Blue Christmas 2015 – Isaiah 40:1-14, 28-31; Matthew 2:1-18
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child. / Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
The Coventry Carol has long been one of my favorite Christmas tunes. I don’t know why. I think it’s the close harmonies that intertwine to make a carol that doesn’t quite sound as joyful as most Christmas carols do. It has a quieter beauty that somehow feels more like the Christmas I feel inside, than it does the one the rest of the world seems to be celebrating.
Don’t get me wrong: I do love Christmas, I do. I just don’t get into it in a big, showy way. I don’t love all the decorations; they just feel like one more thing to have to clean up on December 26. I’m not even putting up a tree this year. And the presents? I never know what to get anybody. And God knows, I don’t need more “stuff” in my house. It looks to all the world around me that I’m a Scrooge, I think, but just because I don’t get into the symbols and trappings of the holiday, doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate it, in my own way. It’s just quieter. More contemplative. Like the carol.
O sisters, too, how may we do / For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing, / “Bye, bye, lully, lullay?”
I’ve never really paid attention to the words of this carol. I have a tendency to do that, actually; I know hymns and their words, but I don’t really know what those words have to say, what they portray. It’s only recently that I’ve started to pay attention to the words of all of these tunes I’ve been singing since I was little, and I’ve really been surprised by some of them. The Coventry Carol is no exception.
After Jesus was born, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, he was visited by three learned astrologers from Iran or thereabouts. On their way back home, they conveniently “forgot” to tell King Herod where to find the Christ child. Then an angel came to visit the Holy Family, and told them to get going, to run for their lives, because Herod was going to kill all the infant boys in the Bethlehem area. The gospel of Matthew tells us that, “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
Which, frankly, is horrible. Herod the Great sends his soldiers into Bethlehem and slaughters all of the baby boys. And the Holy Family is sent running off to Egypt, and the first thing the incarnate God does after his birth is to become a Middle Eastern refugee living in a foreign land. It sounds like a page out of the daily news, not the story of God’s salvation of the whole world! And all, according to Matthew, so that the prophecy of Hosea and Jeremiah can be fulfilled!
Herod, the king, in his raging / Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight / All young children to slay.
This is not the God we know. We hear in this story of the slaughter of innocent children a reflection of all the evils and horrors we experience. It is too easy for us to just say that people do evil things, and wave our hands as if God has nothing to do with it. This is our lives we’re talking about! Why does God just let us suffer? Why doesn’t God take away the {slowly} pain, the grief, the sickness, the despair, the worry, the stress, the fear? God is powerful enough. God could do it.
Why is it that at the moment that God is most active in the world, when God is becoming incarnate, enfleshed, the Christ child is born, that is the moment when these innocent children are sentenced to death? We know that Christ is come into our world. Why, then, is there terrorism? Why, then, does the world teach us to fear people who are different from us? Why, then, are we separated from our loved ones in death? Why, then, do our hopes and dreams falter? Why, then, do our lives seem empty and meaningless sometimes? {pause}
Why, then, was Jesus Christ born into the world, just so that he could die, naked and humiliated, on an instrument of torture, wielded by a powerful empire, at the hands of his own people?
Because that’s key, isn’t it? God doesn’t ignore our pain. God comes to us right in the midst of it. In fact, Jesus Christ was born because of our pain. He shares it with us, walks along the way with us, takes on our pain for us. Which doesn’t make it any less painful. But it does, perhaps, make it easier to bear.
That woe is me, Poor child for thee! / And ever morn and day,
For thy parting neither say nor sing / “bye, bye, lully, lullay!”
When we are at our worst, when everything seems to be going wrong, when our lives are falling apart, God is there. God is not there to fix everything. God knows that would be too easy. We would have this perfect little world, run just the way it’s supposed to be, and yet we wouldn’t be living into the fullness of life God wants for us. The alternative to life the way we have it is simply not life at all. So God is not here to fix everything. But God is here to hold us up when we falter. God’s promise is that, “Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
And this is true even in death. We are like grass, or clothed beautifully like flowers. But “the grass withers, and the flower fades. And the Word of our God will stand forever.” And of course, the Word of our God is Jesus. All the things we have lost are caught up in him. All the people we grieve are caught up in his love. And we, too, when we die, will not perish, but will live in Christ. And there will be such joy!
In the face of our sorrow, there is hope. We can be like a mother, singing a lullaby to her child, a child that she knows will soon be taken from her—and yet that does not diminish her love, or her caring, or her hope that maybe instead of death there will be life. For in Jesus, the resurrected one, wherever there is death, there is life.
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child. / Bye, bye, lully, lullay.