Sermon on Matthew

Delivered December 30, 2007

Matthew 2:13-23

New International Version (NIV)

¹³ When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.  Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”  ¹⁴ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, ¹⁵ where he stayed until the death of Herod.  And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  ¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.  ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:  ¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”  ¹⁹ After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt ²⁰ and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”  ²¹ So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there.  Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, ²³ and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.  So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Our Gospel for today is a bit unsettling because we feel we are still in the Christmas season, and we still have a little of that Christmas buzz on, yet we learn how endangered, how threatened the Christ child was.  But through dreams, Joseph knew to flee with his family to Egypt.  An earlier verse in Matthew explains how also through dreams, the Magi, the Wise Men, who had been instructed by King Herod to find the Christ child, knew not to return to Herod to say where he was.  And later again through dreams, Joseph knew when it is safe to return, and he knew to settle in Nazareth, thus fulfilling the prophecy that the Messiah would be a Nazarene.  So the story heartens us and reassures us that God's plan will proceed. 

In today's Gospel, as a matter of drama, Jesus is actually a minor actor, someone simply to be protected.  It is Herod who is the main earthly player.  He is the menace, and he shows himself to be a monster.  When the Wise Men do not report back to him, when they just return to the east by a different route, Herod knows he has been outwitted, and he gives the order that means so many deaths in Bethlehem.  Throughout Christian history, Herod has been justly reviled for this act, although it is not clear he was the worst monster in the ancient world; that was quite a competition after all.  But it is certainly monstrous what he does here:  All those children gone.

This is certainly not what we expect from a Christmastime story.  It starts out well enough with the escape of Jesus and his family.  But then we have this atrocity:  The Slaughter of the Innocents, as the event came to be known.  So this is a terrible juxtaposition with the setting side by side of rescue and massacre.  Matthew is the only Gospel in which this incident appears, but it was nonetheless a frequent theme in medieval art.  Many paintings depicted the slaughter, all quite disturbing.  These paintings tend to show a substantial number of infants taken, often the ground is covered with them.  But historians have estimated that, based on the likely population of Bethlehem at the time, the number lost was probably no more than twenty and possibly only around ten.  Still, whatever the number, it was a horrible act.  Maybe the medieval artists simply intended to emphasize the dreadfulness of the crime.  Strangely, our Gospel itself does not even venture a number, as if it is simply too much to bear.  (I remember that is how Rudy Giuliani put it so poignantly on the morning of September 11^th when asked to estimate the number of casualties.)  So instead of figures, the text does no more than set out the parameters of the assigned killing, that is, those male children who have not reached their second year. 

Maybe it says a lot when the description of the Slaughter ends on this eerie note of Rachel, the Old Testament matriarch, crying from her grave.  Now as much as I can, I try to read about other religions and how common spiritual themes carry around the world.  And in many early religions, particularly the Native American belief systems, the Earth was considered the Mother.  And often the Earth Mother would feel pain for evil done.  And here we have Rachel crying out like a mother from her grave, from the Earth, which strikes me as being in that spirit.  It also reminds us of Genesis when Cain killed his brother Abel, and the blood of Abel cried out from the ground to God.  Anyway, this all goes to underline the depth of the tragedy we witness. 

I have a very personal recollection of this particular Bible story.  When I was about six or seven, my parents took me to the movies.  I don’t want to sound too prehistoric, but back then, in our little town, we only had one movie theater and, hold on to your hats, it had only one screen.  And needless to say, the theater was not in a mall. From my research, I’ve determined that the movie we went to see was probably the Biblical epic King of Kings, released in 1961.  And by the way, that didn’t mean we saw the movie in 1961, since our theater was always a little behind in its showings.  Believe me, in those days, Hollywood did not wait anxiously for the weekend’s opening take from Burlington, Wisconsin.  The movie starred Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus.  If you’re a connoisseur of movie Jesuses, you might recall him as kind of like the “surfer Jesus,” and reviewers did pan him as being too much of a pretty boy, too young-looking, even though, in fact, he was in his thirties at the time. 

Now movies from that period were not terribly graphic.  For example, I can remember in King of Kings when John the Baptist gets it.  They had a close-up of him in his cell, they panned up to the face of a guard standing over him, the guard pulls out this large sword, probably like a scimitar, you hear this ominous music, the guard raises the sword, and then they switch to another scene, so you know it’s lights out for John.  But one thing that was so terribly graphic and so terribly disturbing for me at least was the depiction of the Slaughter of the Innocents.  I remember it as a nighttime scene, which is always scarier in a dark movie theater, especially when you're little, and they showed Herod’s soldiers carrying little babies over their heads out of these huts with screaming women running after them.  I well remember how much I was bothered by that scene, and I remember telling my mother about how I felt.  And I don’t think I was ever that truly disturbed by a movie again until about forty years later when I saw Saving Private Ryan with that horrifying opening scene of D-Day. 

In early Christianity, these children in Bethlehem were known as the first martyrs of the Church, as if they had been sacrificed to save Jesus.  But when you read this section over and over, you may actually come up with a more awful conclusion.  You see, the conventional understanding is that when the Wise Men did not return to Herod and specifically identify the Christ child, the way Judas later identified Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Herod was then forced to eliminate all likely suspects, all potential contenders for his throne.  But the text says he felt he was “outwitted” by the Wise Men.  Not just that he was “disobeyed” or “ignored” by the Wise Men; Herod was “outwitted.”  Could it have been that Herod thought that the parents of the Christ child, Joseph and Mary, had been “tipped off” by the Wise Men, as opposed to the angel of Lord, and that Herod assumed they were already gone, had already gotten away from Bethlehem?  In that case, the slaughter was simply meaningless terror, a lashing out, which makes the story even less palatable as far as any overall heavenly plan is concerned. 

Why would God allow that to happen?  Why does he save his son but leave all the other sons to their fates?  Why does he leave them in the hands of this monster?  What kind of plan is that?  Isn't it all senseless?  But then, is that kind of senseless terror so strange in our world?  Even in modern times in the Middle East, we know Saddam Hussein ordered poison-gas attacks on whole Kurdish villages.  There had to be many children lost in those attacks.  We know that in 1982, the Syrian regime massacred 20,000 of its own people in putting down an uprising.  Again, many innocent children must have been lost. 

We’ve certainly known senseless terror in this country as well.  Even before September 11^th, there was April 19^th, 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing.  Lately, of course, we tend to worry so much about foreign threats, about people who seem to be speaking Arabic, or women with scarves on their heads, but we need to remember Oklahoma City and the evil amongst us.  For like a Herod or a Saddam, an American can unfortunately be quite capable of killing large numbers of fellow citizens.  But what I always find so painful in remembering Oklahoma City was that nineteen children were killed, who were in the day-care center on the bottom floor, and some of them very small children too.  And also so horrible at the memorial service was the mother holding a picture of her only two sons who were lost.  Again we can hear Rachel crying.  So in a way that was our own slaughter of the innocents.

But again why do we have to hear about these tragedies in Bethlehem or Oklahoma City so near to the time of Christmas when we are supposed to have so much joy and hope? Well, unfortunately, we too often see joy and sorrow mixed up.  And after all, we are often told how we can’t really separate the story of the babe in the Manger from the story of Christ on the cross.  And there were signs of this even in the Christmas story:  One of the gifts of the Wise Men was myrrh, which is meant for one who is to die.  So should we be surprised to find great earthly sorrow tied up with the Christmas story?

So it's always there; it's all foretold; it's all God's plan.  God did save his son but not those other sons in Bethlehem.  God's plan, however, did proceed with Christ's ministry and with the Easter story, when God did give up his son to die, his only son, not as an infant, but on that day in Jerusalem on the cross. 

Okay, so that's God's plan, but what is our comfort, what is our solace when we read about or, worse yet, live through awful tragedies such as these?  We have no easy answers in this life of sorrows.  Why does God seem to stand by while the innocent suffer?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  These questions linger; there is always the mystery.  You know when I was in law school, our toughest class by far was Constitutional Law.  It's a subject taught by the most distinguished professors and is the most intellectually demanding.  And of all the subjects in law school, I think it is the most—dare I say—“theological.”  One day we were going over a very dense case and having real trouble with it.  Our professor, a nationally renowned scholar, looked around the room and sensed our difficulty and said, “If you're confused, you're in the right room.”

I say to you now if you're confused by our Gospel, if you're confused by Christianity, if you're confused by God, you're in the right room.  But unlike me who only left the classroom confused, you leave here maybe confused but at the same time enlightened, enlightened by the blessing of his promise.  When God sent his son to his death, it was for all of us, and we know we have the promise of everlasting life, for on the cross Christ destroyed death.  That is what is promised us.  And while it is undeniably hard during times of grief to focus on that promise, that promise of everlasting life remains.  And it is a warm comfort to know that Christ, in giving up his life, died to save all the children of the world, whether they are in Bethlehem or in Oklahoma City, and whatever madman takes them. 

And if I could be permitted just one more one-liner, the great writer Robert Louis Stevenson, once said, “The duty of a Christian is not to succeed, but to fail, and to fail cheerfully.”  I've always loved that quotation as it has an almost Buddhist or Zen quality to it.  But how do you fail cheerfully?  Maybe you fail cheerfully by knowing that you have that promise of everlasting life from Christ's death on the cross, as do your loved ones.  And by that good news, we can draw strength during our own times of crisis and even when we suffer vicariously by reading the paper or watching the news of all these tragedies around the world.  This promise will carry you through all those dark valleys.  So, when you leave here today, you leave with that, with that promise, that promise that will be kept. Now may that peace which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.  

Sermon on Luke

Delivered June 10, 2007

Luke 7:11-17

King James Version (KJV)

          ¹¹And it came to pass the day after, that he went into a city called Nain; and many of his disciples went with him, and much people.  ¹²Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city was with her.  ¹³And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not.  ¹⁴And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still.  And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.  ¹⁵And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother.  ¹⁶And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people.  ¹⁷And this rumour of him went forth throughout all Judaea, and throughout all the region round about.

Today’s Gospel lesson has Jesus bringing someone back from the dead.  Jesus comes into the town of Nain and finds a group of people bearing the body of a young man.  Jesus sees this sad procession and the grieving mother, and in one of three instances of his raising from the dead, he tells the man to get up, and that did it:  The man simply sits up and starts talking; no CPR, no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  This would seem, then, to be a happy ending, a Hollywood ending, really, with the tragedy of death erased. 

         (I do need to interrupt this sermon for a brief public service announcement:  Just because Jesus doesn’t need to know CPR, doesn’t mean you don’t have to, so get trained!  Keep an eye out for upcoming classes listed in the bulletin.) 

         Now back to our sermon.  Throughout our lives, we must get used to those we know and love passing away.  And even when it happens to those close to us, while we are certainly affected, we usually end up coping and getting on with our lives.  But if you’re like me, one situation that is a little different, not necessarily tougher or more tragic, but just different from other grief events, is when someone we know right around our age dies.  When someone in your own general age group dies, then you have a natural association, a built-in empathy, and that is a little harder to shake.  And it may not even necessarily affect you emotionally, especially if you weren’t close to the person, but intellectually, you do run the numbers. 

         In my life, there have been two periods where a number of friends and acquaintances my same age died.  The first period was in high school, unfortunately.  Several fatal car accidents occurred, as did two suicides, a drug overdose, and even a murder, that being a poor fellow working the late-night shift at a gas station who was gunned down during a robbery.  Now in high school, you have a twinkling of mortality, but in a way, your reaction to such episodes is all of a piece with that morbid sense that many young people possess, especially the males of the species, as if death is almost something cool.  And many think they’re indestructible, bullet-proof, and so the thought seems to be that it’s these other dudes who are the ones buying the farm; that’s them, not me.  It’s always the other guy, after all.

         After high school, I managed to go on for a long time without someone I knew my age dying.  That stopped just a few years ago, when my closest friend at work died of breast cancer.  And after that, I seemed to be in some kind of actuarial stretch where suddenly a lot of people I knew born in the Eisenhower years were passing on.  And most recently, the husband of another friend from work died quite suddenly.  I’ll call him Sam.  He was only a year older than me, and a serious runner, even more so than me.  Now when Sam died, it was so untimely, so shocking that we weren’t even sure the family would have a memorial service.  But they did, and I went to it, along with many others from the office.  I drove two of the secretaries to the service, and, as usual, I was running late, so I ended up having to race over there like a bat out of hell.  And all the way there, I was worried about the irony of possibly dying on the way to a memorial service.  But we did get there on time, and it was a wonderful service.  It made me think of that cliché of how funerals are for the living. 

         It was held up on top of Mt. Helix in an open-air service that was rather informal.  A local minister did preside, yet most of the time was taken up with people coming forward to describe Sam and what he did and his effect on their lives.  It was particularly eerie how one man got up and recalled how Sam convinced him to move out to San Diego.  On one trip out here in that process of persuasion, Sam took the fellow up to the top of Mt. Helix, and they had stood on that same spot and looked out on the city as we were then looking out. 

         I should explain that Sam was an anesthesiologist.  And I must confess that I’m a real doctor-show junkie; I won’t miss an ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House, M.D., and I’ve been that way even since Ben Casey and Dr. Kildaire.  (By the way, it’s funny how I’m a lawyer, and I watch doctor shows.  I wonder if doctors watch lawyer shows.  You might ask during your next check-up.)  Anyway, if you’re a doctor-show junkie like me, and you’re brainwashed by these undeniably unrealistic programs, you probably just picture the anesthesiologist as the guy who sits in the corner and watches if the stats are dropping. 

So on TV, they may seem like bit players, but that was why it was so wonderful to have so many of his colleagues go up and explain his practice and note especially what an important member of the surgical team he was.  One of them described how once it was Sam who was the one to say, let’s keep going, let’s continue the surgery, and that patient ended up making it due to Sam’s insistence.  So that was all very enlightening to me.  And further, it was described what a great mentor Sam had been to young anesthesiologists, some of whom had travelled a long way to be at the service.  One I remember so well who came from back east just for the service said he had not actually seen or spoken to Sam for a few years and felt bad that he had lost touch.  And so right there, he asked all of us assembled there on Mt. Helix to commit, as a memorial gesture to Sam, to get back in touch with someone who affected our lives.  What a wonderful idea. 

         Toward the end of the service, Sam’s wife, my friend, and their daughter got up to say a few words.  And the daughter, who I still remembered as this little kid and who was now this very poised young woman, spoke movingly of her father and what a hero he was to her.  And, of course, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

         In our Gospel for today, we have Jesus coming upon something like us up there on Mt. Helix, coming upon a group of people still somewhat in shock over an unexpected death.  Jesus comes to the town of Nain, which is the only time in the Bible that town is mentioned.  And it still exists today, but it is probably not much bigger now than it was then.  He arrives to find much of the town in a funeral procession.  And while Luke is rather spare in setting the scene, we have to imagine, both culturally and emotionally, what this would really be like, this picture when Jesus walks in.  We are in the Middle East, after all, and it may be helpful for our imaging to think about what we see in the Middle East today because these are traditional societies with a great continuity of ways. 

When we watch the evening news and clips are shown of funerals in Iraq or in Palestine, what do we see?  Is it like a bunch of Lutherans standing around at a pioneers’ cemetery somewhere in Minnesota, back there in our Holy Land?  No, probably not.  Those images of mourning are quite overwrought.  I’ve heard that in some of those societies, the practice even exists of hiring women to specifically wail at funerals.  I understand that is where we get the word “ululate.”  Now in our story, we have Jews in mourning, but again, if we watch a funeral on the news in Israel after a bombing or other attack, it is likely not that much different in the pitch of emotion, in the raw outburst of grief.  So although our text is quite matter-of-fact, quite Sgt. Friday, we have to read this in an imaginative way and appreciate the likely enveloping emotional atmosphere that Jesus was walking into with these people so stricken.  Undoubtedly, you have men and women crying out and, as we might think, coming apart. 

         And what is really special about this death?  Who is the deceased?  What is his status?  He’s an only son, right?  Some of you may know that Linda and I were in the Peace Corps many years ago, and we were in South Korea, another very traditional society, where we taught English in their middle schools.  When we first arrived there in 1977, we were told how the year before, there was a terrible incident at the so-called Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ, separating North and South Korea, where two American officers were killed rather savagely by the North Koreans.  It was referred to at that time as an ax murder because they had gone there to the border area to trim some trees that were obstructing observation and in the ensuing melee, they had been attacked with their own axes.  This story was told to us in our training to illustrate how traditional Korean society worked by its reaction to the deaths of the two Americans.  Now one of the officers was married and had small children and the other one was married but with no children.  Out in the countryside, in the villages, the old Korean women were crying openly when the story of the killings came out, but they were only crying over one of the men.  Which man did they cry over:  The father or the other man?  It was the other man.  Now that was a trick question because I didn’t give you all the facts:  The other man was an only son. 

         So in our Gospel, we have the widow before Jesus, the widow who has lost her only son.  And the text says that Jesus was moved by her plight and had compassion for the widow and told her, do not cry, and then he brought the son back to life.  Now usually in these kinds of miracle stories, we focus on the miracle, the thing we can’t do.  The walking on water, the driving out of demons, the feeding of a multitude with a few fishes, or the bringing back from the dead.  But maybe we should take the story apart a little more.  Why does Jesus do what he does?  Is it because the son was such a great guy?  Was he like Sam the anesthesiologist I knew who was so much beloved and had helped so many?  We don’t know.  We don’t really know anything about him; Luke doesn’t tell us.  He might have been a terrible person.  But we know his loss to his mother, such that Jesus was moved.  And Jesus recognized her grief in the midst of all the welling up of emotion I suggested earlier was probably taking place. 

Some of you recall that often at Christmastime, Pastor Phil would give a sermon on Jesus’ birth.  And he explained how we typically focus on the virgin birth as so miraculous.  But Pastor Phil explained that we should focus on God becoming flesh, that is, God coming down to us in the form of a baby.  That is the big deal.  A virgin birth by itself God could phone in, but to come down to us and be one of us is the big deal. And likewise here, the big deal may not be the bringing back from the dead, for after all this is only a temporary reprieve; the only son still won’t live forever; he hasn’t found the tree of life.  Maybe the big deal is Jesus feeling pity for the widow, being with the widow, God showing his compassion here with us on Earth.  And that is how I say we reenact that show of compassion whenever we go to a funeral or otherwise provide support for the bereaved.        

You know if you have children in college and if they take psychology courses, they probably come home and explain the world to you; they are sometimes kind enough to do that for you.  Some of them may even study the teachings of Carl Jung, the son of a Lutheran pastor incidentally, who came up with the idea of archetypes.  Now what is an archetype?  When we come up for communion, for example, we are acting out an archetype.  We are reenacting the Last Supper, and sharing as the disciples shared with Jesus that last time.  And in a way whenever we experience grief or empathy at the death of someone, we are reenacting the feeling of Jesus when he saw the widow of Nain.  That is what I’d like us to take away from this story, not so much the raising from the dead, but that Jesus was with this widow. 

         And it doesn’t end there, and of course, it didn’t end at Nain.  Later it was Jesus who died on the cross, and there were those in mourning around him, and those who needed comforting.  For Jesus is an only son too, right?  And by his resurrection, we are comforted.

         And so whether we are at Nain or on top of Mt. Helix, we struggle, and we try and cope.  You know when I was sitting up there thinking about Sam, I remembered one of the last times I spoke to him.  As I said, being a doctor-show junkie, I naturally asked him about his practice, and he told me, boiling it down to the simplest terms, how his job was so tough because as an anesthesiologist, you have to bring people so close to death such that they are in a state to be able withstand the stresses of surgery.  And he lived with that knowledge every day in his work.  And you remember how I said it was so moving toward the end of Sam’s memorial service that his daughter spoke, leaving everyone in a rather stunned state.  But the minister closed by saying how although the circumstances were awful that brought us up to the top of Mt. Helix, it’s still a beautiful world, and we have to embrace the mystery of this all and have faith.  Now may that peace which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.