A Sermon preached at Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship, Berne, IN, December 28, 2025
The Lion King … Scar. Little Red Riding Hood … the Big, Bad Wolf. Sleeping Beauty … Maleficent. Harry Potter … Voldemort. Dorothy … the Wicked Witch of the West, but in Wicked, it’s the Wizard. Mary and Joseph … Herod.
Every parent struggles with balancing the innocence of their children with things that are unfair, dark, and scary in their lives. I used to read, “There’s a Nightmare in my Closet” to my kids. When, how to introduce them to suffering, to death – a pet, a grandparent, a friend.
(Sung): Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies … (Spoken): ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
I worked on this sermon Christmas Day evening, having just spoken with grandsons from Colorado (they’re coming on Tuesday), grandsons in Washington DC, having spent the day with granddaughters in Fort Wayne, and with memories of the delight our children brought us last week re-enacting the first Christmas, all the while knowing that today, December 28, Western churches around the world remember “The Slaughter of the Innocents” at the hands of Herod. Both are true. How to reconcile them? How do you do that with your kids? What would your sermon be today?
Most churches start, what I call, “from above.” They create a “virtual world” apart from the nitty-gritty world we inhabit the rest of the week. They create special language – “God,” “Trinity,” “Christ,” “Incarnation, Salvation,” “Baptism, Communion,” “Easter,” you adopt, sing songs, create rituals, preach sermons, pray prayers, to reinforce this alternative reality, that their virtual church world is the real world. I used to do this, too, when I was younger, because the virtual church world was tidy and safe, things made sense, because God is in control, where good always triumphs over evil, and everything turns out alright in the end.
But this “from above” approach always seemed abit too prescribed, too unreal to me. Church world, real world. One of the ways teaching at a public university changed me, even now that I’m back in church work, is that I begin “from below.” What are your worries, what are you afraid of, your doubts, your tears, your dreams? What breaks your heart, what heals it? If theology doesn’t make sense on the job, around the kitchen table, in a hospital room, a funeral home, in those places where today’s Rachels weep for their children, then what’s it good for? My sermons, my classes – “from below” is where I begin.
This shift, from “from above” to “from below” changes everything. It’s the difference between Christian nationalism’s sanitized American history and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States; the difference between the church’s creeds and the way of Jesus, the difference between trying to fit ourselves into a virtual orthodox dogma church-world, and the church as Jesus’ hands and feet and heart in this world. God comes as poor not as privileged, comes in a manger not in a mansion, God squeezes God’s infinite self into a screaming little human baby born of a teenage mother in backwater Bethlehem. Christmas is God “from below.”
Herod slaughtered innocent children. And we heard last week from our friend, Zoughbi Zoughbi, that Israel – today’s Herod – is still slaughtering children in Bethlehem (did you hear that, “slaughtering children” in Bethlehem), and in Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, in Gaza – children. According to the latest statistics, more than 25,000 children, more than 30 a day for the last two years, the children are crying out to us from their unmarked graves under Gaza’s rubble. With our tax dollars, in our name, children. What are we doing about it? What shall we do about it?
But there’s more than one way to slaughter the innocents. In Jerusalem today, signs, Make Gaza Jewish Again, and others with a picture of the bomb-happy American president next to Israeli and American flags, Make Israel Great Again. In our country, the Vice President recently said that the US “will always be a Christian nation … where you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” while it ends SNAP benefits for its most vulnerable and terminates affordable health care for tens of millions. In our name. Who does that? It might as well be Make Racism Great Again, or Make Hate … , Make Violence … , Make “Might Makes Right” Great Again. And we can’t just point fingers and let ourselves off the hook; there’s slaughter of the innocents by omission, too. The privileged throw up their hands, shake their heads at how bad it is, and with a slight twinge of liberal guilt, turn their attention away because it asks too much of them to get their hands dirty with such things. In our name.
Our friend, the late Jewish theologian, Marc Ellis, used to quote his teacher, the late Rabbi Irving Greenberg, “After the holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” Today it’s “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of Gaza’s murdered children under the rubble.” And there are other children at risk – children in cages on our southern border; trans children denied their identity; black and brown children rounded up like animals, deported simply because of their color or religion or their country of origin … children. And tomorrow is the 135th anniversary of the massacre of native peoples at Wounded Knee, just like Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents by colonizers. But no one’s talking about that because it strikes too close to home. Yes, there’s more than one way to slaughter the innocents.
So we know that in the “little town of Bethlehem” today, “how still we see thee lie” is a lie, and as we sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night,” the night is neither silent nor holy. I’m sorry but on Christmas morning as we opened presents with Zoey, Sophia, and Chloe, I couldn’t help but remember those children, and Gaza’s children, and so many other children innocent no more. I can’t look away. We can’t look away.
Today might as well be not only “the slaughter of the innocents,” but also, simply, “the slaughter of innocence.” We try so hard, especially in this season to recreate – we say for our children, but really for ourselves – a longed-lost innocence – traditions, foods, decorations, stories – waves of nostalgia to inoculate ourselves against truths we dare not admit to ourselves.
The words we use … homesickness in German, Heimweh, “home pain.” Nostalgia, from the Greek, nostos, “return,” and algos, “suffering.” We’ve grown up, life moves only in one direction, forward not backward, bittersweet, we can’t recreate an idealized innocence, no matter how hard we try, the unfulfilled longing to return to wherever, whatever, whoever it was where we felt safe, where we felt secure.
So we return to where we began. How can we honestly acknowledge the cruelty of today’s Herods, even our own shadows, even our own “Herodness,” and not flinch, ignore, deny, and still refuse to become jaded, and still believe in the goodness, the beauty, the wonder of it all and love even when our heart are broken? Is it possible for a “second, mature innocence” to rise out of the ashes of reality? A mature innocence.
When Lauren, Andrew, and Anne were little, and the grandkids, too, one of our little games (perhaps you played this game, too, with your little ones):
(Sung): Rock a bye baby on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And I’d toss them and catch them:
(Spoken): And down will come baby, cradle and all. Rock! Rock! Rock! Shake! Shake! Shake!
I didn’t give it much thought with my kids, but I did with the grandkids, the tragic irony of the song. I knew they’d fall down and get back up again, they’d fall in love, their hearts would be broken, they’d know joy, they’d struggle. I’d hold them close, smile into the mystery of their innocent eyes, I’d Rock! Rock! Rock! Shake! Shake! Shake! them a little more. And I promised, “I’ll love you as long as I have breath,” and I sat with them. I held them closer, I just sat with them. Those little bundles of contradiction.
Maybe that’s where we start. No magic formulas – we each find our own way. God becomes small at Christmas, an innocent child, so when we sit with the innocent, no matter how dark the world is, we can begin to discover a “second, mature innocence.”
Exiled Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov, calls it, “nostalgia in reverse,” the longing for a home to come that we weave out of the fabric of our lives, shadows and all. We call it “the kingdom of God,” our new homewhere we sit with the tension, not let it paralyze or defeat us, bring a lamp where it’s dark, protect the poor and innocent, our children, all children, because all children are our children, and love each other … then Rock! Rock! Rock! and Shake! Shake! Shake! the world together!
The Christmas Child, like all our children … our teacher.