Invite kids up…
Some of you looked at this Bible story in Sunday school a few weeks ago. It’s a scary story, isn’t it? With the bad king who wants to kill babies, because he’s afraid? … Why would we tell kids a scary story like that? … Well, I have some good news: It probably didn’t really happen! Does anybody remember another important person from the Bible, named Moses? Moses led God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and through the wilderness; and he told them how to live in God’s holy ways. Now, before Moses was born, Moses’ people were slaves and had to work for the Egyptians. And the king of Egypt, Pharaoh, got afraid that they might get strong and rise up and refuse to be slaves anymore. So Pharaoh said that all the baby boys of Moses’ people should be killed! Just like in the Gospel story today!
Who remembers how baby Moses was saved? … Yes, his mother and his sister put him in a basket in the river, and Pharaoh’s grown-up daughter found him and decided to adopt him!
Now, King Herod did some bad stuff. He was not a great person. But nobody who was writing down what happened, back in Jesus’ time, says that King Herod ever killed a bunch of babies. Our Gospel story today wants us to remember baby Moses, and to think about how Jesus is like Moses – a leader chosen by God to lead his people to freedom and holiness. And the story also wants us to remember that very powerful grown-ups can sometimes be afraid of little kids, because even very small people can be powerful and important when you stand up for something good and true! Right? …
When we hear a scary story, it might also important to remind you that the people who love you will always do everything they can – everything we can – to keep you safe. Okay?
Okay! Now I’m going to send you out with Io and Max. We have prepared a little New Year’s party for you in the meeting room!…
Kids leave.
Tradition has a name for these children, the murdered babies of Bethlehem from Matthew’s Gospel. They’re called the Holy Innocents.
This story doesn’t come to us every year. But when it does, I always tell the kids: It’s OK. This story isn’t true. And the people who love you will keep you safe.
It’s a lie. We all know it. The truth is: we cannot protect our children.
I’m usually thinking ahead several weeks in the lectionary. I already had some thoughts about preaching this Gospel simmering on my mental back burner when I went to a concert on Saturday, December 14 – the concert of the Wisconsin Chamber Choir, in which our vestry co-chair Andi sings.
They sang a setting of the Coventry Carol, a 16th century English carol that is a lullaby to the children doomed by Herod’s anger and fear. Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child… Herod the king in his raging, charged he hath this day, his men of might in his own sight all young children to slay… Then woe is me, poor child, for thee! By by, lully, lullay..
Then the choir sang a piece by Jean Belmont Ford, written in response to the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Ford draws on the Coventry Carol – lully, lullay – as part of a song of grief and anger and a plea for more kindness in the world. Be the one who knows what must be done, she writes.
That Saturday I listened with tears in my eyes.
Two days later, a 15-year-old girl brought a gun to school at Abundant Life Christian School, on the east side of Madison, where she killed two people and wounded six others before completing suicide.
We can’t protect our children.
I checked in with a few other parents of school-aged kids, that week, to see how the kids were handling it. And we noticed, together, how little the kids seemed to react. I’m sure some kids showed signs of big grief, big fear. But a lot of them didn’t.
We realized: They’ve been training for this, since they were four or five years old. Lock the door. Crowd into the corner. Practice being very, very quiet. Of course they’re not surprised or shocked when it actually happens.
But I think there’s more to it. It’s not that they take it in stride, exactly. It’s not that they’re not afraid. But they’ve had to lock up their fear – lock down their fear! – because there’s no alternative.
There’s no way to opt out. Because we can’t protect them. We teach them that with every Code Red drill.
We grownups have had to lock down our grief and rage, too. Friend of the parish Jonathan Melton posted to Facebook a couple of days after the Abundant Life shooting. Jonathan used to be the chaplain at St Francis House over on campus, and he served here on Sundays during my 2018 sabbatical. He lives in Texas now with his family.
Jonathan’s words captured some of what I was feeling – or struggling to feel. He wrote, “Right now, I’m trying to feel more than empty grief… My grief has no legs today. There’s no surprise, even at the close to home-ness of it all. On one level, the closeness to our hearts and lives, for each one of us, is just an inevitably of math. Columbine was a quarter century ago. I was a senior in high school. My daughter is a sophomore now. It surprised us then. Through subsequent headlines and intervening years l’ve been alternately outraged and gutted and thoughtful and hopeful and determined and convinced by my own “if only”s. I’ve shared vigils and tears and swear words and prayers. But just now my grief doesn’t have any legs.”
Numb.
Helpless.
Overwhelmed.
Despairing.
Grief without legs.
What do we do with this fucking horrible truth? That we cannot protect our children? That’s a big question. Let me narrow it slightly. What do we do, theologically, with the fact that we can’t keep our children safe? How do we grapple with it as people of faith?
I know there are adults hearing this sermon who also feel at risk and face big challenges, too. I’m focusing on kids, today, because we just read the Gospel of the Holy Innocents. And because most of the time, any risk or challenge an adult faces is even more dangerous for a child or teen. And because it’s our responsibility, as the grownups, to try… to try to protect and help.
One thing we can do is insist on not letting the horrible truth that we cannot protect our kids drive us apart. Separate us.
Within hours of the Abundant Life shooting, people were fighting in the comments of the local community Facebook group about whether we should be talking about gun regulation or mental health support. As if we had to choose! As if we could not, collectively, decide to prioritize both commonsense gun safety laws, well enforced, AND a robust mental health care system accessible for everyone!
Blame-shifting, scapegoating, anger – these are ways people try to handle their grief and fear. Releasing the negative feelings that threaten to overwhelm or consume. It’s not great, but I get it.
Another way we try to protect ourselves – and end up separating ourselves! – is by deciding which children matter. Not consciously, of course – but we all do it. My friend Betsy is the rabbi at one of the synagogues in town, the Beth Israel Center. We’ve talked about how hard it has been for her to hold onto the truth that all children deserve to be safe. To keep insisting that Israeli children matter AND Gazan children matter. Yes, the terrorist attack in October 2023 was *genuinely* horrific in ways that many of us don’t even know, because the media we consume shielded us from some of the worst details. And yes, the continued crushing violence against Gazan civilians is ALSO horrific. And you have to care about BOTH. You can’t belong to the God of Abraham and Moses and Isaiah, and care about the wellbeing of one kind of child and not another kind of child. We are not free to do that.
Activist Glennon Doyle puts it this way: There is no such thing as other people’s children.
Facing the truth that we can’t keep our kids safe brings us into solidarity with the rest of humanity. We can’t protect our children, just like parents in Gaza or Ukraine can’t protect their kids from missiles and bombs, or death from exposure to the elements as winter deepens. Just like undocumented immigrants can’t protect their children from the possibility that their US-born kids will come home from school one day to an empty house.
I’m not saying we should tear our hearts open, feel every death. We can’t function that way. But we need to commit to the idea that there’s no such thing as other people’s children. To resist the false solace of caring about some children, but not others. To resist letting terrible things drive us into fruitless squabbling instead of the work of care and change.
The reality that we can’t keep our children safe draws us into solidarity with the rest of humanity. It also should draw us into solidarity with God.
One of my favorite authors, Francis Spufford, talks about the thwarted tenderness of God (Unapologetic, page 109). Thwarted tenderness. Tenderness, because God actually really, really loves us and wants good for us. Thwarted, because we humans get in the way of the good and holy, in so many ways. We turn away from what’s true and life-giving. We hurt each other. We hurt ourselves.
And it’s all built up, over millennia, into deeply entrenched patterns of division and inequality and struggle.
Jesus, looking out over Jerusalem, cries out: How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! It’s one of the most powerful expressions of God’s thwarted tenderness in Scripture.
But there are so many other places, especially in the books of the prophets, where we hear God yearning for us to return, to come home, to accept the love God offers us, to make amends and set things right and be made whole.
God is a Parent who can’t protect us. Because She lets us be free, as every parent has to let their children be free. And because we have used our freedom, individually and collectively, to make some very bad choices.
That helpless heartache we feel when we watch a young person we love walk out the door, knowing that we can’t guarantee their safety of body, mind, or spirit… that’s what God feels for us. All of us. All the time.
God is aching with us, yearning with us, raging with us.
The fact that we can’t keep our kids safe should draw us closer to each other, and closer to God. It should also – perhaps needless to say! – drive us towards action. Here are Jonathan’s words again: “Just now… I will let it be enough for my soul today to say to myself what we all already know, as an articulation of a hope still capable of grief: it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Our children are SAFER than they used to be. Thanks to improvements in maternal and infant health care, and vaccines that have controlled illnesses that used to kill and disable millions. Thanks to government regulation of things like the environment, food, medicine, cars, and toys. We can’t create a perfect world for the young people we love. but we can improve on it, if enough of us are loud enough long enough.
And we can choose to be the proverbial village – the one that helps raise a child.
A couple of days after the Abundant Life shooting, I shared on Facebook that I was feeling some complicated grief towards the perpetrator. Some of my favorite people in the world are fifteen-year-old girls, and I can’t help thinking how deeply things must have gone wrong for this young woman to lead her to this lethal violence against self and others.
One of the gifts of our new, larger diocese for me has been getting to know Amy Heimerl, who serves Ascension Episcopal Church in Merrill, Wisconsin. She also served for many years as a chaplain at Lincoln Hills, Wisconsin’s juvenile detention center. In response to my post, Amy wrote, “When I worked at Lincoln Hills, I worked closely with thousands of kids who had done horrible, awful things—even killing others… Most of the kids I worked with carried so much pain and trauma that they had become almost numb in order to be able to do what they did. [The problem isn’t] just mental health or just access to guns (although fixing both would help). It’s that we only want to be a village when something bad happens. What we need is to act like a village SO THAT nothing bad happens.”
It may be a cliche but it’s true: Kids do need a village. Parents do, too. Being the village for the young people of this congregation (including the ones who just come to youth group!) is a significant and holy part of our common life and work as God’s people, here.
If you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t have kids, or, I don’t have young kids… look around, when they come back, in a few minutes. Yes, you do.
If you think you don’t have gay or trans kids, who face new governmental assaults on their freedom and sense of self-worth – yes, you do.
If you’ve been around here long enough to attend a baptism or a confirmation, you have made some very specific promises to support the young people of this parish in their lives in Christ.
The baptized children and youth of this parish include gay, trans, and nonbinary kids; neurodiverse kids; disabled kids; brown kids; and more. You’re in it, friends. This is your family. And your care – our care – for them, matters. It matters to them. It matters to the world they’ll help shape.
In a few minutes, when the kids come back, after the Prayers of the People, we’re going to bless them and pray for their protection. This is a tradition, a custom, for the feast of the Holy Innocents – praying over the children of the church, together. I’ll invite you, if you want, to come forward and gather around – or you can stay in your seat and extend your hands, as a way to participate in the blessing. For now, let’s pray the Episcopal Church’s prayer for the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
Prayer for the Feast of the Holy Innocents
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
BLESSING
I call today upon our God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
in unity of love,
to bless our children among us.
I call upon God’s power to guide you,
God’s might to uphold you,
God’s Wisdom to teach you,
God’s Eye to watch over you,
God’s Ear to hear you,
God’s Hand to guide you,
God’s Shield to shelter you,
God’s Way to lie before you.
Christ be with you, Christ within you,
Christ behind you, Christ before you,
Christ beneath you, Christ above you,
Christ in hearts of all that love you.
Dear ones, may you grow in wisdom as in stature,
and in divine and human favor.
And the blessing of God the Holy and Undivided Trinity be upon you, body, mind, and spirit, this day and forever more.
And let the people say AMEN.