If you were here on Sunday, then you
know this sermon is sort of Part 2 to what I began that morning. But don’t worry – you don’t have to have
heard Part 1 for Part 2 to make sense.
Part 1 was about the question, How can we get ready to celebrate
Christmas after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut? Part 2 is about a harder question: Where is
God this Christmas if something so awful can happen?
On Christmas Eve, we like to hear
stories. I’ve often written stories for sermons
on Christmas Eve. There’s something
about this night, a chord of memory long-played from childhood, that makes us
want to gather around the fire with a mug of hot chocolate (or something
stronger), basking in the warmth of the love of family and the love of
God. I can still see my family gathered
around our living room on Christmas Eve when I was a child, and I can feel the
warmth of the fire toasting my back as I sat on the hearth – the spot for the
youngest in our household because the older people got the chairs. We talked, and sipped whatever our mugs held,
and got ready to head off for midnight mass to welcome God’s love into the
world once again.
That was my Christmas Eve from
childhood. This Christmas Eve, things
feel different. This isn’t a
sipping-cocoa-‘round-the-fire sort of Christmas Eve – not with our nation and
our own hearts still aching from the shooting in Newtown. This is a Christmas Eve when sentimentality
feels even cheaper than usual. This is a
Christmas Eve when we can only imagine how the people of Newtown must be
reeling, trying to figure out how they’re supposed to celebrate the birth of
the Christ child only 10 days after losing so many children of their own.
In fact, this is a Christmas Eve when some
of us might have come to church trying to figure out a few things about God,
too. If you’ve come here tonight with
serious questions on your heart, know that you’re not alone. If you’ve come here tonight even with
something of a chip on your shoulder, know that you’re in good company. I imagine there are many people, even folks
of long-standing faith, who’d like to ask some serious questions of God
tonight. At the top of the list might
be, “Where were you in Newtown?” Or
maybe, “How can such awful things happen to such innocent people?” Or maybe, “Why didn’t you do something?”
On a night when those questions hang in
our hearts, I guess I do want to tell a couple of stories after all. First is the story of one of the victims at
Sandy Hook Elementary. Of course, all
the adults who died at the school that day are rightfully remembered as heroes,
giving their lives for the children they served. But one woman’s story particularly strikes me
this night – Anne Marie Murphy.
Ms. Murphy was a teacher’s aide at Sandy
Hook, assigned to help special-needs kids in a first-grade class. Ms. Murphy was a wife and mother of four, a
strong Christian who loved to paint and who was planning a big celebration with
her extended family over Christmas. That
morning, she was with working with Dylan Hockley, a 6-year-old who struggled
with autism. When the gunman burst into
the classroom, Dylan Hockley was hit, along with the teacher, Vicki Soto, and
several other children in that class.
What stands out to me about Ms. Murphy, the teacher’s aide, is where her
body was found. She had apparently been
nearby Dylan because she had pulled him close, using her own body to try to
shield him from the gunfire. In that
act, she lost her own life.1,2,3
Why do I tell you such a sad story on
this holy night? Because, in a deep
sense, it’s the Christmas story. It’s
the Christian story.
In our culture, the Christmas story
tends to come across like the images on our Christmas cards – a loving couple
cast in soft light; cuddly lambs around a manger; a baby glowing in divine
light, wrapped in blankets and resting comfortably on clean, warm straw.
Now, none of us has video from that
night 2,000 years ago, but I think the scene probably didn’t look quite like that. Two thousand years ago, this child was born
to impoverished, unmarried peasants.
They’d been forced to travel on foot the 70 miles from their home in
Nazareth to the father’s hometown of Bethlehem because government authorities
commanded it. It wouldn’t have been easy
in any case, but it was all the harder because the young woman was about to
deliver their child. When they arrived,
the only place they could find to stay was in a cave, sleeping with the animals
that were kept there. And if you’ve ever
mucked out a stall, you know how clean that cave most likely wasn’t.
This couple’s situation wasn’t all that remarkable. Thousands of peasants would have been
affected by the Roman government’s census, and most of them would have been
enduring similar hardships.
But the difference, of course, was the
child. This wasn’t just another peasant
baby, as likely to die as to live in its first few hours and days. This peasant baby was the Son of God. Now, you’ve heard that said so many times
before that it may not mean much to hear it again tonight. But let me say it again: That was the Son of God lying in the muck of
that stable.
Messengers from heaven came to other
peasants that night, sheep herders outside town, and told them a Savior had
been born – the anointed ruler, the Lord, the true king who would reveal the
Roman Emperor as the imposter he was.
But this divine king was lying in a feed trough, and his parents were
just hoping they’d find something to eat that night.
To the sheep herders, the message must
have been literally unbelievable. It
didn’t make sense. How could it be “glad
tidings of great joy” (Luke 1:10) that another peasant baby had come into a
dark, uncaring world? He certainly
couldn’t have seemed like a savior. He
looked like he was the one who needed saving.
Thirty years or so later, he’d look very
much to be in need of saving once again.
He’d be beaten and killed by the worldly authorities he’d come to
challenge. And on that dark Friday,
people gathered around would ask, where was God? Why didn’t God come to save this young man
who who’d worked miracles and who called out to his Father from the cross?
On the floor in Newtown, Connecticut, a
teacher’s aide lay shot and killed by a madman.
And again we ask, Where was God?
Why didn’t God come and save the children at Sandy Hook Elementary and
the teachers and staff who protected them?
This is the mystery
of Christmas: In Jesus, God was lying there in the dirty straw. In Jesus, God was being beaten by the
Romans. In Jesus, God was dying on the
cross. And at Sandy Hook Elementary, Jesus
was shielding a 6-year-old, trying to save a beloved child from the power of
sin and death.
The mystery of Christmas is that God
saves us from sin and death by stepping directly into the line of fire. God loves us, and all of creation, so deeply
that God saves the world from the inside out.
As a baby, vulnerable to everything, God chose to enter into our
experience and make it God’s own. The
pain we know, God knows. The fear we
face, God faced. The death we seek to
avoid at all costs, God chose. Like the
teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary, God saw us in need and decided to act, no
matter the cost.
But what transforms this from simply a
story of noble suffering to the story
of salvation is the fact that for this baby born in the dirty straw, death was
not the end. Jesus’ death toppled death
from its throne. Enduring it, he
defeated it – and gave to us that victory, as well.
Anne Marie Murphy knew that truth. She staked her life on it. For Christians, death is not the end because
God chose to defeat sin and death from the inside out, stepping directly into
it to lift us out of it.
In our own small ways, we, too, know that
we’re called to walk the path of Anne Marie Murphy. We probably won’t find ourselves called to
shield a child from a bullet. But we
most certainly will find ourselves called to love people extravagantly in a
thousand smaller ways. We may not lay
down our lives, but we can hold out our hands.
We can give when the world might take.
We can cry with someone who mourns.
We can offer a coat to someone shivering in the cold. We can commit ourselves to honor this truth:
that all children deserve the chance to
learn free from violence, free from hunger, free from systems that bind them in
despair. As Anne Marie Murphy chose to
act as Christ, so must we. God loves us
enough to defeat sin and death from the inside out. Now, Jesus asks us to return the favor.
At the end of the order of service,
you’ll find a poem.4 It
wasn’t written in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, but it might as well have
been. On this holy night, let me leave
you with this:
When the song of the angels is still,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their sheep,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoners,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
– Howard Thurman
2. Feldman, Emily. “Newtown Teacher’s Aide Died Cradling Dying Student: Family.” Available at: http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/NATL-Newtown-Teacher-Died-Cradling-Dying-Student-Family-184007371.html. Accessed Dec. 20, 2012.
3. Liu, Betty Ming, and Shelley Acoca. “Connecticut shooting: Sandy Hook victim Anne Marie Murphy mourned by Katonah parents.” Available at: http://newyork.newsday.com/news/nation/connecticut-shooting-sandy-hook-victim-anne-marie-murphy-mourned-by-katonah-parents-1.4336910. Accessed Dec. 20, 2012.
4. Thurman, Howard. “The Work of Christmas.” In: Thurman, Howard. The Mood of Christmas and other Celebrations. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1973. 23.
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