1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

If you are a visitor here this morning, I hope it doesn't take you long to figure out that at Christ Church, we care about children. On a new baby's first trip to church people line up for their turn to hold it. We delight in the exchanges of the children's sermon time. The season of Christmas especially brings us the images of childhood and the tales of Jesus himself as an infant and child.

This morning's Gospel lesson is one of three stories about Jesus' infancy and childhood that the early Church wanted us to have. Each of the three poses a challenge that Mary had to face.

The first of the three childhood passages is Luke's story of no room at an inn, and a babe laid in a manger. Mary's first challenge is finding shelter for her child, and behind that challenge is poverty. Rich people don't usually have problems with shelter. It is poor people who find doors closed in their face, and are told to have their babies out with the animals.

The words of the Christmas stories are so familiar that sometimes we go numb and don't think about what they are actually saying. To get a better picture of this young woman who has been told she should give birth in a barn, go back and read an earlier part of Luke's account. Luke portrays Mary as someone versed in scripture and the traditions of her people, who tells her cousin Elizabeth of her pregnancy and praises God in a song modeled on the song of Hannah in the Old Testament, when Hannah presents her son Samuel to God's service in the temple. For Luke, Mary is not only an accomplished reciter of Scripture, but she has some definite attitudes about power and wealth, privilege and poverty. For Mary, God is the Mighty One who "has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts," who "has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;" who "has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

If Mary is as versed in Scripture as Luke portrays, then she knows the other passages of Scripture addressing poverty. Leviticus: to neglect the poor is to deny God's Lordship (Lev 19:10, 23:22). 2 Samuel: to take from the poor is to do injustice (2 Sam 12:1). Isaiah: God will judge against those who have the spoil of the poor in their houses (Is 3:14-15). Isaiah: the mark of Zion, (and thus any Government whose leaders take God seriously), is that the needy will find refuge there (Is 14:32), for God is concerned that the poor have water to drink even when others fail them (Is 41:17). Amos: God will punish a country which allows the poor to be sold for a pair of sandals (Amos 2:6). Jeremiah: to judge the cause of the poor and needy is to know God. (Jer 22:16).

Luke's Mary is not an empty-headed child who hasn't a clue as to what is going on. She knows that being poor, having no crib for her baby other than a feed trough for cattle, is a powerful sign that the world is not the way God wants it to be, and she understands that she is to have a part in making things different.

Luke's picture is important to us because Protestant Christianity has tended to look at wealth as a sign of God's favor, and poverty as a sign of God's punishment. Our Protestant tradition looks at poor people to see what defect in their own character made them that way--perhaps because they didn't pay attention to school, or perhaps they are lazy. "Get a job,:" the innkeeper might have told Mary and Joseph, and then you won't have to sleep with the animals." Luke's story challenges that kind of perspective, for Mary's words to Elizabeth are the words of someone who sees that actions of the rich and powerful are the cause of many of poor peoples' problems, and that God is angry that that is so.

This kind of perspective is difficult for many of us to see. Individually we are generous to the poor, but to see their problems as impacted by the social system itself, or by those with wealth and power? That gets threatening. Dom Helder Camara, a bishop in Brazil, was quoted as saying, "When I give food to the poor, people call me a saint. But when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." Mary's words in the Magnificat would have been similarly upsetting to such people. "Three cheers for God," Luke has her say when she discovers her pregnancy: "God's going to turn things upside down."

The second of the three childhood passages is Matthew's story of the wise men, and it describes the second challenge Mary faces: protecting her child from evil. Just as it's easy to sentimentalize Luke's story, keeping the shepherds and angels and forgetting the poverty, it's easy to sentimentalize Matthew's story, keeping the wise men and the star in the east, but forgetting Herod's evil. And what is the nature of Herod's evil? Herod is a Jewish quisling ruling his own people on behalf of the Roman oppressors; he has achieved wealth and comfort and an attachment to stability. The rumor of a new king terrifies him, and he calls together his intelligence operation, attempts to recruit the wise men as spies, and when that fails, tries to solve his problem by killing every child under the age of two in Bethlehem. Are you ever confused about the nature of evil? Let me give you a simple, practical definition: when evil is present, children die.

30 years ago this coming March, there was another massacre where 504 men, women and children died. The place was not Bethlehem but My Lai, and the soldiers were not Roman but American. What happened that day in effect poured sewage on the uniform of every man and woman who has wanted to honorably serve their country. It was a major reason I resigned from the National Guard in 1971 and conducted a memorial service for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. My Lai has haunted me since. I want to know why--not the simplistic answers like American young men instinctively kill babies or, well, it was the lieutenant's fault. To answer the question I've walked in the footsteps of King Herod for several fairly depressing months this year into some of the nastiest corners of the 20th century.

The footsteps of Herod took me to rampant racism we had against Vietnamese that said killing them didn't matter. The footsteps took me to the body count mentality that made an entire Army's criterion of success the number of people who could be killed. The footsteps took me to a culture of lying and secrecy in our government which stretched from Johnson's Tonkin Gulf incident that never happened all the way to Nixon's unraveling at Watergate.

The footsteps of Herod took me to other massacres-- El Mozote where 900 civilians including 131 children hiding in a convent were killed, not by Americans but by Salvadoreans who had been trained by Americans at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. The footsteps took me to the assassination of Archbishop Romero while he was saying Mass, to the murder of 6 Jesuit priests and their housekeeper, to the rape and murder of 4 American churchwomen who were working with El Salvador's poor, all killed by Salvadoreans trained at the School of the Americas. I wondered why church people in particular seemed to be targeted, and then the footsteps took me to the "Santa Fe" report, influential in several administrations, which taught that Marxist-Leninist forces have infiltrated the religious community with ideas that are less Christian than communist, and that U. S. foreign policy must "counter" liberation theology.1 There it is: if the Christian church speaks about the poor in the language of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Mary the mother of our Lord, the Christian church is the enemy of American foreign policy, and must be "countered.".

The walk in Herod's footsteps took me back to a 1948 speech by George Kennan, one of the most important architects of post-world War II American foreign policy. He noted that Americans were 6.3% of the world's population and had 50% of the world's wealth. He described the task of foreign policy as devising "a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity". To do this, he called us "to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming..[and] cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization"2 In other words, the basis of American foreign policy is to maintain American material wealth by doing whatever it takes, without regard to any standards of morality or ethics and no matter how many babies are killed. And there my pilgrimage had taken me to the very palace of Herod.

What do you do in the face of evil? Matthew tells us what Mary and Joseph and the Christ child did. The minute they were warned of Herod's intent, they ran for their lives, all the way to Egypt, staying there until Herod died and they could return to Palestine. But for many today, there's no safe place to run to. Just four days ago, on Christmas eve, the newspapers told of a massacre in Chiapas province, Mexico. There, 45 poor Indian peasants sheltered in a village church were massacred by militias supported by property-owners and the local government. There are no reports yet of American involvement, but if we learn that we had supplied the weapons or trained the troops or advised the government that permitted this, it would be consistent with what has happened elsewhere.

This morning's Gospel is the third of the New Testament's passages about the infancy and childhood of Jesus. Now Jesus is a 12 year old in Jerusalem for Passover and Mary a worried mother who has lost him in the crowds and after three days of looking, finds him talking theology in the Temple. This third challenge is the toughest of all for Mary because her struggle is with God.

There must have been a Mary who asked, "Isn't it enough to bear my firstborn in a stable? Isn't it enough to be a refugee fleeing from a massacre? Isn't there to be some reward for all I have had to go through? Can't this treasure of a son I have fought so hard for be spared to grow up a little bit normally, to learn a good trade, to marry a nice Jewish girl and give me grandchildren so that I can be respected among the other women of the village? Is that too much to ask?" The horrors of Bethlehem were twelve years ago, now, and Nazareth is a safe, quiet place. Isn't there some way to just put up the walls and say, "this is enough?" Can't we just do God's work in our own town and forget the outside world?

Then there's the other Mary, the one who shouted "Three cheers for God" when she heard she was pregnant, the one who patted her belly and thought, "this one's going to turn the world upside down, this one's going to be the means by which God fills the poor with good things and sends the rich empty away," this one's going to take on the evil that has made our people poor and despised. Now he's 12, and she can see it coming. Already, he's beginning to pull away, to seek out his own path. This Mary would give even her son as a gift to God--and yet, when her 12 year old looks at the Jerusalem temple and tells them, "didn't you know I must be in my Father's house," the words must have stung.

This is the hardest of Mary's three challenges, and what we see in today's Gospel is just the beginning. Elsewhere in the Gospels, we get glimpses of Mary continuing in her struggle to hold Jesus tight and let him go, all at the same time. Once she comes upon him when he has a crowd gathered around him and sends word that his mother and brothers are near. "Who are my mother and my brothers," he asks the crowd. "All who do the will of my Father are my mother and my brothers." And then we see Mary at the foot of the cross where she has to finally let him go totally. Did she think she had lost, that day, did she think that Herod had finally won despite all her efforts, did the memory of her "three cheers for God" speech at Jesus' conception form a bitter lump in her throat, standing there on Calvary? Or did she know there is no road to Easter except through the cross? Did she stand there in the midst of her grief but thankful that he had been true to the very end to the God of the poor, that he had taken on the forces of Herod and evil and darkness and come through on the Easter side? Did she come away committed to carry on?

If Mary had wanted to build a cocoon in Nazareth and find a way to keep Jesus there to build cabinets and father her grandchildren, we would understand, because all of us have the same impulse. Life takes time and energy. We have jobs to go to, food to prepare, children to educate. Why must we keep hearing about the awful world outside? Why must we be reminded that babies are still born in stables, and Herod after Herod, sometimes with help and encouragement from our own government, continues to massacre children?

An answer to that question came to me when I stood in the circle with many of you Christmas eve, holding a candle, and we read the words from the Gospel of John (1:5) : "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." In this very room, four nights ago, we made the darkness flee because we each lit a candle with a flame from the Christ candle.

I believe our church is at the threshold of a challenge. We are tempted, as I think Mary was, to throw up a wall around our Nazareth and shut out the darkness of the outside world. What God wanted for her, and what I believe God wants of us, is instead to light a candle in the face of that darkness. Could this be the time we need to take on some projects that directly confront the evil of our times? Could this be the time to join a mission project for Chiapas, or a study group on liberation theology, or letter writing to our Congressional leaders to close the School of the Americas? I hope there are others here for whom the answer is yes.

I pray for the day when our children will hear the Christmas story and hear about the part of Herod and his evil, and say to us, "that was pretty awful, wasn't it." And on that day, we'll be able to say, "Yes, but that was long ago. Things like that don't happen anymore."

1 The Committee of Santa Fe, "A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties" (Washington, D.C.: Council for Inter-American Security, 1980), cited in Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, School of Assassins. Maryknoll: New York: Orbis Books, 1997, p. 63.

2 Quoted in Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) p. 48; quoted in Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, School of Assassins. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 39

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