"Mixing Religion and Politics (First Sunday after Christmas)"
Pastor Susan Langhauser
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Matthew 2:1-26
The Second Day of Christmas. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to simply sit in this beautifully decorated church, sing a few of those well-remembered Christmas carols, celebrate a newly baptized baby girl and reflect on the warmth of being together with family and friends for holiday gatherings and times of good cheer?
Wouldn’t it be grand to hold on to the beauty of Christmas lights and decorated trees with brightly wrapped packages beneath and smells from the wonders in the kitchen filling our noses?
Wouldn’t it be worth all the preparation and planning, waiting and wondering, fretting and fussing to just sit here this morning and let the “peace on earth, good will to all” settle around our shoulders like a warm blanket?
Well of course it would! However, we are a people of instant gratification, and so we are ever-so-quick to shift our focus to the NFL playoffs, or the college bowl games, or even our plans for New Year’s Eve. This morning’s paper has already begun the Top Tens of 2010 and we are encouraged to move on, to mark quickly and to proceed full speed ahead. Reflection is too passive, listening to the moment too focused, settling in to the fellowship of others pales in comparison to more stimulation, external motivation, or “the next big thing.”
Even our telling of the Christmas story seems to come and go so quickly. After four long weeks of Advent waiting, we come to the manger on Christmas Eve, look inside, than catch our breath and turn around and shift our focus – from Jesus and the miracle, to politics and power plays. And by tonight, our Christmas will be (for all intents and purposes) over – and we’ll go back to work, or re-title “Christmas vacation” to “holiday break.” We’ll pack up the decorations and put the tree out on the curb. We don’t have time for Twelve Days that start with Christmas. And so, I included the reading about the wise men today, because if we wait – we’ll miss how it plays into the human experience that is as true today as it was over 2,000 years ago.
It’s been said that you shouldn’t talk about Politics or Religion in polite company - and if you do, you should certainly never MIX them together. However, the Bible has proclaimed and mixed the two together from the beginning! But we in the western cultures really like to separate these things, so we prefer Luke’s telling of our Christmas story: Mary and Joseph, a warm and tidy stable, a perfect baby, shepherds and sheep in a lush green meadow and angels in the heavens. Even our music reflects only the information we learn from Luke’s story, save only the inclusion of the Wise Men from Matthew. That could be because where Luke has the music of “glory to God” and lullabies; Matthew’s focuses on weeping women lamenting their dead children.
Matthew acts as sort of a “corrective.” Where Luke is rated “PG,” Matthew’s version is “R” for violence, and there is scarcely any room in our fantasy of this story for anything that might intrude on our well-planned celebration. But, before you start to think that I am a Christmas Scrooge shouting “Humbug!” let me make a few small points, that you all know too well:
#1 - No one is happy all the time. #2 - Nothing in this life is perfect. #3 – Christmas means far more than we allow it to mean.
I am reminded of the stage play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The two title characters have very small parts in a better known work, a classic story by William Shakespeare called, Hamlet. But in Stoppard’s play, we see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s small contribution to the Hamlet plot unfold onstage, only to have the entire stage rotate around 180 degrees so that we are privy to the other side of the story. As the two men exit Hamlet, they enter into a completely different storyline – their lives and stories when they are not onstage with Hamlet – which gives the audience new information about the Prince of Denmark, and changes the viewer’s perspective on the story completely.
On Christmas Eve, The Wall Street Journal ran an article by John Wilson titled, “Do Christians Overemphasize Christmas?” It stated that “Some theologians claim that Easter is more important (than Christmas.) That's wrong. When we celebrate one, we celebrate the other…This claim we call the Incarnation—and celebrate at Christmas—can't be separated from "the paschal mystery of death and resurrection." The babe in swaddling clothes comes with a mission to fulfill. And as we sing carols for his birth, we” see him swaddled in cloth and laid in a manger, at the same time that we know we will see him taken down from a cross and wrapped in linen cloth and laid in the tomb of a friend.
“Easter is implicit in Christmas, and Christmas is implicit in Easter. When we celebrate the one, we celebrate the other, looking forward to the restoration of all things.”
But perhaps we celebrate Christmas more easily and more completely, because there is no Good Friday to Christmas. It seems so much easier to follow the story in Luke 2, add the Wise Men and never mention the “other” dynamic – the Good Friday known as Herod the Great. For Herod was the King of the Jews. And when someone threatened to become the new King of the Jews, Herod responded with Imperial force and deathly precision. He would have killed the Son of God right then and there if he could have, but once again God used dreams to warn the wise men not to trust Herod, and to warn Joseph to flee the country and take his family to the safety of Egypt.
Perhaps our question to ponder as we move away from the manger and back into the world is “How will you take Christmas with you this year?” How will you respond to the incarnation of Almighty God into a regular human who lived among us? Once away from the glow of Christmas and the trappings of our celebrations, will you react to Jesus as did Herod, with fear of the way this Christ will change your life? Or will you be more like the Wise Men (who were really not so wise, just faithful) and allow yourself to be drawn with wonder and curiosity to discover what Jesus has in store for you?
“We must not speak of God’s love coming down at Christmas without remembering that the divine love is fierce in its judgment of those who resist love’s demands.” (Douglas R. A. Hare, Interpretation Series, “Matthew” p. 20.)
We know what God wants from us, now we simply have to live it day after day after day. God doesn’t want to change YOU – God wants you to choose to change the world, because you love God. As you can hear in the following prayer by Howard Thurman, the task hasn’t changed much, and probably won’t; until we all give up resisting Love’s demands, and resolve to become wise bearers of God’s gift:
“When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner
To teach the nations,
To bring Christ to all,
To make music in the heart.”