Let’s Put the H back in cHristmas
To most people this is extremely insensitive and even irreverent. But truthfully, the slaughter never really stopped. We ignore the ever present, ongoing ‘massacre of the innocents’ that unfolds daily before us.
In her book entitled Accidental Saints Nadia Bolz-Weber asserts that we need to put the ‘H’ for Herod back in Christmas. “…in a world where suffering is as real as Herod and Boko Haram and Sandy Hook, where people are longing for something to help make sense of their suffering. Pretending that everything is fine isn’t helping anyone…The story about Christmas is as much about comfort and joy as it is about how messed up our world actually is”
We need to tell the whole Christmas story and that story includes the horror and hedonism of Herod.
In the gospel we have this record Matthew 2:16 When Herod saw that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was filled with rage. Sending orders, he put to death all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under,
It is the story of the massacre of the untold number of infants that were killed in an effort by King Herod to rid the world of the Christ child.
As the Christmas season approaches, we still do our best to ignore this fact by numbing ourselves in our hedonistic culture.
We hear of children drowning as they try to escape wars. We hear of them starving to death, being bombed, being stolen and sold as sex slaves and a host of other horrors. So instead of thinking too deeply about it, we start planning for Christmas.
What kind of cards will we mail? What will we cook? Who did and did not get a gift? Have we paid off last year’s credit card yet? What did I do with all of the stuff I got last Christmas?
I suggest, we keep the ‘H’ in Christmas. Let it not be Herod and Hedonism. Let it be Hope, Healing and Holy Ghost Hallelujah.
Think about this please. The slaughter is before us and God will hold us accountable for how we ignore or meet the needs of those innocents.