Preacher: Julia Baker

Scripture: Matthew 2:13-23

When I saw that the gospel lectionary passage for this 3rd day of Christmas was The Holy Innocents  — I wanted to pass. 

The story of King Herod and his plan to get rid of the infant Jesus before he can grow up to be a threat. Jesus is spared Herod’s plan, God tells Joseph in a dream to escape to Egypt, but there is a massacre of baby boys in Judea.

Really? Do we need to end 2025 with this? A story that feels too real and raw in a year where the Holy Innocents among us have been killed, starved, deported and shamed — all this fresh and still happening and right here.

We are still in the after glow of the angels “Glory to the new born king!” Let’s not talk about death, about the horrors so soon.

But, Matthew intentionally includes this as part of the birth narrative. So let’s sit with it, see what is here for us in this moment alive in this time and place. 

Let us pray…

Matthew 2:18 echoes back to the prophet Jeremiah 31:15 –

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

Wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

She refused to be consoled.

Because they were no more.”

What has been prophesied has been fulfilled. 

In this story of the slaughter of innocent baby boys we hear the visceral immense inconsolable cry of Rachel — weeping for her children in exile. Rachel symbolizes the cry of mothers everywhere, through all time — the cry of mothers in Palestine, Ukraine and Nigeria, the cry of mothers as ICE ripped them from their children’s hands, the cry of mothers with bills spread on the table worrying about food. Maybe this year or in years past you to have been in a season of keening and weeping like Rachel.

Just days ago we sang, “Joy to the World, the Savior reigns…” The candle light in our faces is still glowing.

Episcopal preacher Fleming Ruthledge writes, “I took my mother to church on Christmas morning one year and we sang the familiar carols. As we were driving home after the service, suddenly she said. “Joy to the world, the Savior reigns” What on earth does that mean? The Savior doesn’t reign. Just look at all the horrible things around us. That is an observation made for Holy Innocents Day. In our reading we come against the fact that, in the Christmas story as in today’s world, monsters and angels coexist.” Indeed. 

The more I sit with Matthew’s telling of this whole story, the more I see the wisdom and need for Rachel’s weeping.

If the story just ended in the stable, the heavenly hosts and all that light — it would be lovely  but as empty as Frosty the Snowman. 

It is a story whose grounding, whose incarnation is in holding together the joy and the inconsolable suffering. 

That is what Jesus, the baby born into the fragility of being human, right away born into danger — is all about:

Proclaiming that suffering is not the end of the story – that the arch is long and bends towards justice.

Proclaiming that we are accompanied in this arch, in our weeping.

Proclaiming that the most innocent among us matter.

Proclaiming the words of Joy to the World:

“He comes to make his blessings known, far as the curse is found.” 

The curse is: our separation from the Real. 

The blessing is: bringing life — mercy, grace, presence, peace, comfort, love, justice – to the places that seem most devoid of it. 

The world wants to pull us continually from the Real, to lure and lull us with tinsel and scrolling. Numb the parts of saying, this isn’t the Blessing we were created for. 

We need to keep Rachel’s cries echoing in us, not to be awash and paralyzed in sorrow, but because being in touch with the ache deepens our singing out in true “Joy to the World.” 

Joy to the one – Emmanuel, God with Us – who is indeed with us, in it all. 

The poet Ross Gay writes, “Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows. I’m saying: what if that is joy?”

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We are  next going to listen to a piece by the French composer Hector Berlioz: L’enfrance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ) which chronicles the Holy Family’s flight from Egypt.  As we listen to the soaring score, written in 1853

I invite you to sit with the sorrows you are aware of — of Holy Innocents in your heart. 

To hold it all up to the Light of the Christ who came, who continually comes to make the blessings known. 

Amen.