12/28/2025
Here is today's message preached today in church:
Based on Matthew 2:13-23 and Isaiah 63:7-9
(There was one Christmas season many years back during my first full-time position as the Director of Mission and Outreach at a church in Hartford, CT that I went with a friend to New York City to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.
During the intermission, when we looked at our phones, we had received multiple news alerts. And I had received a message that we were going to have an emergency staff the next morning to discuss how the church was going to respond to the news.
The news was that a shooting had occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I was serving a congregation in Hartford, CT.
The church, like many others in the area, collected teddy bears for survivors.
A retired pastor in our congregation who had been a chaplain spent his time weekly going to Newtown, CT to be available for counseling and being present with the victims’ families.
One of the victims had been a granddaughter of one of our members.
This felt close to home…
A voice rises in Ramah,
Rachel weeping for her children.
After the glow of Christmas trees, candlelight, and familiar words about peace on earth, these texts pull us back into the real world like a sudden winter wind, catching us off guard.
Even as we confront the grief and violence these texts describe, this story remains part of the Christmas season. Christmas is not only about lights, gifts, and celebration; it is also about God entering a world that is broken, fragile, and often unjust.
The birth of Jesus did not take place in a bubble of safety or peace—it took place in the midst of fear, oppression, and uncertainty. To acknowledge this is not to dampen our joy, but to root it in reality: God comes into the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is at the heart of the Christmas Season—that Emmanuel, God-with-us, chooses to be present in the midst of suffering, calling us to join in compassion, justice, and hope alongside the vulnerable and grieving.
We live in a world where children die and caregivers grieve—not occasionally or even accidentally, but far too often - not only in hospitals, but in neighborhoods shaped by neglect, in places marked by violence, in camps and shelters, in temporary homes, in regions fractured by war and instability.
We live in a world where the vulnerable suffer while systems of power too often protect themselves, and accountability is delayed, denied, or never arrives at all.
Matthew’s account of what the church has long called “the slaughter of the innocents” is a horrifying text. And to be honest one that most preachers want to avoid in this season.
It disrupts any attempt to make Christmas harmless or sentimental. It names what happens when fear hardens into policy and power turns lethal. It shows us that the gospel begins not in safety, but in danger.
Many of us first heard this story through the Flight into Egypt, often told gently. Mary and Joseph were framed as models of faith or quiet courage.
But the truth is much darker. They were refugees. They crossed borders not to fulfill a calling, but to survive. They did what parents do when the world becomes unsafe for their child. They fled state-sponsored violence.
As children, we were spared graphic detail. But we understood enough: this was a dangerous world for Jesus to be born into. And many of us assumed, or were taught, that our own world had somehow moved beyond this kind of threat.
But now I think we know better.
You could argue that this story belongs elsewhere, maybe in Lent, or in a space set aside for harder truths. But grief does not keep liturgical calendars. Violence does not wait for appropriate seasons. And our public rituals of candle lighting, praying for peace on earth, joy and love have not undone the conditions that make this story recognizable.
Child poverty.
Interpersonal and systemic violence.
Displacement.
War.
The slow violence of inequality.
This is a brutal world, not because cruelty is inevitable, but because power so often values control over care.
Rachel’s weeping is not confined to one time or place. It echoes wherever children are lost to violence, neglect, hunger, or preventable harm.
It rises wherever families are separated, wherever parents and caregivers are forced to leave futures they had barely begun to imagine.
It is present in the unrecorded grief of neighborhoods, communities, and families whose stories are never fully told.
If we allowed ourselves to hear it, this weeping would interrupt our celebrations. It would complicate our hymns. It would refuse to be background noise.
And this, too, is the world Jesus’ ancestors inhabited that the long lineage that Matthew names.
These were people shaped by empire, famine, forced migration, and loss. How many of them had had to bury children? How many had had to flee in the night? How many lived one decree away from disaster?
Because we have to remember that Jesus was born as a Jewish child under Roman occupation. From the very beginning, his life was politically and socially vulnerable.
And so, when Matthew shares this story, he is not just reporting history. He is reminding his readers, both then and now, that Scripture remembers the vulnerable.
A Joseph who dreams prophetic dreams recalls another Joseph, betrayed by his family and exiled in Egypt. The murder of infants echoes Pharaoh’s campaign of terror, when empire targeted the smallest bodies to secure their future.
And first-century listeners would also recognize these patterns from their own collective memory.
This story echoes through time. Trauma echoes through time. And scripture remembers.
But Matthew is stirring up another memory too, one that holds hope.
Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31:15:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children.
Jeremiah speaks these words as Jerusalem is destroyed and families are forced into exile. Rachel—long dead—rises in imagination to grieve for all Israel. Though she is biologically mother to only two tribes, she becomes mother of all, a symbol of care that refuses to be contained.
And it is important to note, Rachel’s tears mark a turning point in Jeremiah’s prophecy. From that place of deepest grief, the prophet pivots toward hope:
There is hope for the future, your children will come back from exile.
Ancient rabbis imagined this moment as a cosmic conversation. Jeremiah calls up the great ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, to plead with God for mercy. Each offers reasons why God should relent. None succeed.
Only when Rachel speaks—only when a mother pleads for her children—does God respond. Only Rachel’s grief changes the conversation.
Not logic. Not precedent. But love refusing to let children be forgotten. One parent speaking to another parent.
Matthew invokes Rachel in the midst of this story of Immanuel, God-with-us, the birth of a child whose very name, Jesus, Yeshua, is a verb: save.
God’s salvation may feel far off and wholly inadequate to mothers who mourn. Yes, Herod’s threat passes, but only to be replaced by another Herod, another ruler without a conscious. The violence does not end. And yet, when this child grows and returns to Jerusalem, God does something unimaginable:
God does not justify suffering.
God does not explain it away.
God does not ask the grieving to wait quietly.
God enters it.
In Jesus, God enters the fate of every child harmed by violence and every parent left behind. God takes the body of the vulnerable. God stands in solidarity with those crushed by systems they did not choose.
Not spared, but carried. Not rescued from history, but accompanied through it.
This is what Isaiah dares to say:
“In all their distress, God was distressed;
in love and compassion God redeemed them;
God lifted them up and carried them.” (Isaiah 63:9 (paraphrased))
The birth of Christ should shatter sentimental Christmas faith. Warm images and familiar songs cannot heal deep loss. Charity, while necessary, cannot undo structural harm. Even justice pursued faithfully takes time that grief does not have.
Because comfort does not come easily for Rachel or any one experiencing the loss of a child or loved one.
What exists instead is presence, costly, vulnerable presence.
God enters the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. God refuses distance. God refuses indifference.
And if God is with us then maybe we are called to remain present as well:
To listen when it would be easier to turn away.
To grieve without rushing to resolution.
To confront systems that wound rather than ignoring or spiritualizing their effects.
All our weeping is gathered by the One who promises transformation…not erasure, not denial, but healing… healing that remembers.
Nothing, not grief, not injustice, not even death, can sever the bonds of love. Nothing can keep God from being present. Nothing can stop God from working toward liberation for all.
This story refuses to let Christmas remain safe or sentimental. Jesus is born into a world where power too often protects itself by harming the most vulnerable. And rather than bypassing that reality, God enters it.
God does not look away.
God stays.
God suffers.
God carries us.
Because Emmanuel—God is with us.
Amen.
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References Used: Fickenscher, Pam. Remembering Rachael: the Slaughter of the Innocence. Journey with Jesus - Article Archive
