer rig on Interstate 71 about
four miles from her home in a small town near Cleveland, Ohio. This would have been tragic enough, but she
had left a note appeared on Tumblr (a social media site) after her death. It was clearly a suicide note.
Others of her posts tell a fuller story. Leelah was a transgendered woman. That means that she had (and had always had) an
awareness of herself as a girl and then a woman, but she was born in a male
body. She agonized for years over the
disconnect between her sense of herself and the body she was trapped in. When at fourteen she discovered that there is
a name for her experience, she in her words, “cried of happiness.”
To her parents, understandably, she was Joshua, their
son. When Leelah came to her mother with
her discovery, her Christian parents’ response was to send her to a series of
“transgender conversion therapists.” Their
goal was to fashion her into a straight man, to match her body’s physical form.
After three years of this, the pain and anger were too much
to bear. In her suicide note she wrote that
her death needed to be counted among the suicides of transgendered people, that
people need to look hard at that and then they need to fix society. “Please,” was
the last word she left us.[1]
Leelah is to be counted among the Holy Innocents.
Her parents are mourning her. Her mother said, “[W]e told him that we loved
him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need
to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy." I know that they are grieving Leelah’s death, but
I beg to point out that the child they are mourning never was except in their
imaginations. They never knew their
daughter. Leelah’s death is doubly
tragic for them.
Before I say more about this, let me put on my pastor hat and
say this to children and youth and their parents: If you are struggling with
who you are or whom you love, if you have found that you are a girl living in a
boy’s body, or a boy living in an girl’s body, or a boy who falls in love with
boys, or a girl who falls in love with girls, or someone who falls in love with
both boys and girls, there is nothing wrong with you. If you come to me, you will not get the
reception that Leelah got from her parents or her pastor. If you are so discouraged or angry or tired or
sad that you can’t imagine living any longer and you are thinking about taking
your own life, come to me or a parent or a teacher or counselor or someone
who can help. It can be better and
it will be if we can work on it together.
Putting my preacher hat back on: Epiphany celebrates the
light that allowed the magi to find their way to the child Jesus. Epiphany is a light that shines on ordinary
things and lets us see them as the extraordinary things they really are maybe
for the first time. What if Herod had
had the epiphany? What if he had heard
the magi’s words and decided to keep his promise to pay homage to the child
Jesus, or better yet, what if he had gone with them?
What if Leelah’s parents had had an epiphany and saw Leelah
as she was and as the woman she was becoming?
What if we had an epiphany and saw the people in our lives as the extraordinary
people they actually are, rather than as we wish they were? It would be something! It would be worth telling stories and singing
songs about! It would be an Epiphany
worth celebrating!
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