All Saints, Dorval
January 5, 2020
Photo from the Wandering Wisemen Facebook page, which if you don’t follow, you should.
Today, we celebrate Epiphany (a smidge early) but technically it’s still the twelfth day of Christmas. Tonight is Twelfth Night, if any of you want to make plans to wassail your apple trees or bake a king cake.
In 2020, it’s hard to really embrace the richness of the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas because we’re all so exhausted from the December “holiday season”. And there is a great deal to be said for resting, recreating, and cocooning in the days between Christmas Day and New Year’s. But it would also be nice if we could truly observe the feasts of the Church that traditionally fell on the days following Christmas – St. Stephen’s on the 26th (as the carol Good King Wenceslas reminds us), St. John’s on the 27th, and Holy Innocents on the 28th. (The BAS, bowing to the realities of the 20th century, offers alternative dates for all three that are not in the week after Christmas.)
Holy Innocents, especially, is an important part of the Nativity story that often gets glossed over in our celebration of the babe in the manger and the visit of the wise men. It was the Gospel reading last week, on the first Sunday of Christmas, which means that the 8 am congregation got to hear Yvonne Bayne’s sermon. Chronologically, though, the story of Herod’s slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem comes just after this morning’s readings; after the Magi have departed, returning to their own country by another way because it has been revealed to them in a dream that Herod does not have their best interests at heart, Herod panics and sends his goons to eliminate all the children who might possibly be the one who might steal his throne. Meanwhile, Joseph has taken Mary and the child and escaped to Egypt.
In a week in which we woke up a couple days ago to the news that the world was teetering on the brink of World War Three, this all sounds bizarrely contemporary. The arrogance and paranoia of world leaders – in the Middle East and elsewhere – the jumping to violence as a preemptive strike rather than a last resort, the appalling vulnerability of children, and the ordinary people caught up in it all who must flee across borders, taking enormous risks to protect themselves and their loved ones – plus la même chose, plus ça change.
It’s easy to let the horrors overwhelm the good news. It’s easy to look at the Holy Innocents, listen to the wails of their grieving mothers, and ask, was it worth it? Right at the beginning, the coming of God in human flesh led to a massacre. Maybe God should have just left well enough alone? Does all this drown out the song of the angels and darken the Christmas star?
One thing about humans, I find, is that we very often let one bad thing cancel out all the good in our lives. If things aren’t going well on every front, we focus on whatever isn’t perfect while ignoring everything that is actually good. Learning to overcome this instinct can help us see things in a more balanced light.
Of course, the kinds of events that happened in first-century Judea and are happening in 21st-century global politics are more than just minor annoyances to be overcome with a bit of positive thinking. They are real, and scary, and they bring real suffering and tragedy to real people’s lives. But that doesn’t mean that we give up hope and sink into despair. It means we keep praying, and learning, and taking action as it is within our power.
And it means that we keep our eyes and hearts focused on the Christmas star. The fact that its light shines on the awfulness of life as well as its glory, doesn’t make the star a fantasy.
For darkness will cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, writes Isaiah. And it is precisely this darkness that the Light of the World has come to dispel.
At this point, I could reel off a list of statistics about how, despite appearances, 2019 was actually “the best year ever” in terms of the metrics of child mortality, famine, and extreme poverty, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof claimed in an opinion piece last week. But that’s not the point. God is not in the business of keeping score and tallying up the good vs. the bad. God is in the business of shining a light, of coming into the world to be with us in both the good and the bad.
The rapturous words of Isaiah, the Psalm praising God’s ideal king, the Magi following the star – from one angle, they can clash with the violence lurking in the story, and the violence that prevails in our headlines today.
But from another angle, the light of the Christmas star puts all the awful stuff in perspective. Because the fact is, the good is just as real, just as true, as the bad – in fact, it’s more so. It is tempting to focus on the things that upset us, that need to be fixed, that spur us to action – and of course we should let them spur us to action! – but we cannot, must not, lose sight of the great works that God is doing – and the small, daily blessings of our lives.
If we had used the readings for the second Sunday after Christmas today, the Gospel would have been the Prologue from John: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The darkness cannot overcome the light. That is the message of the Christmas star.
And so, even amid the horrors of a world that seems to have gone mad, we rejoice, because the light of the Christmas star shines over a stable where wise men from the east have come to visit. And that same light shines in our hearts, helping to illuminate the world in the name of Immanuel, God with us.
Amen.
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