An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Is Christmas For Children?

A sermon on Matthew 2:13-23 & Hebrews 2:10-18 by Nathan Nettleton

It is frequently said that “Christmas is for children”, and there are plenty of ways in which that is quite true. Most of children I know love Christmas time, and indeed, whenever there are pictures showing Christmas celebrations, most of the pictures will feature children enjoying themselves immensely. Excited children decorating trees, opening presents, sitting on Santa’s knee, or gazing in wonder at decorations and pageants and reindeer and nativity scenes and more presents: these are the popular images of Christmas. Christmas is indeed for children.

But then, in the midst of all those images of happy children, the gospel confronts us with an entirely different image of what Christmas can mean for children. Matthew doesn’t give us much detail about the birth of Jesus. The stories about the census and the stable and the manger and the shepherds all come from Luke’s gospel and we hear nothing of them from Matthew. Instead Matthew gives us the story we heard last Sunday about the small town scandal of the pregnancy and the angel’s message to Joseph. From there, he simply tells us that Jesus was born and given the name the angel had proposed, and then he takes us immediately into the story of the visit of the eastern magi and the subsequent threat of death squads that causes the family to flee their homeland and seek refuge in Egypt, and their fears are proved real when a government death squad does indeed arrive in their village and slaughters all the toddlers in a murderous rampage. It is an ugly and terrifying scene, and given how much we usually sentimentalise the Christmas scenery, it comes as a horrible shock, a brutal jolt back to the harsh realities of life in a violent world. Christmas is for children, they say, but a movie based on this Christmas story would probably not be considered suitable for children’s viewing.

But the danger of the usual Christmas-is-for-children message is that it becomes an exercise in sentimentality and head-in-the-sand delusion in which we divide the world up and celebrate “our” children, while remaining culpably oblivious to the plight of millions of other children around the world. And surely, if we do that, then we have thoroughly corrupted the message of Christmas and turned it into something that is akin to spitting in the face of the Christ-child. If we want to be able to say Christmas is for children without blaspheming, then we need to take seriously the situation of children who are facing the sort of circumstances that the infant Jesus and his family faced, and ask what the Christmas gospel might mean for them.

Today there are approximately 2.2 billion children in the world, and of those, about 1 billion, almost half of all children, are living in poverty. Even in the wealthier countries with their developed economies, significant numbers of children live in relative poverty, below the national poverty lines. Here in Australia for example, it is slightly more than one in every ten children. Of the 1.9 billion children growing up in the developing world, about 1 in 3 are living without adequate shelter; about 1 in 5 with no access to safe water; about 1 in 7 with no access to health services; and more than 1 in 4 are underweight or stunted due to malnutrition. Nearly 1 in 6 of the world’s children aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And, as their report says, they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”

Communities that are in the grip of serious poverty tend to also be more vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse. Impoverished nations frequently end up with dysfunctional, unstable and despotic governments, and so state-sponsored violence and oppression are also more likely. Which brings us even closer to the specific situation faced by the infant Jesus and his family. Millions of people around the world today have been forced to flee their homes to escape from war, violence and persecution, and being cut off from the social infrastructure of home and family networks further increases peoples disadvantage and vulnerability to other afflictions. At the end of last year, there were some 45.2 million forcibly displaced people in the world, and the numbers were growing at a rate of about one new refugee or internally displaced person every 4 seconds. The situation in Syria this past year has probably accelerated these figures further. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, “almost half of the world’s forcibly displaced people are children and many spend their entire childhood far from home. Whether they are refugees, internally displaced, asylum-seekers or stateless, children are at a greater risk of abuse, neglect, violence, exploitation, trafficking or forced military recruitment. They may also have witnessed or experienced violent acts and/or been separated from their families.”

So if we want to say that Christmas is for children, we need to make sure that it is for all children, and we need to ask what hope it might offer to the millions of children who don’t fit the usual sentimental depictions of Christmas excitement and joy. What hope does it offer to the children who have come to this country, and others, seeking a place of asylum, welcome and safe refuge, and who have instead spent this Christmas locked up in horrendous immigration detention centres?

If the Christmas gospel is to be good news of hope for all children, then that hope begins with a line that comes shortly before tonight’s reading, but which is given its first illustration in what we heard tonight. “They shall call him Emmanuel, which means, ‘God is with us.’” The good news begins with God-with-us as a vulnerable child, forcibly displaced, and with his family seeking asylum far from home. Or in other words, the story of the life of Jesus begins much as it ends, with God-made-flesh voluntarily on the receiving end of the bitterness and violence of a hostile world. He escapes death this time, but it continues to stalk him throughout his life, and eventually he absorbs its full force in his own body. This cannot be the whole of the good news, but it is a good start. As all who have been plunged into suffering and grief can tell you, the first and perhaps most important comfort is the presence of another who is truly with you in the midst of it. To every child living in poverty or fear or seeking refuge, the Christ-child is firstly Emmanuel, God truly present and sharing the pain.

That is indeed a good start, but does the Christmas gospel offer any hope that the suffering will end and that the world will be a safe place for children? Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews also spoke of children. It spoke of God bringing many children to glory and of Jesus becoming the pioneer of their salvation by first entering into their suffering. So our good start is a step towards leading all to salvation, to a new world that is safe for children. It goes on to repeat this idea, talking of Jesus having to first become like his fellow children “in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.” Don’t mishear this, as is commonly done. It does not say that he makes a sacrifice ‘to God’, as though God demands the blood of his children. Jesus makes himself a sacrifice when he casts himself onto the grinding wheels of the ruthless mechanisms of demonic human evil which continue to sacrifice children over and over, all around the world. God becomes one of us at Christmas and offers himself up to suffer what millions of children suffer in order to unmask the system and expose the lie that God endorses our privilege and that ‘God with us’ means God with us against them and so their children can be forgotten and abandoned, and if they come too near, locked away and subjected to inhuman conditions. The unmistakable presence of God in a hunted baby and a crucified man confront us with the consequences of our refusal to lives as brothers and sisters with all the world.

Unfortunately, the first consequence of this unmasking of the truth is that evil, stripped of its cover, lashes out with redoubled bitterness and rage, like the murderous enraged Herod, and so things get worse before they get better, and we and millions of children around the world are living through this still. But if the Christmas message means anything, then it means that the change is underway, and that it gets underway with small fragile beginnings like us. If we have been converted from death to life, and had our eyes opened to the truth of God’s loving solidarity with all children everywhere, even and perhaps especially with those who are forcibly displaced as he was, then the changing of the world has been placed into our hands. The continued naming and unmasking of the evils of impoverishment and violence involves us. The forging of a world that is fit for children is our business.

If it wasn’t that so many of our children were away this week, then tonight would have been a very appropriate night for our special rite with the children in which, at this time of year, we give gifts in their names to children in need in other places. It is only a token action, but it points us to the bigger picture of making sure that our celebration of our own children at Christmas does not pull the veil again over our eyes to hide from view the kinds of children who were at the centre of the first Christmas story. We may be able to do it next week, but whenever it is, the most important thing is that we are caught up in what God is doing, in making Christmas really and truly for children, all God’s children, and bringing forth the ultimate Christmas gift of a world that is safe and fit for all God’s children.

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