Christmas 2C 2010
St. Dunstan's
January 3, 2010
The Rev. Patricia Templeton

"The Slaughter Continues"

Somehow in 16 years of preaching I have managed to avoid a sermon on today’s gospel text. “The slaughter of the innocents,” as this passage from Matthew is called, was not even included in the schedule of Sunday scripture readings until just a few years ago.

And even today it is one of three choices of gospel readings.

It’s easy to understand why this passage is skipped over so often. In the church year, at least, we are still in the midst of the Christmas season, still singing tidings of comfort and joy, still oohing and aahing over the cute little baby God in the manger.

The story of the slaughter of innocent infants doesn’t exactly fit in with the festiveness of the season.

Matthew is the only one of the four gospels that tells this story of an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream and urging him to flee with Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt because King Herod is searching for the child to destroy him. Joseph obeys.

The family stays in Egypt until an angel again appears in Joseph’s dream, telling him it is now safe to return home.

Our lectionary text very politely leaves out Herod’s reaction to finding out that Jesus has eluded him.

But “He was in a furious rage,” scripture says, “and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.”

Biblical scholars and historians are very quick to point out that there is no historical record of this heinous act, although there are detailed records of other actions of Herod’s reign, some equally horrific.

The scholarly consensus is that this did not happen, that Matthew included the story to draw parallels between the life of Jesus and the life of Moses. Moses, too, was born at a time when male Jewish babies were under a death sentence, and escaped that fate through divine intervention.

Moses, too, confronted the cruel leader of his day, Pharaoh, and led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and to the edge of the promised land.

Jesus, Matthew is saying, is following Moses’ tradition, but is even more special than that most-revered figure.

Now “out of Egypt” God’s own son is called, who will bring redemption and liberation not just to the people of Israel, but to the world.

I hope that the historians are right that this horrific event did not actually occur. If it did, it raises troubling questions that Matthew neatly avoids.

What kind of God would warn one family of coming destruction, but allow other innocent children to be killed? What kind of messiah begins his life by at least indirectly contributing to the deaths of those he has come to save?

Matthew, of course, is focused on Jesus, not the other infants who are collateral damage in this story. And while he may not have intended for those questions to be the focus of this passage, they are legitimate inquiries for which there are no satisfactory answers.

Whether or not the slaughter of the innocents actually occurred, this story makes a theological point that is still true today – God’s acts of peace and justice inevitably evoke a hostile response. Empires and other powers are still threatened by challenges to the status quo.

And it is all too often the innocent who suffer.

The truth is that whether or not this particular story is historically accurate, innocents have been slaughtered throughout history, and the slaughter of innocent children continues today.

Last fall, The New York Times ran a story that in the year 2008, 8.8 million children around the world died before their fifth birthday.

The untimely death of that many children seems horrific. Yet a UNICEF official called it “a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children’s health” because it was the first year on record that the number had fallen below nine million.

It is sad to think we live in a world where the death of “only” 8.8 million young children in a year is good news. But the UNICEF report says that the number has fallen by almost 4 million since 1990.

“That’s 10,000 less children dying a day,” the official said.

The decrease is attributed to low-tech, inexpensive solutions like mosquito nets that help prevent malaria, and vaccines that help prevent diseases like measles.

The two leading causes of children’s deaths, pneumonia and diarrhea, also have simple solutions – access to antibiotics and clean water.

These children may not have been murdered by a furious king or emperor. But apathy, neglect, and corruption kill just as surely as bullets and bayonets.

We don’t have to go to the developing world to witness the slaughter of the innocents. We can find too many examples in our own land.

A recent report on infant mortality rates from the CDC ranked the United States as 30 th out of 31 “medically advanced” countries. We rank behind every developed country in North America, Western Europe and Asia, except Slovakia.

In this country 6.9 out of every 1,000 children born die before their first birthday, a 36 percent increase since 1984. For African Americans, that rate almost doubles.

“Infant mortality is one of the most important indicators of the health of a nation,” the CDC report says. “It is associated with a variety of factors such as national health, quality of and access to medical care, socio-economic conditions and public health practices.”

Other examples of the difficult lives of many children in this country abound.
A recent report on hunger in America states that almost a quarter of the children in this country, 22.5 percent, suffer from food insecurity, meaning they go to bed at night not knowing whether they will have enough to eat the next day.

In Chicago, 45 public school students were murdered during the last school year. The head of a nonprofit group offering tutoring and mentoring to kids in Chicago says that many of the students she talks to “feel they have nothing to live for.”

“We’re fighting a war in Iraq to try to keep the peace over there, when we have innocent children dying in the streets right here at home,” a Chicago Catholic priest says.

An Episcopal priest in this diocese, Claiborne Jones, the director of Emmaus House, will quickly remind us that Chicago is not unique.

Last year on Palm Sunday afternoon one of Claiborne’s teen-aged parishioners was murdered and another maimed as they ate ice cream across the street from the church.

The slaughter of the innocents continues, around the world and in our own backyard.

And into our world where the lives of children are regularly sacrificed to apathy and abuse, to neglect and violence, we once again this season rejoice at the birth of a baby who comes to show us a better way.

This child grows up to spend his life among those who are most vulnerable, reminding them, and us, that they are valued and loved by God.

This child grows up to tell us that it is by serving these innocents that we serve God.

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