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Sermon by Andrew Plocher December 31, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill The carols had ended. Great joy had entered the world. The angels’ glorias had faded from the sky and the sounds of children singing had ceased. A silence overcame the dark night in Bethlehem. He woke up with a start. His blankets were damp and his hands were clammy. Nervously he glanced around. His wife was sound asleep next to him. Cautiously relaxing he leaned back into his pillow and stared at the ceiling. Did it really happen? Had God really come to him in a dream again? The first time it made sense: they really did need to get married and it was okay that she was pregnant. She was young after all, and beautiful too, and he loved her. But this? Did they have to get up and leave already? The visitors had been so compassionate and welcoming, and he had felt a sense of calm for the first time in months. They had brought great gifts: more than Joseph had ever owned, there they were- piled by the cradle. Yet it was God. He had to listen and to act. There weren’t really any other choices now, were there? Rolling over, he decided, “The morning is soon enough.” The journey ahead would be a long one and with the new son… he had to try to sleep. As he stared lovingly at Mary, exhaustion took over and he fell back asleep. Joseph probably didn’t want to pack up, back track, and go to Egypt. He had an infant son, an exhausted young wife and his own struggles to deal with. Yet he knew that Egypt would be a place that they could rest. There was a large Jewish community that would welcome them, maybe even some friends would be there. It was the move, the trip that he didn’t want to do. Why should they have to go again, why was it their child who threatened Herod, and their flight that was necessary? This was harder than he thought it would be. Whether it is a gun in school, change in the work place, Christmas dinner or a life transition, we feel stress. Maybe we don’t wake up to God speaking to us in a dream, but we often feel a sense of urgency. We recognize the need to escape the injustice that is about to occur, to flee and protect ourselves. It may not be the murder of innocent children that plagues us. The selfish desire to murder the Son of God. Yet injustice invades our homes and sanctuaries- the places of rest become the places of stress and panic. But what do we do with this story? The perfect Christmas world, the six operettas of Luke were so happy, so removed from this tragedy in Matthew. Yet now, as the New Year begins, the blood and the questions flow. They follow the child, the gift that we so earnestly wish were without cost. Yet the story is there- the challenge to our comforts, to our desire for the world to be able to be joyous and silence the pain. Let’s take a moment and reflect on someone who faced similar challenges: Jonah, our whale riding prophet. When Jonah was called by God to go to Ninevah he didn’t want to go. He was stubborn. He even turned his back on God and ran in the opposite direction toward Tarshish. But as his journey continued, and as he tried to escape God, he found that he couldn’t. The darkest recesses of the ship to Tarshish couldn’t hide him. Even his hopeful death over the side of the ship couldn’t hide him. No, he was rescued by a fish so that he could go to Ninevah and proclaim the judgment of the Lord. And so Jonah preached God’s five words of judgment. He was hopeful that God’s justice would prevail and that the city would be destroyed. Yet Ninevah repented and was spared by God’s mercy. At a loss, Jonah was angry at God. God didn’t let Jonah escape, didn’t kill him, and wasn’t just (as Jonah saw it). God should have destroyed the Ninevites, but God didn’t. When we leave Jonah he is sitting under a bush, one that God provides as shelter, and is “angry enough to die.” The last words of the story are God’s simple question, “Don’t the people and the animals of this great city deserve my concern?” When we rest our ears upon the story of Ninevah we wonder: can we ever repent? Could Baghdad put on sackcloth, could Sudan listen? Yet in Bethlehem, a town much smaller than Ninevah, Herod committed murder. We know not how many children died at his command, but even if only (a poor word at best) thirty children were murdered, why did God not intercede and stop the murder? Today we ask the same questions of the holocaust, of Darfur and Somalia, of the Congo, and the countless losses around the world including the losses to violence in our own city of Philadelphia. Where do we find the justice of God, the mercy of God, in the midst of the violence of the world? Maybe we’ve been too busy looking for God the king. They heard the angel’s voices: the child was born in Bethlehem! He took his steps, walked in faith among us and died so that we can live. Can we, knowing that Emmanuel, God among us, came to us, pause in our panicked dream and listen and cry? Can we acknowledge our faith and hear the weeping? Can we listen in the darkness long enough to see the light? If we listen, in the midst of this story, we can hear the weeping of Rachel. Remember Rachel? Because Jacob loved her more than Leah, the sister he didn’t wish to marry, God apparently closed Rachel’s womb, says Genesis, while Leah bore many sons. Eventually, Rachel confronted both God and Jacob. "Give me children or I’ll die!" she demanded. When she finally bore Jacob a son, she named him "Joseph," which means, "Do it again," or "Let there be another." Thus, all who shared her rejoicing and spoke her child’s name joined her prayer for another son. When birth pangs came a second time to Rachel, the family was in transit (sound familiar?). As so often happened then, something went wrong and Rachel died birthing the answer to her prayer. With her last breaths she named the baby Benoni, "Son of my sorrow." Jacob could not bear the sound of his beloved’s sorrow in this baby’s name, so he called the child Ben-jamin, "Son of my right hand." This second name lifted a burden from father and son, but it also silenced the dying mother’s voice. In the midst of our celebrations we also listen to Rachel’s lament because today her children and her neighbors’ children are still dying with their hands on each other’s throats in blind rage over disagreements old as her own jealousy of Leah. Like Abraham and Moses in the ancient midrash, leaders Ariel, Mahmud, George and Tony step into the aftermath and lay more blame. They cannot take Rachel’s disconsolate cries to heart because, truth be told, it would kill them, at least politically. They, and we, choose to rename our sorrow and hide it. We bury it in the hold of the ship and try to throw it overboard, thinking that we’re doing the right thing. We celebrate Christmas without remembering the cost of hope: our savior on the cross. Only those already dead, or willing soon to die, can respond in a way that might give hope to Rachel’s children and to all others caught up in all this world’s whirlpools of violence and genocide. Supposedly, there are 2 billion such folks among us these days -- a third of the planet’s population who take the name of Christ, bear his cross, have been buried with him by baptism into his death. Perhaps we can’t do anything about Bethlehem and Ramallah, Jerusalem and Gaza, Iraq and Sudan, even 2 billion of us who no longer need fear death because the worst that can happen to us already has. But we can weep. We can join our voices with Rachel’s. We can step out from under Jonah’s bush and cry for God’s mercy. We can proclaim the grace of God, the gift of a Son who brings us new life: the child of light. Imagine the din. Someone would have to listen. God would listen. We have God’s promise. And with Joesph’s trust, Jonah’s reluctance, and Rachel’s sorrow we too can find a way to listen. And maybe, just maybe, in this New Year, those who speak for God could listen, too. |