Playing the Villain

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

 

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

December 10, 2023

Second Sunday of Advent

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

 

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Lighting of the Advent Candle

Reader 1: In days when God’s people longed for peace, Isaiah declared, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins” (Isaiah 40:1).

Reader 2: We who gather today also seek comfort and peace, yet we are unsatisfied with ideas of peace that tell us to keep quiet and go with the flow. We long for real peace, true peace, just peace.

Congregation: We wait as people who yearn for peace that bears the fruit of community, equity, and flourishing for all.

Reader 1: We light these candles as signs of God’s shocking hope and just peace. May they be beacons calling us to repent and to live the good news of Jesus Christ as we wait and watch and labor for the day when all people can gather together to worship and glorify God. Amen.

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

The world is dark and cold.

We look for signs of your coming.

The world is hungry for righteousness.

We look for signs of your coming.

The world yearns for your love.

We look for signs of your coming.

*Hymn                  O Come, O Come, Emmanuel                    #211, v 1-4

Prayer of Confession:

God of love and kindness, you have promised to renew our lives, to be with us in a new heaven and new earth—a realm where steadfast love and faithfulness embrace forever. We are afraid of your promised coming. We cling to rules we understand: the rules of privilege and power. We are afraid of a world of true justice and peace, afraid that you will change the way things have always been. As we wait for you to live among us, we confess our unwillingness to see that you have always been here.

Assurance:

In God’s love and mercy, we are given each new day for the healing of the world. In the name of Christ, you are forgiven.

Scripture Reading Matthew 2: 1-12

The Visit of the Wise Men

2 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise mena from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising,b and have come to pay him homage.” 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiahc was to be born. 5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for from you shall come a ruler

who is to shepherdd my people Israel.’ ”

7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise mene and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising,f until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped,g they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Sermon                                 Playing the Villain

Friends, we’re now in the second week of the season of Advent. We’re continuing on in this sermon series I’ve put together based on the book An Unlikely Advent by Rachel Billups. In this series we’ll be looking at the stories of characters who are very important in the narrative of Jesus’ birth, but who are rarely our sole focus on a Sunday in Advent, and who usually aren’t included in any Nativity set.

Today we’re talking about the great big baddie, King Herod.

It’s important to start out by noting that all four of our Gospel writers do not give equal weight to the story of King Herod. Two of them–John and Luke–don’t mention him at all. One, Mark, mentions King Herod a few times, principally in chapter 6. But Matthew was, by leaps and bounds, the most concerned about the actions of King Herod. In fact, he tells us stories about two different King Herods–this one, and then his son and heir, Herod Antipas, who was arguably just as menacing.

For some of us this might be redundant, and for some of us this may be brand new information, but wherever you find yourself today, this point needs to be unpacked from time to time: the four Gospels we have in our Bible are not historical accounts, nor are they biographies. They’re accounts of Good News. It doesn’t mean we can’t find history and biographical information within the Gospels, but that wasn’t the goal of any of the evangelists in their writing. Every single detail we read in those four books was intentionally included because that author felt that detail would add to the Good News of Jesus’ story. And often, the evangelists decided that in order to understand the Good News of Jesus, we needed to fully appreciate the Bad News his friends and neighbors were drowning in.

Matthew, the evangelist most concerned with telling a story about a Jewish Messiah to a Jewish audience, also showed the most concern with the foreign occupation of the Southern Kingdom of Israel by Rome. At the time of Jesus’ birth, this put every person in Jesus’ midst under the Iron Fist of King Herod, the focal point of this morning’s message. Matthew makes it clear that King Herod is both feared and hated, and he deserves it. He’s a blood thirsty tyrant who wants total control, and will take out anyone who gets in his way, whether it’s a foreign monarch or a bunch of toddlers. He’s never satisfied in his power, and always on the hunt for more. And the more power he seizes, the more enemies he gains. This is a very dangerous and deeply unsustainable quest, and no one is more intensely aware of that reality than Herod. One false move and Herod is dead, either at the hands of a rival tyrant, or at the hands of one of the many, many people who want justice or vengeance. Thus, we have a story about a King who sits squirreled away in his throne room, surrounded by stolen riches and anxious to the point of chronic twitching about what could happen tomorrow. If you put a pencil in Herod’s hand, he turns it into a diamond.

In this atmosphere, Herod hears whispers of a new king, out there “somewhere”, brought to his attention by three astrologers who want to give him presents. We’ll hear more about them at Epiphany. It sounds like they’re looking for a very powerful baby. In Herod’s mind, this might mean that an heir was born to one of his rivals, so he seeks out the wisdom of the scribes and chief priests to work against the interests of their own neighbors in order to help him sus out where this “king” is. Turns out, it’s a baby born to a working class couple named Mary and Joseph. They’re woodworkers. The new king that Herod is so threatened by is a poor baby living in a hole in the wall little village who’s being raised by wood workers. It takes a deeply insecure man to decide that a baby carpenter is a threat to him. But that’s Herod. So he manipulates the magi into finding this baby, and reporting back where he is, because “I, too, have a gift for him.” That gift, of course, is either poison or artillery, hard to say. When the Magi disobey Herod and never return to him, he decides to kill every boy he can find under the age of two. Jesus narrowly avoids death when his parents flee to Egypt…only to end up on the cross 30 years later under the reign of the next Herod.

There’s so, so, sooooooo much that we can say about King Herod, and the slaughter of the innocents. We want to say we can hardly fathom this level of evil, and we think that it can only be matched by a despot from a previous era, the Pharaoh of Egypt, who ordered the two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill every boy baby they delivered. Moses, the hero of that story, also managed to survive because of the quick thinking of his mother.

The comfortable message to draw from King Herod is one of resistance to evil men of power, or one of comfort that the moral arc of the universe may be very long, but it always bends toward justice. We have Dr. King to thank for that one. Another preachable and comfortable message to pull from King Herod may be one about trusting God when you’re scared to death, or holding out hope even when life has you fleeing from home. I could compel you toward acts of mercy for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, just like Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. And, it’s me, so I still will.

But Billups, the author of this book I’m reading, doesn’t want me to preach any of those messages, and I understand her point and agree with her. She stresses in this chapter that most of us see King Herod in this story, and think no one like him lives now. Guys, I’m here to tell you, after seeing in the news just a few days ago that a gentleman opened fire at a synagogue in Albany, and attempted to gun down children, that the bad guy who’s willing to hurt kids is as alive in this world as ever. But, even more troublesome for all of us, the person who might do something terrible because they have their reasons could be the face looking right back at you in the mirror. If we want to confront all the evil in the world, we have to be willing to address the evil within our own selves, too. The gentleman who opened fire in Albany last week felt that he was seeking justice for the atrocities that Israel has inflicted upon Palestine in the last two months. I want to be super, super clear–he was wrong and he’s rightfully in jail. But can we really say his heart is wholly unlike every one of ours? Have we ever felt despair, anger, and helplessness so deep that we had no idea what to do with it? Have we ever lashed out in violence, whether with our bodies, a tool like a weapon, with our words, or with our silence? Have we, like King Herod, ever made a terrible decision because we were anxious? Have we ever acted in greed, or lusted after control we shouldn’t have had? And, most of all, even if we all genuinely feel that there is not an ounce of King Herod within any of us, have we ever quietly sat by and let another Herod carry on because we benefited from it, and it was easier for us to just go along?

Womanist and BIPOC liberation theologian Erna Kim Hackett recently had these words to say about white American Christians. I’ll warn you that these aren’t at all easy to hear, but they’re so important if we really want to follow Jesus.

“White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For the citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when it is studying Scripture, is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society -- and it has made them blind and utterly ill equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.”

With so many of us here being white, middle class, native born Americans, it’s so much easier and far more comfortable to write off King Herod as a bad dude who lived and died 2000 years ago. In reality, the hard truth is that people who check the same boxes that many of us do have turned the entire world upside down. They have built fortunes off the backs of minimum wage workers. They have caged immigrant children. They have enslaved, then oppressed through Jim Crow, then incarcerated en mass. They have empowered corrupt police officers and politicians, and armed war criminals. They have stolen land, and taken the lives of many, many babies.

Is this what any of us wants to talk about? Of course not. And you get a really pretty Christmas hymn to sing right after this as your reward for hearing me out. But the point is this: the only Bible so many people will ever read is our own actions. We can bring Jesus to life with a single act of loving kindness. But we can just as easily resurrect the ghost of Herod when we act in selfishness, greed, and cruelty. Who do we want the world to see? The future is up to us. Conquering evil in the world always has to start within.

Amen. 

*Hymn                          Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming                    #216

 

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Almighty God,

Your Spirit swept over the waters of creation;

You are sweeping over us now, creating something new.

Call us away from the distractions of the world

to experience what You are doing now, in us,

and through us,

and in our world.

Open us to a new awakening, a new beginning,

where we look through the lens of the goodness of Your creation,

experiencing all possibilities in You.

Turn us away from the negative lens,

and lead us to the light.

In the name of Jesus, who leads us into life, we pray. Amen.

~ written by Rev. Mindi, and posted on Rev-o-lution. http://rev-o-lution.org/

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                     Angels from the Realms of Glory                       #220

Benediction

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant