So, for those of you that don’t know this already, I have a confession. I’m kind of a church nerd. I geek out over simple things like candles, crosses, and clergy fashion. There’s a certain, admittedly strange, joy I get from knowing weird things about the church and then using that trivia to impress people at cocktail parties. In seminary, Brooks, Quinn, and I even made a Book of Common Prayer themed version of Trivial Pursuit as a way of studying liturgics. We even got Dean Turrell to cancel some staff meetings so he could play with us!
You see, I dig the church and what it has done to continually re-orient my life to God. It’s like a compass, reminding me to face the Rising Sun and the Risen Christ. Sure, from time to time, I get a little too focused on those italicized rubrics, doing things “just so,” but, hey, we’ve all got our vices. So why am I telling you all this?
Maybe I’m letting all of you know, letting myself know, that I really am a good Episcopalian before going rogue. You see, the church calendar is one of my favorite things about what we do, a way of sanctifying our daily lives as we encounter different facets of the same god year in and year out. Right now we’re in the glorious Season of Christmas.
While the rest of the world has already begun to move on, abandoning pine trees at the curb with reckless abandon, we’re only beginning to get our Christmas celebration underway. During this season, the church has set aside a few days immediately after Christmas that often go overlooked, overshadowed, rather than illuminated, by that bright star shining in Bethlehem. There’s St. Stephen the Never Celebrated - December 26th, Saint John the Taken for Granted – today on December 27th, and the Shamefully Forgotten Holy Innocents - tomorrow, December 28th. And that’s where my leanings are leading me today, rather than the muddy waters of John’s Gospel.
Because in our story, just days after his birth into this beat-up world, Jesus’ life is already threatened. King Herod, frightened by word of a new king’s challenge to his authority, releases the fury of the empire, at least his corner of it, to squash any hopes this pretender may have. Never mind that the pretender is only a child. His horrendous method? The murder of every child in Bethlehem under the age of 2.
The Holy Family escaped the slaughter, but they couldn’t escape the reality of that dirty world Jesus was born into, his joyous birth accompanied by the sorrow of death. This is the world that would defame him for preaching peace, the world that would torture him for speaking out, the world that would kill him for giving humanity cleaner options. This world, this way of encountering the world, wasn’t uncommon. It still isn’t uncommon.
There are far too many stories in our own scriptures of this same sort, a king ridding himself of an inconvenient plague of humanity: an Egyptian pharaoh, worried about his people becoming the minority, orders the slaughter of all his slaves’ children. Hence, Moses in the bullrushes. And when Moses leads his people out, the bodies of Egypt’s firstborn are left motionless in his wake. And now Bethlehem, bereft of a whole generation, weeps as the Holy Family runs, not for their lives, but for the life of their tiny child. God chooses to enter this world, a nasty place where erasing an entire generation is an acceptable political strategy. It’s one dirty tool box, indeed.
But we can’t look back and tsk-tsk at what history once allowed. Because this goes on all around us; we aren’t above these things today. Schools on far away shores -- and on our own -- are rattled far too often with voilence. Children in cages, torn from families, because of someone else’s fear emboldened by hatred or power or bigotry. And more often than we’d like to admit, it’s people claiming to be people of faith leaving destruction in their wake.
I say this not as a reprimand but as a reminder. Christmas is a complicated time. We are supposed to rejoice! We are supposed to share the Good News of the Incarnation, to revel in much-needed time with family, to let our lights pierce the darkness.
But from the very beginning the peaceful scene of the Incarnation is sullied by violence; many families need mending; and our lights rarely shine as brightly as we would hope. But while the Gospel reading from John encourages us with the light of Christ being eternal, even before the dawn of time, even there, there was darkness.
As the King James Version puts it, “The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” It’s as though Darkness sees all our lit Christmas candles and shrugs them off, going back to doing whatever dark Darkness was up to. It’s hard to imagine what justice could look like in this world. It’s hard to imagine how blood for blood couldn’t be the best answer when there seem to be no others. It’s hard to imagine a light that could snuff out darkness.
But Christ didn’t come into the world to be that long-awaited Messiah leading the armies of the faithful, conquering by the same means as the man that tried to kill him or the man that finally did. No, in fact, he so avoided that path that he went largely unrecognized. Christ came as the Messiah, yes, but he came as the Messiah of Peace. And the darkness comprehended it not.
A Messiah that so utterly baffled the authorities in their way of ruling, where violence meant strength. He neutered their power by rebuking violence, highlighting the futility of striving for peace by means of the sword. And the darkness comprehended it not.
Now maybe I’ve let the church calendar get the best of me. Maybe I’ve let my church mouse leanings overrun the joy of the season, but I hope not. I hope the Feast of the Holy Innocents provides us with a reminder. A reminder that it’s alright to mourn or be unsettled in the midst of all this Christmas joy.
A reminder that our world still needs work. A reminder that our story is just beginning.
For at Christmas the world begins to change, even though the darkness comprehends it not. Our work as Christians is to open ourselves to that change, to let the change move through us, to let our lights pierce the darkness. For in the midst of the darkness, a little child was born. And in that child, we are given life, a light unto all people.
A light that pushes back the shrugging darkness one pinpoint at a time. And maybe that’s us. Maybe, just maybe, as we begin to comprehend bit by bit, we push back the darkness a little more, a little more, a little more.
Maybe it’s joy in all that we’ve been given. Or maybe it’s the very human sorrow of all that’s gone away. But this breadth of experience is what Christ came to share with us. So live it, live it fully, and know that you are sharing your humanity with God Incarnate and with the world, though the darkness comprehends it not.