Herod - then and now A non lectionary sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23

Councillor David Horton gets it wrong. In The Vicar of Dibley the local councillor gets asked to play the part of Herod in the local nativity. Unable to accept that poor shepherds might be closer to God than Israel’s King - albeit a puppet King who danced to Rome’s instructions - Horton subverts the nativity by giving sweets to the children leading one to pitifully reply;

“I Love you Herod.”

The reality is that Herod could have gone a fair way to writing “The Prince” fifteen hundred years before Machiavelli wrote his masterpiece of political cynicism.

He had ability. He left quite a legacy of building projects. And he knew how to play diplomacy somehow managing to walk a tightrope between the demands of his Roman masters and a Jewish people who never regarded him as one of their own.

His reign begun with an act of bloodshed in which he massacred practically the whole of the Sanhedrin. It ended with a King by now crippled with extreme pain having a great number of distinguished people brought to Jericho with instructions (not carried out as it turns out) left for them to be killed on Herod’s death so that his death might be accompanied by displays of grieving.

As for his family, he killed a number of relatives including at least three sons and his favourite wife. Not for nothing did Caesar Augustus comment that it was better to be such a man’s swine than to be his son.

So David Horton aside, most of us feel discomfort at Herod figuring in the Christmas story. Now to be fair theologians have long debated the historicity of the story of the massacre of children in Bethlehem. Some argue that this story is more about Matthew’s gospel proclamation than it is about history. Certainly there are no historical records that attest to such a massacre although it might be argued that if confined to Bethlehem the numbers killed would be small and thus ignored. Quite frankly it strikes me as a case of you pays your money and makes your choice.

But the story is such that it should never be ignored. It is a story that takes us into the darkness of the world. It is a powerful response to the sort of facile optimism that fails to take evil seriously and believes we can simply be happy all the day. Indeed it reminds us that it is for a world of imperfections that sometimes are horrifically grotesque that Jesus came.

In fact in this regard Matthew offers a similar understanding to John’s Gospel. There the evangelist speaks of light entering a world in which there is darkness. Matthew demonstrates this through the Herod story. And Christian hope suggests that wherever the darkness’s of cruelty and injustice exist Christ shines a light and bids us to join in incarnational ministry by bringing light to the darkest corners of our communities and world.

Back to the story. The Holy Family under threat are forced as others had been in previous centuries to seek refuge in Egypt that had once been a place of bondage. Israel has become unsafe. Only in Egypt can they be safe. And in this we see a story constantly repeated today  as millions of people live as refugees across the globe often badly treated which makes it good news that next year Nottingham City Council are set to make Nottingham one of a number of Cities of Santuary in the UK. Indeed according to Matthew when the Holy Family return home after Herod’s death they are forced to return not to Bethlehem but due to the brutality of Archelaus who now rules in Judea to go north to Nazareth and the relative safety of an area ruled by another son of Herod  where in the meantime there had been a devastating massacre by Rome’s army but a short time earlier less than an hours walk away.

But this is a story that must not be left in the past. For it is in so many ways an ongoing story. Indeed I would suggest that what should concern us more today is the ongoing presence of Herod. Look to resource conflicts around the world in places such a Congo. Look to the sale of weaponry to countries that cannot afford the bare necessities for their own peoples. Look to tyrants waging wars on their own people as with Assad’s Syria to use but one of many examples. Look to the use of torture in so many countries and it being ignored when convenient by other counties and yes standby for gloomy revelations of our country being caught up in at the very least covering up of some renditions to the torturers of Damascus and Tripoli amongst others during the past decade. Look to those who have sought refuge but are deported to places such as Uzbekistan as has been British practice for a number of years. Look to gang war on the streets. Look to the continued rampage of diseases such as HIV and the all too common failure to provide the necessary drugs to sufferers and would be sufferers. Look to the lives blighted by alcohol, drugs and yes the insidious disease that is gambling. Look to the homes where there is choice between consuming heat or food. Look to the homes where unemployment low pay or whatever mean than not just adults but children also lose the capacity to hope. Look to a rich west where incredibly many are consigned to dependence on food banks. Just look!

For this Jesus will soon tell us that he has come for the most vulnerable. He will speak of bringing life with abundance.  Still he struggles with Herod.

But because we recognise with John’s gospel that darkness cannot put out the light of Christ, we move forwards even into 2012 with hope in our hearts. We gaze in wonder at possibilities for transformation knowing that being a friend of justice is part of the calling of followers of Jesus. And then engage with the cries for justice because anything else is playing games!

A boy in a manger - A sermon for Christmas Day based on Luke 2: 1-20

It’s all about a baby boy. Lying in a manger he is the epitome of helplessness. No control over body function but a tendency to exercise those lungs to bursting point when hungry or just uncomfortable - that is what he’s about.

His dependency on a mother’s care is absolute. He just needs to be held, to be loved, to be comforted, to be cared for. That is all that matters to him. Oh sure he is born into a harsh world of conflict but that does not matter a fig to him. A Jewish baby boy he has no interest in your race or nationality. You can be a a fellow Jew, a Roman or even a Palestinian, these things matter not to him. Nor does he care about our gender or our respectability - even our lack of it. He just wants to be loved.

In that he is not dissimilar from us in our infancy. But whereas we easily lose our innocence and become cynical an judgemental he never loses it. The innocent acceptance of all is something he takes into adulthood and even to a public execution.

All around him are the signs of rejection but he does not care. The circumstances of his birth are the stuff of gossip. His early teenage mother is at the centre of a scandal and the equivalents of News International journalists are all over the case but he doesn’t care. He just wants her love. And in times ahead he will be the defender of tainted women.

And when his first visitors are shepherds is he bovvered. No way! It doesn’t matter to him that smelly shepherds were at this time regarded as shift dishonest people not deemed fit to provide evidence in a court. After all they took the time to visit him and to make a fuss of him when the respectable had gone walkabout. In fact he’s going to go on mixing with the sort of people who are no better than they ought to be. And religious professionals will tut about it but does he care! As Desmond Tutu puts it his standards are “quite low!”

Later he will be visited by astrological types from the East - foreigners whose religious understandings he will be told are quite mixed up. And even if their gifts are just a little bit strange for a baby he will be grateful that they gave him the time. And later he will build bridges with another group of semi foreigners with upside down religion, the Samaritans even telling a story in which one of these despised peoples bears a passing likeness to himself.

But of course he will not be immune to harsh side of life. Israel’s King, by now a paranoid tyrant, will seek to kill him. Herod - please note not a real Jew but an Idumean hated by many of the people he ruled over - will use his soldiers like many a despot if not to save the regime to ensure dynastic succession. And this baby will no longer be safe in the town in which he was born but have to flee as a refugee becoming one of those asylum seekers against whom the Daily Mail of his day would doubtless rage. And when he moves to Nazareth he will be moving but an hours walk from  the scene of wanton destruction by imperial Rome at Sepphoris in the aftermath of Herod’s death - whose rebuilding at least gave some work to craftsmen such as Joseph. And yes his teachings will be at their sharpest when it comes to exposing injustices and cruelty for he knows these things are crippling to victims and also to perpetrators.

And later in adulthood he will just go on involving all sorts of people in an undemanding cycle of love. From the beginnings of his ministry when he proclaims good news for the poor he will be in solidarity will all manner of outcasts. Yet he will not champion violence against the wrongdoers. Even Roman military officers will be helped in their moments of need. So when we envisage Jesus as being on the side of the good guys he never hates the bad guys. Perhaps Will Campbell has it right. The only white man present when Martin Luther King formed his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Campbell later sought to minister to klansmen and rednecks over whisky explaining when challenged about this;

“We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”

And that’s the way that Jesus will live even though such inclusive love will make him enemies and ultimately lead to his torture and a public, humiliating execution.

But all of that is for the future. The question now is will you give your love to this bundle of humanity? Will you like him embrace humanity even in its less appetising forms and even when it disappoints? Will you take the risk of journeying with and following this little boy? And will you open your hearts and minds to the claim that God is uniquely in this boy? And that in him we meet the truly human and the truly Divine, that in him we God made flesh, the means of our salvation and the pattern for our living.

A very political Christmas to you all - A non lectionary sermon based on Luke 2: 1-2-

Well may I be the first to wish you A Very Political Christmas

. Yes you heard me right. I wished you A Very Political Christmas. Sure I know that some of you are thinking that this time I have lost it and gone too far.

 But I repeat I wish you a Very Political Christmas. Not in the party political sense I would add for whilst political parties are perfectly legitimate as means to work for the implementation of cherished goals, they inevitably disappoint even the most committed loyalist. For they are very human organisations and all fall short at times so that to render any political party as above criticism would quite clearly be an act of idolatry.

No when I wish you a Very Political Christmas I am thinking in terms of power and how it is exercised. However you might date the birth of Jesus and to be honest estimates very widely, he was clearly born into a world dominated by the Roman Empire and the figure of Caesar Augustus. Luke’s community for whom he writes several decades later is also dominated by that Empire and by this time Jesus followers are experiencing difficult times with the Empire. So it is worth pointing out that Luke in his account of the birth of Jesus does not hold his punches when it comes to challenging and offending Rome. We see this in the Census story which suggests an empire moving people around like pieces on a chessboard.

 And yet in so doing they unwittingly prepare the ground for the decidedly non imperial Jesus. Luke like Matthew sets the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem which has powerful connotations given that it is the town from which Israel’s greatest king David came. Hearers of the gospel would at once be jumping to the conclusion that just as David had seen off external threats so to might this new born King of whom Luke tells. But Luke goes further. We often miss the offence when he uses terms such as Lord or Saviour to describe the new born child. But these were the terms which were now being used of Rome’s emperor. Yes Luke is setting up Jesus as being truly that which Rome claimed its emperors to be. He is affirming that the new kid on the block or more accurately in the manger is the true Lord and true saviour. It is as shocking as if in Nazi Germany one other than Hitler was declared as Fuhrer. The very stuff of sedition - for if Jesus is Lord and saviour then the vacancy is filled and it is to him rather than flawed rulers in time and place that we owe our loyalty and allegiance.

 And that is why Jesus continues to be dangerous to the powers. Give him our allegiance and our vision of life and the world begin to change. Caesar Augustus had ended the civil wars of Rome by victory over rivals. At the point of the sword he had brought the pax Romana to the world. This was the peace that came through force and the threat of shock and awe, of retribution. Now comes Jesus with the message of peace for that world but this is not peace from the sword but through the power of love. On Palm Sunday they come into ultimate conflict when through different gates Jesus and Pontius Pilate enter Jerusalem through different gates - Pilate with all the might of Rome and Jesus armed only with seemingly powerless love. And down through the pages of history these two visions have been in timeless conflict. Aye there’s politics in this!

 And we see it also in the characters who fill the story. Sometimes we are tempted to expect god to work through the powerful but Luke’s nativity bypasses any equivalent of the lord Mayor’s banquet. It is instead a story of God at work amongst the marginalised. The Holy Family are incredibly ordinary in many ways. What may be seen as abnormal is the situation into which they are thrust with the possibility of shame in an honour culture which took such things seriously. Indeed there would be those who might argue from an Old Testament understanding that Mary should be stoned to death - shocking situation for a girl who would have been 13 years old at most. The first visitors to the manger would be shepherds whose standing socially was not of the highest order - outsiders with no place in the cultic worship of Israel. And what of where Jesus was born? Tradition often imagines an innkeeper sending Mary and Joseph away - a strange story given Joseph’s ancestry and Mary have relatives but a short distance away.

And this before we consider the tradition of hospitality that is so important in the Middle East. Perhaps here our problem is linguistic. The Greek word translated as Inn is kataluma. It appears elsewhere in Luke’s gospel to refer to the room in which the last supper is celebrated whilst a different Greek word is used by Luke in the parable of the Good Samaritan to refer to a commercial inn. Most probably what we see is the generosity of the have only so much’s who having no room in the guest room invite the Holy Family into the family room which would have had a manger for the animals kept at night on a ,lower level. Indeed what we see here is not the thieving of the wealthy priestly call which years later earns the rage of an adult Jesus but the generosity of the humble. And in this is a contrast. Jesus is welcomed by the lowly whilst he is ignored by the equivalent of the Great and Good to whom we sometimes refer. For what we see in the Luke’s nativity is God working not so much in the centres of power as in the margins.

And by the time Jesus begins his ministry Luke will have him speaking of good news for the poor. Christmas reminds us that Jesus occupies the margins. If we want to put Jesus at the centre of our lives then it is to the margins that we will have to travel. That is why Giles Fraser the until recently Dean of St Paul’s suggested that if Jesus was born today it might well be in an Occupation camp. In a week we shall celebrate his birth. We shall rejoice in the good news of Immanuel - God with us! In him Divinity has entered our world. Divine love has invaded our very being. And the world can never be the same again. His coming gives us direction, hope and meaning. His coming invites us into a new way of living. Now our loyalty is to him. Caesar in ancient on modern forms stands under his judgement.

So today rejoice! Embrace a political Christmas. For we put our whole beings in the hands of the one who is love for all times and for all peoples and who graciously invites us to make that journey of discovery and love with him that we might be transformed and be agents of the gospel of transformation.

 So I say it again. A Very Political Christmas to you all!