Year C
 Jeremiah 31:7-14
 Psalm 84:1-8
 Ephesians 1:3-615-19a
 Matthew 2:13-1519-23

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

Bp. Frank Louge…  of the Diocese of Georgia wrote…  that on this Second Sunday after Christmas…  Matthew recounts the narrow escape of the Holy Family…  when King Herod ordered the execution of all babies two years old and younger…  in and around Bethlehem…  but Joseph has a dream…  he flees with Mary and the infant Jesus into Egypt…  and in Bethlehem there is such a lamentation going up that it echoed among the pyramids…  an unknown number of innocent children are killed…  only one is known to get away…

If the king’s plan had worked…  the joy of Christmas would have been snuffed out even as the light of Christ was coming into the world…  and yet…  while Herod could…  and did…  exercise his own will…  he could not thwart the overarching will of God… 

This matters…  because what happened in Bethlehem was not an isolated incident…  Herod’s slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem…  is part of a pattern with which we are all too familiar…  Pharaoh worried that the Hebrew slaves were growing too numerous and so slaughtered innocent babies…  only the infant Moses escaped that time by way of a floating basket that carried him into Pharaoh’s own household… 

And throughout history…  we have seen the ongoing pattern in which tyrants can kill who they will…  in recent memory we have Stalin’s wholesale execution of opponents in the Soviet Union…  Pol Pot in Cambodia…  and so on…  down to the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s…  and within the last year or so…  the South Sudan government has recruited child soldiers to fill out armies in a costly civil war…  so how do we make sense of a loving God…  looking over a world in which such senseless slaughter of the innocent is a repeating pattern…

In fleeing Bethlehem…  Mary and Joseph and their infant son become displaced persons…  refugees…  their flight…  like that of so many others…  from the power of a dictator has become all too familiar in the killing fields of the world…  making sense out of Bethlehem…  is vitally important…  because it means making sense out of the fallen world in which we live… 

God is omnipotent…  which means all-powerful…  but even this can’t make two contradictory things happen at once…  God cannot both give humans free will…  and take away that free will…  if God prevented the choices we make that lead to pain and suffering in the world…  then we would no longer be free…

The limits of what God cannot do…  are set not by logic or some arbitrary boundary…  the limits of what God can and cannot do…  are set by love…  love is the founding principle of all that is…  to say that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…  explains so much…  because it shows first and foremost that God loves us unreservedly…  and true love can never be demanded or coerced…  there is no other way…  oppression cannot create even the faintest spark of the fire of love…

Yes…  one can coerce some sort of reaction…  you can force someone to act out the semblance of the symptoms of love…  but you cannot force love…  because what you arrive at without free choice…  is not love…  love must be freely given and freely accepted in order to be love…  and for God to love us means that God must give us free will…  there is no other way…  and this is exactly what God did…  God gave us a choice…  and through our choices we can get hurt…  and we can hurt…  or even kill…  others… 

God has created a world in which love is possible…  and we humans can bend our wills to do some very ungodly acts…  the result includes death at the hands of murderers or drunk drivers…  it also means that birth defects can occur from known causes…  like a mother taking drugs while pregnant…  or causes less understood at the time…  such as infants harmed by thalidomide… 

A universe where real love is an option…  will always be a world in which pain and suffering are not only possible but likely…  and yet…  this world of choice based in love is also what makes all noble acts of self-sacrifice possible…  this world is not only a world of pain and suffering…  but also a world of generosity…  kindness…  and love… 

God showed real love for creation…  not by taking away the choice that made love possible…  God showed real love…  by becoming weak and vulnerable…  God entered into the creation in Jesus to gently repair the tattered tapestry of our world…  with love…  and through our free will…  we can choose to respond to God’s love by committing to follow Jesus…  in answer to that love… 

We are reminded today…  the painful truth…  that when Jesus was born…  Herod struck out against innocent children in Bethlehem…  and still…  we learn more about God since God’s plan cannot be thwarted…  God loves us so much that God is willing to enter into the pain and suffering of this world to redeem it…  and even as Herod could exercise his free will to do the unthinkable…  and end too many innocent lives to secure his power…  Herod still did not have the power to stop God’s love and the plan of salvation for all…  yes…  the world is fallen…  yes…  those who wish to do evil have the free will to act on their misguided desires…  but the free will of those who commit evil is powerless to stop the love of God…  evil exists for but a painful…  tragic moment…  compared to God’s eternal love…

What God did in Bethlehem during Herod’s slaughter of the innocents…  was to be present to those children in life…  and then to be with them always in eternal life when they died…  for the parents…  God remained with them in the tragedy and stayed with them always…  God does not abandon us in our suffering…  but remains with us in the midst of our pain and loss…  then God works with all the terrible pain we humans cause…  to bring good even out of loss…

The Bible does not hide the painful truth of the world as it is…  scripture does not try to pretend that all is well…  throughout the text we see the painful truth of the world…  that given the free choice to do good and to love others and act on that love…  many will distort the image of God within them and do unspeakable things…  yet God does not let that choice stand unchallenged…  Herod could not put out the light of God’s presence born in Bethlehem…  Herod could not steal the gift of love which was Jesus… 

And in answer to the evil humans do…  God offers love…  real…  enduring…  eternal love…  love that in time will break the power of evil and death…  we see that an evil tyrant could use the gift of free will to do evil…  but we also see that evil could not and did not win a victory in Bethlehem…  and it will never win an ultimate victory in all of creation…  the power of love can and does defeat evil…  love will win out in the end…