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The Hopes and Fears of All The Years
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 9, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 60:1-6 Matthew 2:1-23
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way,” begins Matthew after he has finished his genealogy, a genealogy that commences with Abraham and concludes with the deportation of the Hebrew people to Babylon fourteen generations before the birth of Christ. His account, as we have noted in previous years, is not the account embraced by the culture. For Christmas Eve we prefer the Lukan version, a story which keeps the chaos offstage and majors instead in Mary’s Magnificat, the multitude of heavenly host praising God, the simple shepherds making haste to the manger and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. So Caesar Augustus is counting heads; so the inn is overcrowded; so Mary and Joseph are poor; so the shepherds are sore afraid at first. If Luke were the only version we had of Christ’s birth, even the church could abide in that soft stable light until the dark clouds of Lent began to gather…as they are even now gathering…narrative momentum. This is not possible if Matthew’s gospel is the gospel we choose to read on the twelfth night or the fifteen morning after Christmas. For though we ended our reading of Matthew’s tale on Christmas Eve just as we ended our own keeping of the feast--at the moment the gifts were opened--now we revisit this story in the holiday’s aftermath: when the tree is brittle, the toys are broken, the grudges resumed; when the time being is proving to be, especially this year, the most trying time of all. Here in Matthew’s gospel Christ’s birth is offstage, alluded to in the past tense; whereas evil and sin and death in the person of Herod take on present tense and center stage, stalking this child from the manger to the cross. What does Matthew mean to tell us by his darker beginning? We cannot help but ask this from out of our new year’s darker beginning, bringing its hopes and fears to our reading and hearing of Christ’s birth for a second week: the tragedy that has begotten a generosity worthy of the headlines; a Sudanese war and its destruction both ended [after two million deaths] and unabated [five hundred thousand more] if we turn the page; the hopes riding on two elections, both to be held near the place of Christ’s birth where soldiers stand guard because peace is so hard to make; the offstage deaths of thousands every hour, whose brief moment onstage in the AIDS death of Nelson Mandela’s son will net no vast outpouring of millions anytime soon; and always the question of God’s visitation to the borders of our lives lived in the face of our own death. These tremors of primordial hopes and fears, whose waters race in the mind toward our undefended shores, has returned us to this story, fearful castaways one and all, clinging to a vague hope that real help is on the way from across the sea. By way of Herod, Matthew means to tell us of that help. According to Matthew in the first place, Christ’s birth reveals what we could never see without the incarnation, its light illumining Herod who has taken center stage. And what we see is the immediate and complete opposition to God’s presence in the reality of evil and sin and death. We see, ironically, what theologians have called nothingness. Herod holds the place and plays the part of nothingness in the story, represents that which opposes God’s will for creation, an opposition enacted here in the slaughter of the innocents. From the beginning and throughout human history until Christ was born, say the theologians, the nothingness that God did not will from the beginning, the chaos at the boundary of the heavens and the earth created good by God, has threatened the very world God spoke into being. But we need to be clear about what we mean when we speak of this nothingness. We know in the world God created there is light and there is darkness. We need no one to tell us that. There is firm ground and there are deep waters. We map and maneuver both at our peril. God wills all of this as the theater for our brief hour on stage wherein we praise God often more in the shadows than at noonday, turn to God more honestly in the depths than on the mountaintop, trust God alone in our indigence rather than our opulence, abide with “fear that is worthwhile” in God’s judgment more faithfully than when we presume upon God’s favor. But when we curse the willed shadows of our finite human existence and blame God for the darkness that has befallen us, we miss the real nothingness that crouches at creation’s door! Though Herod can be said to be a sinner raised to a significant power, I think in Matthew’s gospel Herod does not represent simply the shadow of human existence which God wills for our good, for our growth in faith, for our chastening. Herod does not even represent the corrupt politics which our better vote can reform or the sick mind that medicine can now mend. Herod’s immediate and murderous resistance to news of God’s presence in the world reveals rather the encroaching void, the sin and evil and death God has not willed but which has rivaled God’s will from the beginning, which appears to resist God’s rule even now, and which therefore God alone can defeat. In other words [words that Matthew uses more explicitly later in his gospel] and in the second place, a battle of cosmic proportions is pitched at the center of human history in the person of Jesus Christ. Because this unwilled nothingness is directly in opposition to God’s will, God determines to enter the fray as the primary victim and the real foe of nothingness. But how and with what sort of armor? In this “weak unarmed wise” says the poet; in the Word become flesh, says Scripture, God enters as ‘a creature in mortal peril, a creature threatened and betrayed, a creature lost and unable to retrace its way home.’ Hence, “This little babe, so few days old,/Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;/All hell doth at his presence quake,/Though he himself for cold do shake,/For in this weak unarmed wise/The gates of hell he will surprise.” Benjamin Britton set this poem of the martyred Jesuit Robert Southwell to a canon whose notes rise upward with every line, adding in each verse another voice to the canon, until the music is compressed into what is called a “stretto” [a rapid whir of notes and voices], creating the cacophony of battle and ending in a flourish of triumph. Britton, who himself struggled mightily with the darkness of his own mind, understood the magnitude of the enemy and knew the One who had been sent, armed with our own, vulnerable human flesh, to do battle. “With tears he fights and wins the field;/His naked breast stands for a shield;/His battering shot are babish cries,/His arrow looks of weeping eyes,/His martial ensigns cold and need/And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.” The battle, I repeat, is God’s. But all who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil ignore this fact and, refusing God will, join with the nothingness against God’s will claiming always to have taken up arms for God’s will. Ultimately under the guise of religious and political righteousness, nothingness reaches the zenith of its armed opposition on the height of Christ’s cross and there [where Matthew really began his gospel] nothingness meets its defeat: Death where is thy sting? Grave where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, writes Paul, who giveth us the victory. We therefore live in the faith that real nothingness is the past, wrote Karl Barth, because death itself has been destroyed by the positive will of God, the will that raised Jesus from the dead. Nothingness, which is to say death in all of its forms, is no longer to be feared, because the battle that first was waged in the manger has been won on the cross. It is a victory few can see or believe amid the innocents slaughtered. Most humanists prefer to locate our hope in acts of compassion as though we were again the ones to do battle with the nothingness that makes us fear for our lives still. The religious in the crowd would rather compound our fears, identifying this present destruction with God’s will, though we cannot fathom it…or the consequence of our sin [truly two ministers said this Thursday as they were approved to serve churches in this presbytery], though we are hard pressed to trace the reason such wickedness dwelt in so many little children now washed away. But you see if we make no distinction between the darkness God created and willed, and the nothingness unwilled by God, this must be our twisted logic, what comes to human minds whose hopes and fears have not been met in Christ, but who have blithely surmised God’s will by the dim light of so-called Christian moralism. “Contrary to its true nature,” says Barth, “so-called Christianity has become a sorry affair both within and without. It is shameful enough,” he says, “to have to admit that many of the interpretations of nothingness which we are forced to reject as non-Christian derive their power and cogency from the fact that for all their weakness and erroneousness they attest a Christian insight to the extent that they do at least offer a cheerful view and…treat nothingness as having no perpetuity.” Almost as if to make Barth’s point, Friday I received a chilling first person account written by a man who was swept, with his wife, three times to the bottom of the sea by the Tsunami. He wrote that though they were not religious people in a traditional sense, they had been brought closer to God on a personal level. When asked how their lives had been changed, both agreed that neither feared death any longer. “When I couldn’t break through the surface of the water due to the debris and out of air,” he writes, “I accepted that we would die. When that happened I unexpectedly felt a peace I’d never known before. It wasn’t frightening or surreal but in the simplest terms an incredible tranquility and peaceful acceptance. From this we both feel there is nothing to fear….” But if before the waters rise, if instead from the resurrection we trace God’s battle with nothingness backwards to Christ’s birth, if we live as those who know in Him our hopes and fears are met, know in him that death and evil and sin have been defeated once for all, leaving nothingness powerless over us, then we return with the wise men by another route to our lives, accompanied by the God who has made our hopes and fears his own in Jesus Christ. What finally of our part in the meantime, in the time when Herod appears still to rule? God’s victory does not mean we may become spectators. Rather we are summoned to oppose the already defeated armies of nothingness in the same weak unarmed wise of God in Christ, unafraid and in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection: “My soul, with Christ join thou in fight/Stick to the tents that he hath pight;/Within his crib is surest ward,/This little babe will be thy guard./If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy/Then flit not from this heavenly boy.” Hold fast to Him, my friends, in whom are met the hopes and fears of all the years, even this year! Thanks be to God |