Sandston Presbyterian Church
A Sermon by Ken Goodrich
December 20, 2009
**Explanation for this one: On a day most of our folk couldn’t get out of their driveways, much less neighborhoods, for the 12 inches plus snow on the ground (but, by Jehovah, we didn’t cancel, and there were about thirty of us), this seemed to me a good time to put together a not-so-serious, tongue-in-cheek sort of sermon. You probably didn’t think there was such a thing, did you?
Scripture: Matthew 2:1-12
“Have Yourself A Herod Little Christmas”
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, wise men from the East arrived in Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to pay homage to him.”
When Herod heard of this, he was troubled. And assembling all the chief priests and scribes, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, as it is written by the prophet, Micah, ‘O Bethlehem, you are by no means the least among the tribes of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who shall govern my people Israel.’”
Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly to ascertain from them exactly when the star appeared, and sent them on their way to Bethlehem with these instructions, “Go and search diligently for this child. And when you have found him, bring me word of his whereabouts, so that I, too, my come and worship him”
And so, the wise men went their way, the star before them, seeming finally to rest over the place where the child was. And going into the house, they found the child and his mother, Mary, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Then, being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
* * * * *
If your Christmas list of precious memories does not include a fair share of disasters, then you are not trying hard enough. If those forgettable Christmases do not rank among your favorites, right up alongside your most unforgettable ones, then you do not understand Christmas. If you are doing Christmas right more than you are doing Christmas wrong, then you do not know what you’re doing. But I’d be willing to bet all the gifts under my tree right now—there aren’t any yet, but that’s beside the point—that every adult in this room remembers and can retell in hilarious detail a dozen tales of Christmas fiascoes for every one of Christmas bliss.
Oh, and guess what? The debacles are the only ones worth telling or listening to. Your perfect Christmases? Those idyllic, dreams-come-true, Walt Disney-scripted, chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-fire, snowy mornings involving the engagement ring or new set of tools or that Caribbean Cruise or, when you were a kid, your first Lionel train set or bicycle or Cabbage Patch Doll, or the year your own children just loved everything? Nobody cares! Cuddly-nice and chocolately-sweet as those stories are, they are also predictable and unimaginative, and nobody cares.
Spin those yarns, instead, about the best laid plans gone awry, and not only will you have the room’s attention, but we will see your botched Christmas story and raise it three more from our own stockpile.
How about the year you finally discovered a gift for your husband, who never tells you what he wants or that he really wants anything, leaving you year after year giving him clothes that you want him to wear, for which he politely thanks you. Ah, but this one Christmas, his golfing buddy calls you up to tell you that your husband had really been smitten with a new Calloway driver just out, and, even though the price is outrageous, you might want to take out a loan and get it for him.
And of course you do. You haven’t been this excited in a dozen Christmases. You get this one golf club that costs more than your monthly mortgage payment, hide it in the next door neighbor’s garage, put a big bow on it, and on December 23rd your husband walks through the front door, eyes all aglow, holding out in front of him the exact same driver, and announces, “Honey, I just couldn’t help it. I bit the bullet and bought myself the Christmas present I wanted.”
Or that year it took you half the night putting together the race-car-set with about eight-hundred parts, trial ran the thing ten times before you finally went to bed, only to have it malfunction the next morning on the first lap of the first race between your sons, who start crying, and when you yell at them to stop crying, they begin screaming, demanding to know how Santa would give them what they wanted more than anything else on their list but was busted, and after spending another half hour trying in vain to fix it, you either stomped it to death or hauled the whole thing out and dumped it in the trash.
Or the year Grandma really did get run over by a reindeer.
Show us the pictures of your children or grandchildren decked out in their red outfits, smiling angelically next to the tree-all-lit-up, and we will smile and coo the obligatory, “Awww.” But show us that priceless shot of all three of them bawling on Santa’s lap at the mall, one pulling his beard, another pummeling his belly, and the third biting his arm, and we will howl in recognition and delight and ask for copies to show others and so make their Christmas merry and bright.
For all the beauty, serenity, and wonder of this season, for all the reverence, romance, devotion to God and family that it engenders within us, for all the holiness of it, if a dram of absurdity, a dash of farce, and a shot of slapstick comedy isn’t added to the mix, then what you have is more a Christmiss than Christmas. What you have is all Luke sweetness and no Matthew madness, because Herod is a major player only in Matthew’s telling the tale.
Having executed his first wife and their two sons, along with another son of his by his second, or third, or fourth wife—who could keep up?—in order to secure his throne against any imagined usurpers from within his own family, the last thing Herod would want to hear floating about were rumors that a child had been born to some outsider who was to replace him. But that was the buzz going ‘round his city, sparked by the arrival and subsequent inquiries from some ambassador types from Persia, of all places, who looked like they were anything but fools, even though they didn’t seem to have a clue that the mad-hatter king of Judea was not likely to toast such news with spiked egg-nog all around.
I suspect that the reason Herod was among the last to hear about these fellows and their quest is because no messenger wanted to risk losing his head informing him. But once the story was leaked, he proceeded to display his utter ignorance of all-things-Jewish when he assembled a religious brain-trust of priests and text experts to find out what in the world these foreigners were talking about. They, in turn, provided their king, the highest authority in all of Judaism, for heaven’s sake, with a crash course on the most important and cherished scriptural promise God had ever made to his people, which every man, woman, and child in Judea of the last 800 years had known by heart, with the lone, glaring exception of Herod, the king of the Jews.
The Messiah. In Bethlehem. Only a few miles down the road, practically on his doorstep. Not what Herod wanted for Christmas.
And so, after he was brought up to speed, the crafty old mastermind came up with just the grandest plan. He summoned the Eastern visitors to a private audience and just gushed. “Go, go, go! With my blessings and the exuberant rejoicing of my whole household and court. Why are you still here?! Go! Find this precious child stat! Then return here twice as fast at least, so I can bag up a whole chariot-full of toys and go worship the boy myself. Go!”
To which I can just hear these fellows, once they were out of earshot, marveling to each other, “He’s kidding, right? The King of the Jews doesn’t know where his own Messiah has been born, and needs us to tell him so he can then go play Santa Claus?”
I think Matthew became a bit overly fond of dream sequences, because Herod was so bumblingly transparent from the moment he heard what the wise men were up to, that it could hardly have been necessary to warn them in a dream about what he was up to.
Herod is most well known for the tragic aftermath he dealt to the Christmas story, which, year in and year out, serves to remind us of the harsh realities of life that do not take a holiday regardless of how enchanting this season is. But I, for one, from my admittedly oft-quirky reading of Holy Scripture, can take both comfort and joy in Matthew’s unwitting casting of Herod the arch-villain’s bungling story of Christmas-gone-wrong as the precursor for all the ones we have so comically managed to mismanage ever since.
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Monday, December 21, 2009 3:07 PM