So, Merry Christmas! With that merrymaking out of the way, this Sunday we get hit with the other side of Christmas, a story most of us, especially us Protestants, tend to ignore because it doesn't fit in with all our jingle and Crosby and yule logs and gingerbread. It's known as the Commemoration of the Holy Innocents.
Most of y'all know that the Catos and I celebrate Christmas on the 26th, when all the services are done and we can relax for a minute. This year, Fr. Brooks and I were zooming with a rabbi friend of ours from the south. We were talking about Hanukkah and Christmas and how they were happening together.
And she asked, “How do y'all deal with the corporatization of Christmas? What do you tell people who can't bring themselves to pretend to be merry because everything so eagerly wants them to be? How do you tell them it's ok to be blue on Christmas?”
We tried to explain the importance of celebrating the real twelve days of Christmas, because each day gives us the opportunity to examine another facet of the Incarnation of God. We certainly miss something if the only aspect of God we look at is a baby in a barn, so maybe we need all these other days to remember what else goes on.
And that led us to the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Typically we remember them on December 28th, but their story is tied so closely to Christ’s story and our world today that we can’t ignore them, and the bishop had asked that, if possible, we use these readings.
You see, when Jesus was born, King Herod caught wind of what was going on. Enraged, he issued an order. He didn’t know which child it was that would supplant him or where, exactly, so he did the unthinkable. He ordered the death of every child under the age of two in Bethlehem.
In tragic irony, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had already fled to Egypt, so, in spite of all that killing, Herod failed. And that’s the story of Holy Innocents. It’s awful, but it’s a part of Christmas, a sliver of the Incarnation we celebrate today that points to something real and true about our world.
Brooks mentioned a hymn set aside for this day called “Lully, Lulla, Lullay.” It’s meant to be the lament of the mothers as they find their children, and it’s haunting. I’d always assumed it was a kind of lullaby, a heartbreaking goodbye, maybe.
But the rabbi interrupted him. “Did you say, ‘lullay?’ That’s Hebrew,” she said, “It shows up all over the prophets and in Lamentations. Literally, it means ‘to loosen,’ like a knot, but it’s usually translated to be ‘would that it were not so.’”
Would that it were not so.
As the Holy Family rushes away and hides in relief, as the world reaches to the heights of heaven rejoicing in God on Earth, as American consumers begin the second phase of gift-giving, the phase of returning, the mothers of Bethlehem weep, they weep their song.
Lully, lulla, lullay, Untie this grief from me. Loosen this knot in my heart. Would that it were not so.
See, we so often forget this part. It only shows up in Matthew, like the story of the Three Wise Men. We all know about them, but weirdly enough, the part of the Christmas story we tend to forget is the ending of the Wise Men’s tale.
Instead on this Sunday, we usually hear the reading from the first lines of the Gospel of John. You know it: In the beginning there was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God. Later we are told that this word is also the light in the world and that darkness comprehended it not.
And then we move on, knowing that this whole Jesus thing was the plan from the dawn of time...from before the dawn of time. And we are comforted.
But I'm actually glad we get to hear this part of the story because, while Christmas is a beautiful time in many ways, there is a cost to the arrival of our savior. It’s not always one paid willingly, and mercifully it’s rarely as expensive as those mothers’, but the cost remains.
Because what we often forget is that shining light on what hides in the dark only begins the path forward. Those things that hide in the dark don’t like being exposed for what they are. They’ll either cower or fight. Herod hid in the dark and fought the light, and while that’s not the Light’s fault, it is a result.
Our world hides many Herods. Lately and mercifully, it seems there’s light shining anew in lots of places. That can make it seem like the world’s nothing but Herods and everything’s falling apart, so why even bother anymore. But that’s just not so. Because when the Light breaks through, we can finally see those Herods and recognize what they are. The Light does this for us. That recognition is the beginning, and darkness comprehends it not.
But this is why I think it's important that we remember today those Holy Innocents. There are Herods in the world, yes, more than maybe we realized. But maybe the Herods shouldn’t get the attention. Maybe it’s the Innocents themselves and the ones they’re taken from that deserve remembering.
Every single one of us has experienced loss. We know pain, we know what has been taken from us, we know what we’ve taken from ourselves.
Somehow seasons like this amplify can all those hurts. Maybe it’s the realization that there’s one less person to wrap a gift for, the chair you don’t have to pull in from the living room to fill out the dining room table anymore, the reason for baking a certain kind of cookie is no longer around.
Maybe it’s the different pain of knowing all those gatherings are going on somewhere else but you’re not welcome there anymore. Or you are, but you just can’t raise the courage or the humility to go. Maybe it’s shame over something you said last year or hurt over something said to you.
Or maybe it’s as simple as the everyday tragedies normal people endure. Car accidents and medical anomalies and the random chaos of survival and death, they hurt.
And on days like Christmas or New Year’s or some random day that really shouldn’t have any extra meaning but for some reason weighs heavier than others, on days like that, the lament of the mothers wailing in Herod’s wake proclaims a shared grief, and lets us know that even that pain is part of this story.
I will never know the particular pain inflicted on those women, but I know pain, and while the words of their lament are not mine, their song pulls my grief to the surface where a strange comfort enfolds me in a shared lament.
These days, many in the world are growing uncomfortably comfortable with disturbing headlines from home and abroad. But I hope we ache when we hear of children killed in wars on the other side of the globe and in the hallways of schools much closer to home. I pray our hearts break with every injustice, every breach of safety, every betrayal or loss or inexplicable pain. Darkness comprehends that all too well.
But so does the light.
I know I’ve said this a few times this year, but Christmas is only partly about that little cherub-cheeked baby. Christmas begins a life full of hope and love. But we know the work that hope and love so often take. The road getting there is hard, and painful, and full of suffering and loss, trials and difficulties.
But think of this: as he grew, Jesus had to have known about what Herod did to those innocent children. He had to have heard about the lament of all those mothers. And he had to have known why. He had to have known that he was at the very center of this event.
Jesus knows the loss of those mothers more than any other outside their unhappy conclave. And he knows ours, he shares in our lament, he bears our burdens and the causes of them, and he loves us through it all.
It’s as though something grows and spreads until it spills over and wraps us in that sharing, a swaddling of empathy. It doesn’t remove the loss, the pain. It names it, holds it, cries it out, and lives alongside so many others naming, holding, and crying out their own. And living -- stubbornly living -- in spite of whatever void remains where hope once resided. And offering it up to God. As worthy an offering as any other because it comes from deep within us.
That may sound like darkness, but I’ve been in that dark abyss, and I can tell you this: the darkness comprehends that not. Because there is also light. And life can continue when it seems there’s no reason to, because there is light. And light comprehends.
Y’all, I’m not trying to be a downer here. Quite the opposite. I want y’all to know that while churches are many things, while we here are many things, we remain a place where your sorrow, your pain, your grief, whatever it is that you carry -- we remain a place where your stubborn light in the face of so much darkness will be treasured.
And you are not wrong or broken or unfaithful because you might feel sorrows while the rest of the world slogs through false joy, slowly winding down it's confused celebration, groping to remember what it is we really celebrate, what it is we treasure about this time.
Sorrow is part of the Jesus's story from the beginning, and living with that may bring us more deeply into this sacred story than anyone knows.
We may not all be Innocents, but we are all Holy. And while you may not always see it on our faces or hear it in our pews, we each carry something worthy of God. We add our voices to that angel choir's song stretching back as far as those Bethlehem’s mothers and beyond. In spite of the darkness, that is our light.
And so I say this with no irony intended, Merry Christmas.