I usually don’t do this, but something compelled me the other day to click on a video link in the news cycle that I knew would be hard to watch.
It contained fatal violence, and I wasn’t surprised to see a warning at the beginning, cautioning viewers about the severity of content, giving me a chance to look away, to avoid exposing myself to the severe contents if I so chose.
A Good person lost her life on my screen, right there in front of me.
Today’s message is going to be similar that video. [Not to worry, there won’t be video per se, just the audio from this microphone.]
Here’s your pre-video (pre-reflection) warning… it won’t be easy.
This isn’t a feel good, new year’s, new beginning kind of offering.
Today we will talk about murder, unnecessary killing, human against human.
We heard about it in Matthew’s gospel reading, embedded right there amidst the Epiphany story of wise people and dreams and gifts and stars.
Yes, enfolded into our holiday story is state-sanctioned violence.
If we don’t look away, if we choose to click the link in our minds and hearts, we expose ourselves to the anguished screams of parents over the cribs left empty.
The story of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents is typically observed on Dec. 28th. I wasn’t here that day, but the message is important enough, timely enough these days, to address it now.
In fact, it’s hauntingly timely.
I understand that we want the holidays, and even the afterglow, to be gentle and joyous, safe and sentimental. And goodness knows that after this past year, this is what many of us yearn for.
Yet we are seekers of truth, and the truth of the holiday is…Jesus is born into trauma.
When I hear that word – trauma – I first think of the PTSD of soldiers who experienced the atrocities of war. Needless to say, that trauma is real, often leaving a lifetime of scar, on bodies, families, and on communities.
And there are another kinds of trauma, just as real, but more hidden.
Domestic trauma happens behind closed doors, and a vast majority of the time is quietly carried in the bodies of women and children.
We know King Herod as a mass murderer of the political type, by ordering the killing of boys under two years old. What you might not know is that historians tell us that Herod was also a domestic abuser.
He beat his wife Mariamne, before having her killed. His own household was abused long before his brutality was turned on the public.
Herod is a good example that the same logic that justifies domestic violence develops into the logic that justifies political violence.
The same mindset that says I will do what I want with your body is the same one that says I am entitled to your possessions, your land and labor, your future.
Underneath is the same need for dominance, need of control, and hatred for vulnerability. They reflect the same absence of grace, but at different levels.
The killing of the Holy Innocents in Jesus’ time echoes a previous story of Israel.
Can you think of an earlier story with a similar narrative?
Remember the story of Pharaoh fearing the growing population of the Hebrews, and ordering all baby boys to be killed?
One child – Moses – hidden and sent in a basket down a river, grows to lead his
people out of enslavement, procuring freedom in the face of political oppression.
In the Gospel, Matthew’s story is the same.
Another ruler, clinging to power, ordering the killing of children.
And yet, against the odds, another child, another liberator, survives.
This type of state-sanctioned violence is not limited to biblical passages, is it?
As was the case for Jesus, and Moses before that, children today are born into a world where they too are targeted because they represent futures that tyrants cannot control.
In all of these narratives there are systems and leaders that believe violence is a legitimate means to securing power.
And we, as seekers of the truth, must acknowledge this and not look away.
These types of mass killings are too numerous to name. One devastating example in the modern era is the Holocaust.
The practice of resistance – our focus this month – includes remembering, and we must. However, these issues are not confined to history books.
This is underscored every time we learn of another incidence of antisemitic violence around the globe, such as the mass shooting recently at Bondi Beach.
Practicing resistance means to name the destruction, grieve the dead and injured, and stand with the oppressed.
Another current-day example is the war in Gaza, with life-saving infrastructures such as hospitals and schools being destroyed, while starvation conditions are deliberately created.
Except it’s no longer baby boys under two years old, but baby boys and girls who never reach their first birthday.
At least 1,000 babies under the age of one have been killed in Gaza since the October 2023 attack.
These are current-day Holy Innocents. Our Holy Innocents.
For us ‘civilized’ folks in the U.S., it’s easy to point out the barbaric violence of these other countries.
However, part of practicing resistance is resisting the avoidance of looking in the mirror.
The truth is uncomfortable. As Al Gore says, the truth can be inconvenient.
Our country developed and operated systems of oppression used on Indigenous peoples, and through chattel slavery and Jim Crow measures that Hitler adopted.
If you are in this country and paying the least bit of attention, you will recognize the various stages of genocide, categorized by Gregory Stanton. They are:
Classification (Us and Them).
Symbolization (naming… Gypsies, ‘Indians’. Yellow stars for Jews. Swastikas).
Discrimination (denial of rights by the powerful over the powerless).
Dehumanization (of the Them’s).
Organization (formally through gov’t and militaries, informally through mobs).
Polarization (the driving apart of the Us’s and Them’s).
Preparation (planning goals through inflammatory rhetoric…”If we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us).
Persecution (Victims are separated out, their rights systematically violated).
Extermination (mass killings, rape to genetically alter the victim group)
Denial (attempts to cover up, intimidate, block investigations, blame)
We have been watching these stages categorically unfold before us in our country, especially in the past year.
People, with lives and hopes and dreams like you and me, divided.
Legal or illegal.
Brown or white.
Papers or no papers.
People arbitrarily labeled criminals and cast as threats.
People collected as if by animal control officers, detained in inhuman facilities before being shipped to some foreign country of which they may or may not have any association.
People blamed for an unstable economy that, in truth, they helped to strengthen.
Each of these stages apply to us, in America, except maybe not Extermination through killing as much. That’s changing too now, isn’t it?
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Friends, our faith requires that our eyes be wide open, not looking away, in order to see that The Feast of the Holy Innocents is dreadfully relevant now.
You’ve heard me say it a couple of times, and I’ll say it again…
Christmas isn’t only about tradition and bountiful meals and festive songs.
It’s certainly not about escaping the world’s pain.
Jesus was not born into safety; he was born under threat, became a refugee, and was raised under occupation.
He knew about trauma, and clearly God was with him every moment of the way.
He couldn’t have been the light that he was otherwise.
What does this mean, then, for us…us who are experiencing these dark circumstances that pull on our spirits and wear away our hope?
It means that God is with those who are harmed… in private settings and by public systems.
God is with and within refugees.
God is with and within survivors of domestic violence and abused children.
God is with and within women whose bodies are violated.
God is with and within people whose sexual identity is politicized and endangered.
God is with and within the targeted and the murdered.
Yes, God is with us.
The more challenging question is – Are we with God?
It’s challenging because God is in these seemingly unlikely places.
Typical places…. Sanctuaries, songs and services.
Not as easily recognized places…
In the cries heard within detention centers;
In the bruised and lacerated arms covered under long sleeves.
In long food lines.
In makeshift beds made of rubble.
In quieted bodies found beneath that rubble.
God is waiting for us in those places and faces.
If we want to truly find God through the experience of these holidays, we will… not in comfort, but in solidarity. Not in nostalgia and tradition, but in courage.
Now, it should be said that exposing ourselves to the hard realities of The Feast of the Holy Innocents is not to cultivate despair.
Instead, it beckons us to the heart and soul of our faith…
calling us to….
Say the victims’ names.
Disrupt the oppressive patterns.
Go where God goes, where God lives,
Refuse to deny the realities.
AND let us not forget that the coin of reality has two sides.
The dark side – the gross side. And the grace side.
We’ve heard plenty about darkness.
What about that flip side?
Despite all the darkness, grace believes that love has the final word.
Because tyrants tumble and Pharaohs fall, and villains are vanquished.
And all the while, the deliberate evolution of emancipation – through love and courage – remains on course.
I will leave you with this poem, written just hours ago, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. It beautifully speaks to both sides of the coin.
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