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The Rev. Frank Logue The Real Grinch Who Couldn’t Steal Christmas
“Praise to you, Lord Christ.” These are the words the congregation says each week following a Gospel reading. Usually these words are easily said. Jesus heals a man born blind and we all respond, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Jesus cleanses ten lepers of their disease and sends them back home to family and friends and we all respond, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” This week, King Herod orders the execution of all the babies in and around Bethlehem who are two years old and younger. Yes, Joseph is warned in a dream and the Holy Family escapes into Egypt. But back in Bethlehem, there is lamentation going up that would echo all the way to the pyramids. An unknown number of innocent children are killed. Only one is known to get away. It is difficult to say words of praise following such a reading. Herod was the original Grinch. And if his 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 ultimate will of God. This matters so much as what happened in Bethlehem was not an isolated incident. Herod’s slaughter of the babes of Bethlehem is part of a pattern that is 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 through history we have seen the ongoing pattern in which tyrants can kill who they will. In recent memory we have the holocaust in Germany, 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 the ongoing slaughter of innocent Christian in southern Sudan taking place right up unto this very morning. 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 became refugees. Their flight from the power of a dictator has become all too familiar in all the killing fields of the world. Making sense out of Bethlehem means making sense out of the fallen world in which we live and it is vitally important. I am going to take a risk this morning and assume that y’all trust me enough to go on a dangerous journey of the mind. I will ask you to consider something that sounds heretical, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the Truth of the Word of God. Bear with me for about a minute and a half and I promise that we will emerge on the other side right back in the center of Christian thought and understanding. Here is the risky statement: There are some things God cannot do. This is not because God is not all-powerful. God is omnipotent, which means all-powerful, but even having all power doesn’t make everything possible. The things God cannot do are things that can never be done. I know this will sound blasphemous at first, but stay with me just a moment and you will see how what I am saying is not only the orthodox truth, but reveals something important about the way the world works. God cannot make a married bachelor. To be a bachelor means that you are not married, so even if God wanted to do it, it is not possible, by definition. That seems a trivial thing, of course a bachelor can not be married and still be a bachelor, even if the married man takes off his wedding ring while away from home on business. God cannot make two contradictory things happen at once. The classic question of the Middle Ages comes to mind, which is, “As God is all-powerful, can God create a stone so large that God cannot lift it?” The problem is that if God cannot create such a stone, then God is not all-powerful in the ability to create and if God cannot lift the stone, then God is not all-powerful in strength. The classical conundrum has a simple answer. It is simply not possible to create a stone so big as to not be able to be lifted by an all-powerful God. That doesn’t make God weak, but it means that some things are not possible. In the same way that I cannot both stand still and run at the same time, God cannot both give humans free will and take away that free will. It cannot be done. We either have free will or we don’t. And if we have free will, then God cannot remove it, no matter how powerful God is. For if God took away our choices in order to make sure that there was no pain and suffering in the world, then we would no longer be free. So while I readily agree that with God all things are possible, the full expression should say that all things that are not impossible are possible with God. Other than doing two contradictory things at the same time, God can do all things. 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, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” explains so much. It shows that first and foremost, God loves us unreservedly. This is why scripture teaches that God is love. Love demands freedom, requires it. True love can never be demanded or coerced. Whatever is demanded or required is not love. In the same way that one can never be a married bachelor, one can never love without choice. Love must be freely given in order to be love. There is no other way. Force, oppression, demands, and 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, as what is arrived at without free choice is not love. Love must be freely given and freely accepted in order to be love. So 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 kill others. This is no different from the decisions I make, even if it is at a larger scale. As a husband and father, I make decisions that can and do place my wife and daughter at risk. They are on the road now visiting Victoria’s sister. That trip involves risk. And yet, I want them to take the trip. If I wanted to protect them fully, I would keep Victoria and Griffin at home locked away, wrapped in bubble wrap. But if I did lock them away in bubble wrap, no one would think that I really love my wife and daughter. I would be accused of possessing and oppressing, but not of love. Similarly, God has created a world in which love is possible and that means it is a world of free will. We humans bend their wills to do some very ungodly things and the result includes the deaths at the hands of murderers or drunk drivers and so on. 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 founded on love is also what makes all the 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 love by becoming weak and vulnerable. God entered into the creation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to gently weave back the tattered tapestry of our world with love. This week in our Gospel, we hear the painful truth that when Jesus was born, Herod struck out against innocent children in Bethlehem. And yet, we also learn that God’s plan cannot be thwarted. God loves us so much that he is willing to enter in to the pain and suffering of this world in order to redeem it. Even as Herod could exercise his free will to do the unthinkable and end too many innocent lives to consider in order 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 wrong 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 when compared to God’s eternal love. What God did in Bethlehem during the tragedy of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents was to be present to those babes 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, never departing from those in pain even in the darkest tragedy. God does not abandon us to suffering, but remains with us in the midst of our pain and loss. Then God works to work all the terrible pain we humans cause together for the good. God in power gave us free will and through that free will offered us the free gift of love. God loved so loved the world that he did not stand idly by. We are not to stand idly by either. We are to respond to the love of God. We respond to the love of God by offering God our lives. And we do always see love breaking through in times of evil. In every tragedy, look and you will see someone standing against it. At Virginia Tech a professor stood in the way of the attacker to save his students. The pattern repeats so that in every act of hatred, there are those who show love even in the midst of the loss. We too are to stand against evil. We also respond to the love of God also in prayer. Through prayer, we come to unite our wills with God’s will and so become part of the solution. Prayer is our free will choice to place the ultimate result in God’s hands. Prayer is how we stay in communication with our loving Lord. And through that channel we come to discover God’s will for our lives and to experience God’s love. Know that the Bible is the most realistic of texts. The Bible does not hide the painful truth of the world as it is. Scripture does not try to pretend that all is well. The Bible instead shows 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 this 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. In answer to the evil humans do, God offers, love. Real love. Lasting love. Eternal love. Love that in time will break the power of evil and death. This is why we can end a reading like this morning’s Gospel and say, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Yes, 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 creation. The power of love can and does defeat evil. Love will win out in the end. And in the meantime, God will use love to take all the mess we make out of our lives and work it to the good. To that I say, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Amen.
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