“Sacralizing the World”
Gospel reading: Matthew 2:13-18
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we commemorate the massacre of the holy innocents by King Herod the Great. Most of the feast days in the church year are joyful—celebrations of saints and of events in the life of Christ or the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today’s commemoration is much more sober. My reflections won’t exactly make for a feel-good homily. But there are lessons to be gleaned from this tragic event.
The most obvious is that there are wicked people in the world. There are tyrants who will resort to any behavior, however debased, to hold onto their power. This kind of evil does not discriminate on the basis of age. I actually think this is a round-about argument for infant baptism. Evil does not hold back its fury from the young, and so God does not hold back his grace from them either. We baptize our children so that from the very first they will be protected by God’s grace in a world where evil is visited on young and old alike.
The second lesson is a bit harder to perceive but no less true. It is that our own world is not so different from the world into which Jesus was born. In our own day, we can see the callousness of Herod reflected in different ways.
We see it in a movement that sees abortion not only as an occasional tragic necessity but as an inalienable human right… or even as a blessing, as the dean of an Episcopal seminary once declared.
We see it in instances of police brutality, in which those who are supposed to protect us end up killing those who really don’t deserve to die. We see it when a police officer can kneel on a man’s neck for nine minutes until the life is choked out of him.
The world in which we live is a world where innocents are massacred still.
So what do we say on this day? Do we simply lament that massacres like this happen, and then take the half-step from lamentation to self-congratulation, because, after all, it’s not like we’ve murdered anybody. Yet the issue that this commemoration soberly brings to mind is not just that it’s wrong to murder the innocent. The issue is much deeper, and it involves the human heart. The challenge that faces each of us is not just whether we can avoid murder—most of us can do that—but of whether we can contribute to what has been called “a culture of life.” The remedy for massacres like the one we remember today begins in the human heart and is expressed in how we think and speak.
Just yesterday I went to the gym for a workout and sauna. Sitting next to me in the sauna were two young men in their mid-to-late twenties, though they were acting more like they were in their early twenties. They were talking about their plans for New Year’s Eve—every other sentence included the F-word. They discussed how they planned to “get laid”—with one girl on New Year’s Eve and another on New Year’s Day, if possible. I felt like turning to them and saying, “What is wrong with you? Didn’t your parents teach you not to talk about women that way?”
Here’s why I bring this up. Those two young men were contributing to a culture of death. When we speak about others in a way that fails to recognize the sanctity and dignity and preciousness of human life, we are helping to create a culture in which human beings are not so valuable and so ultimately expendable. It is through language that we create a culture of life or a culture of death—based on whether how we speak recognizes or fails to recognize the humanity of those around us. A culture of death hinges on the dehumanization of those made in the Image of God.
When a man talks about a woman not as a person but as an object to be used for his own gratification, that is dehumanization.
When a person looks at an unborn child in the womb and says, “It’s just a clump of cells” … that’s dehumanization.
Every day I drive to work down 380 and pass a political billboard. It’s a picture of a white man leaning forward, and the caption next to him says, “Stop giving illegals our money.” Not even “illegal immigrants,” but “illegals.” Human beings who face a complex set of circumstances most of us cannot fathom are reduced to one attribute of their behavior—all they are to us is “illegals.” That’s dehumanization.
Each of us has the ability to hallow or profane, to sacralize or desacralize, to humanize or dehumanize, every person in the world by how we speak about them.
If we recognized that our words are not just temporary vibrations in the air but are in fact the raw material which hallows or profanes the world around us, then there would be certain words, certain ways of speaking, that would become intolerable for us: Profanity. Inappropriate humor. Slander. Gossip. Anything that dehumanizes another person made in the Image of God.
As the new year approaches, the real issue for most of us is not whether we’ll participate or be complicit in a massacre of innocent victims. It is whether the way we speak and act hallows our neighbors as the good creations of God or profanes them as something sub-human and therefore as unworthy of protection.
It is hard to speak life into the world rather than death. It requires us to fight against our most deeply ingrained habits. But it’s what the world needs from us as Christians. We can be beautiful in a world filled with ugliness. We can model charity and patience in a country whose public discourse has never been more crude and vulgar. In so many words, we can contribute to a culture of life rather than death. For it is life that Christ came to give us: life abundant, sacred, and unending. Amen.
Dogmatic Joy 