January 5, 2025
Matthew 2:16 – 23
So tomorrow is the last day of the 12 days of Christmas. After months of preparation, months of consumerist frenzy, months of economists holding their breath to see what Christmas retail numbers would tell us, after weeks of Advent, the celebration of Christmas Eve and Day, family gatherings, gift exchanges, cards, travel, trees, decorations up, decorations down, after all of that, Christmas is at an end. I don’t know about you, but I could use a nap.
Christmas has not always been such a big deal in the Christian calendar. It didn’t really take over the whole culture in the way it does now until the 19th century. But ironically, even though Christmas hasn’t always been such a central part of the Christian year, it has always been a subject of fierce controversy and bitter arguments.
Take the date itself, for instance, December 25th. The Bible doesn’t give us any specific date for Jesus’ birth, and the December date was first suggested in about the year 220. The church didn’t officially adopt December 25th as the birthday of Jesus until sometime around the year 330 or 340. Historians argue about exactly how we arrived at December 25, but there are basically two reasons. The first was that people figured maybe the angel visited Mary and told her she was pregnant sometime around the end of March. I’m not sure why they thought that, but they did. And if that was true, then nine months later would be the end of December. So that’s one way we get to December 25th as the birthday of Jesus.
Christians also kind of appropriated the date from the Roman Empire, because around December 25, the Roman Empire would celebrate the winter solstice as the birthday of the Sun. Every day after the sun’s birthday, we got a few minutes more sunlight. So when Christianity came along, we just substituted Jesus for the Sun – we called him the light of the world and made December 25th his birthday. To this day, no one knows exactly why or how all of that happened, but nowadays we use December 25th because we’re used to it.
But when it comes to Christmas controversy, the date of the holiday is just the beginning. For centuries, some Christians have said we should not have Christmas trees, because they date back to a non-Christian Roman custom of putting evergreen trees in the home for decoration in wintertime. And if you have problems with Christmas trees, you’re probably also going to object to lighting candles in Advent wreaths, because that practice is a variation on the celebration of Yule, an ancient pre-Christian Germanic and Celtic holiday when a log was burnt for a couple of weeks around the winter solstice to celebrate the growing light.
In the 17th century Christian Puritans looked at all this and just decided to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether. For them, Christmas was a frivolous thing with dubious Catholic origins that wasn’t Biblical and shouldn’t be celebrated at all. Which seems like overkill to me, but I guess it made more sense to the Puritans.
Of course, we’ve had our own much more recent fights over Christmas. In this country, there’s been an endless amount of argument over whether it’s better to wish people happy holidays or merry Christmas; about whether Christmas has become too commercialized (the answer to that, by the way, is yes); about whether we should boycott retailers who don’t specifically wish people Merry Christmas; about whether all of this is part of some insidious conspiracy to make Christians into an oppressed minority, and all the rest of it.
But you know, in all of these historical controversies right up to the present day, there is one common denominator. Whether we’re talking about Christmas trees or Christmas gifts or the dates of Roman holidays or whether Christmas has gotten too commercial, or whether we should say holiday or Xmas or whatever, the one common idea in all of it seems to be that we’ve lost focus on what’s important. People worry that we’ve somehow neglected what the holiday is actually about. They say we’ve taken the Christ out of Christmas.
Personally, I’m not so worried about that. I think people understand perfectly well what this holiday is about, at least in general terms. Every December, people in our neighborhood call us up here at the church. In fact, I got one of those calls on Christmas Eve, in the early afternoon. People call because they want to know if we’ll accept donations to food pantries, or if we’re taking warm clothes to give away, or if we could use a few extra grocery cards to help feed people. It happens every Advent. People know what churches do – or at least what we’re supposed to do. And I’m always proud of this church that I can say, yes, of course, bring it by. We do that. Every year, we have more people in worship on Christmas Eve (and Easter morning) than any other time throughout the year. That tells me people know what the holiday is about. They get that it’s a big deal. Maybe they just don’t see how what we do here applies to the rest of their lives, or the rest of the year, or the rest of the world.
So here’s what I wonder. What if the problem is not that we’ve taken the Christ out of Christmas? What if the problem is we’ve taken the Herod out of Christmas?
The scripture passage we heard this morning is the final part of the Christmas story in the Gospel of Matthew. Travelers come to Herod trying to find the child they’ve learned about through a miraculous star. Matthew calls them “wise men.” In Greek, the original language of the Gospel, they’re called “Magi,” which is where we get our word “magician.” But these guys are not what we would call magicians. They’re more like astronomers or astrologers. They track the movement of the stars. They’ve seen changes in the night sky, and in that ancient culture it was commonly believed that changes in the stars meant there were important changes on earth. Matthew doesn’t tell us where they’re from or how long they’ve traveled. The point is they can see what Herod the King, in his blind lust for domination, cannot see or refuses to see: a child has been born who will change the world’s balance of power.
When Herod learns about this, his response is genocidal: he orders his soldiers to murder every male child under the age of two in and around Bethlehem.
Now in case you’re wondering, there is no historical record of Herod giving this order. But there wouldn’t necessarily have been a record of it, given that it happened in a backwater of the Roman Empire among a minority of people that Rome didn’t care much about. And people who lived under Herod’s rule would have no trouble believing that he gave that murderous command. Herod had numerous members of his own family murdered in his ascent to power. And he did in fact give an order that when he died, one person in every family in his Kingdom should be killed – because he wanted people to weep at his death. So protecting his power by killing children? In Herod’s kingdom, you’d call that a Tuesday. Nothing unusual about it.
To put the Christ in Christmas is to celebrate a beautiful, touching idea. It’s to celebrate God’s light in the darkness; to remember the Prince of Peace born among us as a child of the poor. It reminds us to serve others, to give generously of what we have, to treat everyone we encounter with compassion and humility and even reverence – especially those who have less power and less privilege than we do, because the Christmas story tells us that among them we will find God.
But putting the Herod back in Christmas, that puts a certain edge on the story. That makes it even more a story of our time, of our world, and not just at this time of year. Because some power-mad Herod is always desperately trying to hold onto control by killing the hope and the light of the Christmas child. Herod is long past caring how much damage he has to do to hold power. He has no hesitation to murder children, or turn a young family into refugees fleeing his tyranny, or to kill them if they don’t. That’s not just a story about the ancient near East. That’s a story about the 21st century, all over the world. Here in the 21st century, we call that a Tuesday.
In Syria, under the Assad regime, Herod tried to kill the child. In Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Herod is trying to kill the child. In Yemen and Ukraine, China among the Uyghur people, Myanmar among the Rohingya, in our own country, where Advent saw yet another school shooting and New Year’s celebrations are interrupted by lone wolf terrorists, here in our own country the child is in danger. Herod is always trying to kill the child.
But I don’t think the story we heard this morning leaves us without hope. I don’t think it means that at the end of our Christmas celebrations, we just go back to a grim and cynical world of business as usual. Because the story tells us that somehow, the child survives. Hope and redemption survive. God’s work in the world goes on. I think the story tells us the child survives because of the willingness of ordinary, everyday people like Mary and Joseph, or maybe like us, to listen deeply to God and care for the light with which we’ve been entrusted.
I believe that each one of us is entrusted with the light. And as intimidating as that may be, I hope the Christmas story also reminds us that we’re up to the task. It takes openness to God, a willingness to trust as Mary and Joseph did: to trust in our dreams and our hopeful visions. But we have what we need, and what we have is enough. There are Herods arrayed throughout the world. And they’re scary, no doubt. But in the end, the Kindom wins. The light shines in the darkness. The light shines in the hearts of ordinary people. And as the gospel of John reminds us, the darkness will never overcome it.