The Rest of the Story…
Every once in a while, one of my children will ask me about their birth story. Maybe they’ve been laying on my belly, and the thought about how they once were inside there comes back to them, and they ask about living inside of my womb. I tell them about how I used to feel their kicks, and how funny it would feel when one of them had the hiccups. I tell them about how we would see pictures of them in ultrasounds and how we would talk to them, sing to them and play music. I don’t tell them about the back pain, the hip pain and the round ligament pain. I don’t tell them how, in pregnancy, I had zero immunity and so in my last two pregnancies, I had the flu and RSV, which led to pneumonia, hospitalization and fear.
Sometimes they wonder about how they got from “in there” to “out here.” I tell them about what we were doing when labor started, what time of day it was and the movies I may have watched to pass the time in the middle of the night. I remind them who came to watch the older kids when we left for the hospital to have the younger ones. I don’t tell them about the fact that at some point before I got that blessed epidural, I looked at my spouse and thought, “Please be a good parent for both of us after I die in this excruciating, painful event that is childbirth.”
The girls get a Hallmark version of how they got here. The sweet stories. Maybe someday when they are older, I will give them the rest of the story so that they can understand more accurately what it is really like to make and birth a human being. But for now, just the sweet stories will suffice.
For years, I have thought about how this is the same thing that we do with many of the stories in the Bible, including the ones about Jesus. We clean them up. We sanitize them to make reading them be more of a “Chicken Soup for the Soul” kind of experience, rather than a disrupting, uncomfortable and challenging experience.
I have a memory of being in Sunday School at the church I grew up in, and we were doing a play about the story of Jericho from the book of Joshua. We were reenacting marching around the city seven times, blowing trumpets until the walls came tumbling down, and then loud cheers and celebration. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that we ended our story there, with the walls tumbling down, even as the very next line reads (like every cherished children’s story): “Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” My Sunday School teachers conveniently left that part out. They didn’t have us reenact the rest of the story.
This week is Epiphany Sunday, but I really want to take us to the text from Matthew on the Flight to Egypt, because I read something recently that has me thinking about the stories we tell about Christmas and the weeks that follow before we begin Lent. Two weeks ago, in this very space, we shared an incredible experience on Christmas Eve, filled with music, candles, and a message centered on Love. We all went into Christmas focused on the power of Love. Two weeks later, on epiphany, I have been thinking about the parts of the Christmas story that we don’t tell, or at least not as often, lest they detract from the warmth of the holiday season.
I came across a piece written by author Joe Forrest, who writes about the intersections of faith, culture and politics, entitled “Revolution in the Manger: How the Christmas Story Speaks to Our Modern World.”
Forrest writes what I often feel about the way that we tell many Bible stories to one another, and what I have often felt about the Christmas story. He writes, “We’ve commercialized, neutered, and romanticized the story of Christmas to such an extent that it has lost its ability to shock and move us to action. There is an undercurrent of darkness pulsing in the background of this ancient story that we’ve mostly overlooked in favor of feel-good sentimentality and narrative predictability.”
Now, I can understand why we don’t tell the whole of the back story of the Flight to Egypt to our children on Christmas Eve. But as Forrest notes, “As we grow up, this story of the Nativity should scale up with us as we mature, and our awareness of the world increases.”
We all love to tell the story of angels, and sweet newborns laying in the hay with cattle lowing in the background. We love to hear about the visitors who saw a beautiful star and traveled from far away bringing precious gifts to this newborn king. All of that is important, AND, as we tell the story of Christmas, especially in our world today, we do ourselves a disservice to tell it without also telling how it is a story of teenage pregnancy in a still unwed woman. It is a story of a lack of hospitality toward a woman in labor who was forced to deliver in a stinky barn. It is a story of an oppressed and occupied Jewish people living under Roman rule. It is a story that includes infanticide. And ultimately, it is a story about revolution – a revolution set in motion by Love.
As we look at the text from Matthew that describes the flight to Egypt to escape those acting on orders from Herod, I think we need a helpful reminder of the context of this text. In Revolution in the Manger, Forrest shares some important contextual details that are helpful to hear alongside the reading of this text. He writes:
At the time of Jesus’s birth, King Herod ruled the region Jesus’s family called home. A half-Jewish ruler, Herod was appointed by Caesar to keep the peace in his corner of the Roman Empire. During his reign, Herod adopted the title “King of the Jews.” Herod was an extremely paranoid ruler and for good reason. If Rome thought he was doing a poor job, they could take everything away from him — including his life.
There’s also some pretty compelling historical evidence that suggests Herod may have been (expletive) insane. For example, he ordered the assassination of his own wife,
and murdered two of his sons — including one by drowning in the palace swimming pool. And when Herod heard rumors of another “King of the Jews” born in Bethlehem, he ordered the execution of all male infants under two years of age who had been born in the city. When Mary and Joseph hear about the order, they flee the country. Fleeing violence and persecution, they cross the border into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.
Yes, Jesus and his family were refugees, and they were the lucky ones. How many mothers and fathers placed themselves between the swords of Herod’s soldiers and their baby sons? How many women were left childless and widowed that night? Do we see the arterial spray sputtering from slashed throats? The newborns ran through and left cold and bloody in their cribs? Do we hear the wailing as parents had their world torn from their fingers? The sounds of gore-streaked blades sliding back into their scabbards?
Though grim and disturbing, we cannot censor this part of the Christmas story. This is infanticide, pure, and simple. It was a startling act of violence carried out in order to protect those in power. The murdered children and their dead parents will easily be dismissed as civilian casualties or acceptable losses. If it means maintaining the illusion of security, an Empire will sacrifice its humanity. The story of the first Christmas is more similar in tone to a season of Game of Thrones than it is a Pamper’s commercial.
Forrest’s piece is hard to read. It takes all of the truth that we likely know is there, wrapped up in the pages of the Christmas stories, and lays it out on the table in front of us. He tells it in a way where we can’t look away, even when we want to.
What I appreciate about his unpacking of the more gruesome details of the Christmas story is that it reminds us that aside from the angels, newborn in a manger, and gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, that reside in our thoughts as we gather together over meals and exchange gifts by the tree, there are elements of this story that have important things to say about our lives and our world right now.
What does it mean that Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are immigrants fleeing across borders to escape violence? What does that mean for us in the United States, a nation with an immigration crisis largely caused by migrants escaping violence and crippling economic and political oppression perpetrated in nations to our south? What does the Christmas story have to say to us, as residents in a nation that refuses to pass immigration reform, and so often speaks of migrants as a burden, or a problem, or worse, as criminals? How do we think about these issues when the story of Christmas, the story of our own savior and Messiah, is one that includes fleeing violence across borders? Is the Christmas story too woke for many Christians?
And what about Herod, the possibly insane but certainly a dangerous narcissist clinging to power? A ruler who was responsible for an empire acting with no humanity. What does that have to say our world today? What do we make of a power-hungry rulers being willing to murder babies and their parents for the sake of maintaining power?
I don’t have to tell you that 2024 is shaping up to be a difficult year for us in this nation – a divisive year, made all the more painful by the extremely polarized political state we find ourselves in. A year where truth is continually questioned. A year where our leaders will continually try to tell us who counts and who doesn’t, and suggest that those who think differently are dangerous enemies. All of the topics we prefer to avoid in the Christmas story are pertinent to us as people of faith living in such a time as this. Could it be that we need to be telling the whole of the Christmas Story to ourselves more often, and leaning into the fact this this story has something to say, not just about the arrival of a Love like no other Love, but a Love that arrives in the midst of teen, unwed parents? A Love that arrives despite the lack of hospitality and basic human decency of inviting a woman inside to have her baby? A Love that arrives first to an oppressed and occupied race of people? A Love that arrives and then quickly has to flee the most disgusting and inhumane kind of violence imaginable?
We need the rest of the story. The whole story of Christmas if we are truly to be disciples of Jesus in this world today. The arrival of Jesus tells us that to be a part of the story of God means being in the middle of all of these issues, not apart from them. We can’t avoid the hard and uncomfortable topics that the Christmas Story is telling us to face.
As we go through this challenging year together, let’s challenge one another to tell the full story of our faith - not just the parts that are comfortable, and seemingly nonpolitical. Let’s tell the whole stories of our faith to one another, leaning into the parts that push and stretch us in uncomfortable ways. Let’s embrace the moments where our faith rubs up against our politics and our lifestyles, rather that pushing those elements of our faith aside in favor of the traditions and biblical passages that affirm who we are and what we think.
This is my challenge to us. Let’s tell the rest of the stories, and see where it leads us. I predict that we are going to need the whole story of our faith to weather the storms ahead, and stay together through it all. Amen.
