William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)
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| - | Week before last, NPR carried a story | 0:10 |
| about how they have plans to spruce up | 0:14 | |
| Bethlehem, | 0:19 | |
| the dusty little Palestinian town of Jesus nativity. | 0:21 | |
| It seems that tourists take the bus ride over from Jerusalem | 0:27 | |
| and they get off the bus and they go in the Church | 0:32 | |
| of the Nativity and they take their photographs, | 0:34 | |
| and they get back on the bus and they go back to Jerusalem | 0:37 | |
| without spending much money. | 0:40 | |
| And so the Palestinian Authorities have plans | 0:43 | |
| to spruce up Bethlehem to turn that dingy car park | 0:45 | |
| in front of the Church of the Nativity | 0:49 | |
| into a swanky shopping center with boutiques | 0:52 | |
| and shops and a luxury hotel, | 0:56 | |
| And international donations of 40 million | 1:00 | |
| are helping with the project. | 1:03 | |
| But the story went on to say that there are | 1:06 | |
| charges of political corruption | 1:10 | |
| of money lining the pockets of Palestinian politicians | 1:13 | |
| and the whole project has taken twice as long | 1:17 | |
| and it's twice as expensive as they thought | 1:20 | |
| the whole thing is bogged down in administrative red tape. | 1:22 | |
| And what else is new? | 1:28 | |
| Poor Bethlehem, | 1:32 | |
| grimy, politically corrupt. | 1:36 | |
| A little town caught on the border | 1:40 | |
| between two warring peoples. | 1:42 | |
| Hardly a place for a celebration of Christmas. | 1:46 | |
| No, Bethlehem is Christmas. | 1:53 | |
| In a way, everything that the Bible means by Christmas | 1:58 | |
| can be said in that one name, Bethlehem. | 2:03 | |
| Today's gospel, | 2:09 | |
| you will note takes place in Bethlehem. | 2:11 | |
| It's the story after the story of the birth of Jesus. | 2:15 | |
| When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the Wise Men, | 2:21 | |
| he was infuriated and he sent and killed | 2:25 | |
| all the children in and around Bethlehem | 2:28 | |
| who were two years old and under. | 2:31 | |
| According to the time that he had learned from the Wise Men. | 2:33 | |
| Then was fulfilled what had been spoken | 2:37 | |
| through the prophet Jeremiah. | 2:40 | |
| A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, | 2:42 | |
| Rachel weeping for her children. | 2:47 | |
| She refused to be consoled because they were no more | 2:51 | |
| "I just can't believe that President Clinton | 3:01 | |
| "has done what they said he has done," | 3:03 | |
| said the earnest student to me last fall. | 3:05 | |
| Really? I replied, | 3:10 | |
| I can, of course I'm a Christian. | 3:12 | |
| And I'm conditioned to believe that politicians, | 3:15 | |
| well anybody in power is capable of doing almost anything. | 3:18 | |
| And at that moment, I realized that as a Christian | 3:23 | |
| I really am conditioned by a lifetime of going to church | 3:25 | |
| and hearing not too nice stories about politicians. | 3:30 | |
| So that, after you've been to church long enough | 3:35 | |
| and you've listened to enough pieces | 3:38 | |
| like this one from Matthew, | 3:39 | |
| you can believe that people in power | 3:44 | |
| will stoop to almost anything. | 3:45 | |
| Christmas is barely two days or in Matthew's Gospel | 3:49 | |
| about 12 verses old. | 3:53 | |
| And already Matthew inserts this horrible story | 3:56 | |
| of King Herod's massacre of the boy babies in Bethlehem. | 4:00 | |
| In a way, | 4:08 | |
| the church is always doing this sort of thing. | 4:11 | |
| You come to church on Christmas, | 4:14 | |
| Sunday after Christmas and the music is so sublime | 4:17 | |
| and the setting is so beautiful. | 4:21 | |
| And you're thinking such good thoughts | 4:23 | |
| until you get to the Scripture and the sermon, | 4:25 | |
| and then everything just seems to collapse | 4:29 | |
| and all this ugliness and horror. | 4:31 | |
| The church is good at that sort of thing. | 4:35 | |
| Few years ago I had to speak, | 4:38 | |
| do some academic hardship duty speaking in Hawaii, | 4:42 | |
| and we went about a week early | 4:46 | |
| and we did all the tourist things in Hawaii, | 4:49 | |
| and it was our first visit to this tropical paradise. | 4:52 | |
| And it really is a paradise | 4:56 | |
| with the sun setting over the beach. | 4:58 | |
| And the tour guides were | 5:00 | |
| telling us about the perfect climate in Hawaii | 5:01 | |
| about all the native plants in Hawaii | 5:04 | |
| and they said here in Hawaii, | 5:07 | |
| you have all these different ethnic groups | 5:08 | |
| living as one, Hawaii could be a model | 5:11 | |
| to the rest of America. | 5:14 | |
| And it was just this beautiful tropical heaven on earth. | 5:17 | |
| And we might have believed that, | 5:22 | |
| except we spent the next week with a church. | 5:24 | |
| And I was speaking to all these clergy in Hawaii. | 5:28 | |
| And during the sessions, | 5:32 | |
| the pastors started telling me about | 5:34 | |
| all the social problems in Hawaii. | 5:36 | |
| The racial conflict that comes out when people are together | 5:38 | |
| in groups and, they noted that | 5:43 | |
| they're more working parents in Hawaii | 5:48 | |
| than any other state in the nation. | 5:50 | |
| There's more child poverty in Hawaii than any other state. | 5:51 | |
| The drug abuse is just rampant. | 5:55 | |
| The alcohol abuse a huge problem. | 5:57 | |
| And I said, leave it to the church | 6:01 | |
| just when I was thinking positively about this place, | 6:03 | |
| you hang out with the church long enough, | 6:06 | |
| they started going to bring about | 6:08 | |
| all this negative dirty laundry and airing it. | 6:09 | |
| And I feel a little bit that same way here | 6:13 | |
| on this Sunday after Christmas. | 6:15 | |
| Christmas Eve we sang about the little town of Bethlehem. | 6:19 | |
| But then you come to church on this Sunday | 6:25 | |
| and you hear about the rest of the Bethlehem story. | 6:28 | |
| King Herod the Great, threatened by all this talk of | 6:34 | |
| a new king of the Jews that might threaten | 6:38 | |
| his political alliance that he had made | 6:41 | |
| between the Jewish authorities and the Romans. | 6:45 | |
| King Herod decided to stand up and act like a king. | 6:49 | |
| He massacred all the boy babies around Bethlehem. | 6:54 | |
| Down through the ages enumerable kings, | 6:59 | |
| governments, dictators, parliaments | 7:01 | |
| have tried to solve their problem by murdering Jews. | 7:04 | |
| Today's Gospel is a horror story about that. | 7:08 | |
| And how that story contrasts | 7:16 | |
| with our cherished views of Christmas. | 7:17 | |
| O little town of Bethlehem how still we see the lie. | 7:21 | |
| That's a lie. | 7:27 | |
| O little town of Bethlehem made miserable | 7:29 | |
| by the birth of Jesus. | 7:32 | |
| Streets running red with blood | 7:34 | |
| while mothers wail for their lost children. | 7:36 | |
| That's the way the Bible does Bethlehem. | 7:41 | |
| Let there be peace on earth | 7:45 | |
| and let it begin with me, we sing. | 7:47 | |
| Christmas cards are inherently sentimental, | 7:51 | |
| and TV tales of a snow covered winter wonderland | 7:54 | |
| where Christmas evokes just about the best in everybody. | 7:57 | |
| While you will note that the first Christmas evoked | 8:03 | |
| the absolute worst in King Herod. | 8:05 | |
| Matthew's Christmas Pageant ends, | 8:10 | |
| not with tensile covered angels for claiming goodwill. | 8:12 | |
| But with Rachel weeping for her slaughtered babies. | 8:17 | |
| Christmas in Bethlehem, and it's the real Bethlehem. | 8:21 | |
| See, Herod was no fool. | 8:27 | |
| He'd been in power long enough to be able to tell | 8:30 | |
| a political rival when he saw one. | 8:33 | |
| What those dumb shepherds might see is just a little baby, | 8:36 | |
| distant relative of King David. | 8:40 | |
| Herod knew that the angels were right. | 8:43 | |
| He was a threat, he was a threat to everything | 8:45 | |
| that Herod had built his kingdom upon. | 8:48 | |
| Thus Herod joins other great political leaders | 8:54 | |
| of this century Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao | 8:57 | |
| who didn't mind a little murder, particularly of children | 9:04 | |
| in order to advance great political ideals. | 9:08 | |
| The world calls it Beirut, where Ronald Reagan | 9:13 | |
| and the Israelis devastated in order to bring peace on earth | 9:16 | |
| to the Near East, | 9:21 | |
| or Bosnia, where the world stood by quietly amid | 9:23 | |
| the genocide or Beijing, | 9:26 | |
| where we did nothing as the tanks rolled over the students | 9:30 | |
| because we wanted to send Pepsi to China. | 9:34 | |
| The world calls it Bosnia or Beirut or Belfast or Beijing. | 9:38 | |
| The Bible just calls it Bethlehem. | 9:43 | |
| We bed down so easily with the powers that be, | 9:48 | |
| we say to ourselves, well, peace on earth, goodwill, | 9:52 | |
| that's fine, but sometimes you've got to exercise | 9:57 | |
| a little Christian realism. | 10:00 | |
| I very well remember what a Duke professor | 10:02 | |
| who had been raised in China. | 10:04 | |
| Right after China's borders were opened, | 10:07 | |
| he went there and visited. | 10:09 | |
| And he said he remembered when people | 10:11 | |
| were starving in China, but nobody was starving today. | 10:12 | |
| What a great tribute to the communist government there. | 10:17 | |
| A reporter asked him "Well, aren't you bothered | 10:20 | |
| "that six or 7 million Chinese were killed by Mao?" | 10:23 | |
| And he said, "Well, six or 7 million | 10:27 | |
| "but the point is nobody's starving today." | 10:30 | |
| These things sometimes hurt. | 10:33 | |
| That's our kind of realism. | 10:37 | |
| That's the way we run the world. | 10:38 | |
| And Doctors Without Borders say | 10:40 | |
| that maybe 100,000 Iraqi children have died | 10:41 | |
| from lack of food and medicine during our embargo. | 10:46 | |
| We don't like this Christmas story. | 10:51 | |
| It's not as many of us here today | 10:55 | |
| as were at services in the chapel on Christmas Eve. | 10:56 | |
| To hear the shepherds and the angels | 11:00 | |
| and the little baby Jesus. | 11:02 | |
| Christmas for us becomes an escapist fantasy. | 11:04 | |
| For that one day of the year | 11:08 | |
| when everybody becomes miraculously transformed from scrooge | 11:09 | |
| into one who suddenly does right by Tiny Tim. | 11:14 | |
| It's hard to be honest about ourselves. | 11:18 | |
| It's hard to be honest about our real situation in Bel Air, | 11:22 | |
| or Birmingham or Bunnlevel or Boca Raton. | 11:26 | |
| But the Bible thank God, always tells the truth. | 11:31 | |
| And it calls it Bethlehem. | 11:37 | |
| If we will turn down the muzak in the shopping mall | 11:41 | |
| for just a moment, you might hear still the wails | 11:44 | |
| of mothers screaming, weeping for their lost babies. | 11:47 | |
| Wherever today the slaughter of the innocence is re-enacted. | 11:52 | |
| Let us go even unto Bethlehem | 11:56 | |
| and let us take a look at this thing which has come to pass. | 11:59 | |
| We lie about this Christmas story. | 12:05 | |
| A few years ago, at Christmas, | 12:09 | |
| a best selling religious book was The Celestine Prophecy. | 12:12 | |
| Aside from reservations about its bad grammar and syntax, | 12:16 | |
| one might also wonder why such saccharine spirituality | 12:20 | |
| should be so greedily consumed now. | 12:25 | |
| It's part of the avalanche of New Age spirituality | 12:28 | |
| and affirmation. | 12:33 | |
| We are good, amen. | 12:35 | |
| We are making progress every day getting better | 12:38 | |
| and bigger in every way, amen. | 12:41 | |
| We mean well, we are doing the best we can meditate, | 12:43 | |
| marinate in a hot tub in California. | 12:48 | |
| Unleash the good in you, unleash the God in you. | 12:52 | |
| Only a century that has produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust | 12:58 | |
| could so earnestly need to lie | 13:06 | |
| about us and our affinity to Herod. | 13:10 | |
| At the end of perhaps the bloodiest century, | 13:19 | |
| the world has ever known. | 13:22 | |
| If you just count up the bodies of those killed | 13:24 | |
| by their own governments to say nothing of the war. | 13:27 | |
| At the end of another year in the streets | 13:32 | |
| of any US city including Durham, | 13:34 | |
| we are beckoned by the Bible to go even unto Bethlehem. | 13:39 | |
| You don't have to call it Bethlehem, | 13:45 | |
| you can call it Buffalo, | 13:46 | |
| where this year a doctor who had aborted thousands | 13:48 | |
| of fetuses is gunned down in his own home | 13:51 | |
| by somebody who did it because he believes | 13:54 | |
| in the right to life. | 13:56 | |
| We just don't know any other way to get what we really want | 13:59 | |
| for Christmas other than violence. | 14:02 | |
| Oh we call it the right to choose, | 14:05 | |
| or others call it the right to life. | 14:08 | |
| Matthew just calls it Bethlehem. | 14:11 | |
| At the end of the story of The Nativity, | 14:17 | |
| after the angels go back to wherever they came from, | 14:20 | |
| and after the shepherds go home and the Wise Men | 14:22 | |
| and the baby Jesus and his family | 14:26 | |
| head for Egypt as refugees. | 14:28 | |
| We hear the screams of mothers weeping for Jewish babies, | 14:31 | |
| and our nose gets rubbed in the politics of it all. | 14:37 | |
| And the blood, and the pain, the blood and sorrow | 14:40 | |
| before the Bible will let us leave Bethlehem. | 14:45 | |
| And even though this is not the Christmas story we want, | 14:50 | |
| it may be the Christmas story we need. | 14:56 | |
| Because any God who is unwilling to come to Bethlehem | 15:01 | |
| won't do us much good. | 15:06 | |
| If any God is going to save us, | 15:11 | |
| us, | 15:14 | |
| God will have to come down | 15:16 | |
| down to where we are. | 15:19 | |
| Because we can never get up to God. | 15:23 | |
| On Christmas Eve, | 15:28 | |
| we gathered in this chapel | 15:30 | |
| and we heard those sonorous phrases | 15:32 | |
| from the opening of John's glorious gospel. | 15:35 | |
| In the beginning was the Word, the Word was made flesh | 15:39 | |
| and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. | 15:44 | |
| The Word became flesh and dwelt among us | 15:50 | |
| and we beheld his glory. | 15:53 | |
| Christians call that the incarnation. | 15:56 | |
| Our belief that God Almighty maker of heaven on earth | 16:01 | |
| came here and took on our flesh | 16:04 | |
| and forgave us and redeemed us and saved us, | 16:09 | |
| that we might be brought to God. | 16:14 | |
| Well today, this is Matthew's way | 16:19 | |
| of telling the very same story. | 16:23 | |
| John calls it the Word made flesh and dwelling among us. | 16:27 | |
| Matthew just calls it Bethlehem. | 16:32 | |
| Just before Christmas, | 16:39 | |
| this student was telling me about the twist | 16:41 | |
| and the turns in his romantic relationships. | 16:44 | |
| I love listening to that sort of thing from students. | 16:49 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 16:52 | |
| And, you see, he thought he was deeply in love | 16:53 | |
| with this young woman and it was meant | 16:56 | |
| to be the right relationship. | 16:59 | |
| And it was love, it really was love but she had given him | 17:02 | |
| his walking papers on Thanksgiving and he was out, | 17:06 | |
| and he was crushed, and he was heartbroken | 17:09 | |
| and he was confused. | 17:12 | |
| In his misery, he said, | 17:14 | |
| "If it's love, why does it have to hurt so much? | 17:17 | |
| "Why does love have to be so darn painful? | 17:24 | |
| "Love ought not to be that way," | 17:31 | |
| he said. | 17:33 | |
| Oh my dear dumb sophomore. | 17:36 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 17:38 | |
| Don't you know that love, real love is always that way, | 17:41 | |
| painful, because if there's real love, | 17:46 | |
| there's got to be risk and if there is risk, | 17:50 | |
| there is always a possibility of failure and pain. | 17:54 | |
| It is a risky, potentially painful thing | 18:00 | |
| to get your life mixed up with another human being. | 18:02 | |
| Today's, | 18:09 | |
| today's Gospel says that | 18:11 | |
| Christ came first to Bethlehem | 18:16 | |
| to real people living on this real Earth. | 18:22 | |
| God didn't come to angels God came to us | 18:26 | |
| in Bethlehem. | 18:31 | |
| Love came down at Christmas we sometimes sing, | 18:34 | |
| If love, God's love is to come down to us where we live, | 18:39 | |
| there's gonna be some pain. | 18:46 | |
| Yes, and there will be blood too. | 18:49 | |
| Somebody is gonna get hurt | 18:53 | |
| because we are terribly hurtful | 18:54 | |
| in both our loves and our hates. | 18:56 | |
| If our allegiances are gonna be dethroned, | 19:00 | |
| if there is going to be another king other than Herod, | 19:04 | |
| it's not gonna be pretty | 19:09 | |
| because we hold on tight to our gods, | 19:12 | |
| and we won't let them go without a fight. | 19:16 | |
| At Bethlehem, we see a prelude to events that take place | 19:22 | |
| later at a place just up the road called Calvary. | 19:28 | |
| The one called King of the Jews goes head to head | 19:35 | |
| with our kings and our kingdoms, our politics and our power. | 19:38 | |
| And there is pain and violence | 19:46 | |
| and there is weeping and blood. | 19:48 | |
| At last Herod will get his way with Mary's baby. | 19:52 | |
| And Matthew says, all of this | 19:58 | |
| was for us and our salvation. | 20:02 | |
| All in the name of love, all for us. | 20:07 | |
| And it began | 20:14 | |
| in Bethlehem. | 20:17 |
