William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)

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-	Week before last, NPR carried a story	0:10
	about how they have plans to spruce up	0:14
	Bethlehem,	0:19
	the dusty little Palestinian town of Jesus nativity.	0:21
	It seems that tourists take the bus ride over from Jerusalem	0:27
	and they get off the bus and they go in the Church	0:32
	of the Nativity and they take their photographs,	0:34
	and they get back on the bus and they go back to Jerusalem	0:37
	without spending much money.	0:40
	And so the Palestinian Authorities have plans	0:43
	to spruce up Bethlehem to turn that dingy car park	0:45
	in front of the Church of the Nativity	0:49
	into a swanky shopping center with boutiques	0:52
	and shops and a luxury hotel,	0:56
	And international donations of 40 million	1:00
	are helping with the project.	1:03
	But the story went on to say that there are	1:06
	charges of political corruption	1:10
	of money lining the pockets of Palestinian politicians	1:13
	and the whole project has taken twice as long	1:17
	and it's twice as expensive as they thought	1:20
	the whole thing is bogged down in administrative red tape.	1:22
	And what else is new?	1:28
	Poor Bethlehem,	1:32
	grimy, politically corrupt.	1:36
	A little town caught on the border	1:40
	between two warring peoples.	1:42
	Hardly a place for a celebration of Christmas.	1:46
	No, Bethlehem is Christmas.	1:53
	In a way, everything that the Bible means by Christmas	1:58
	can be said in that one name, Bethlehem.	2:03
	Today's gospel,	2:09
	you will note takes place in Bethlehem.	2:11
	It's the story after the story of the birth of Jesus.	2:15
	When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the Wise Men,	2:21
	he was infuriated and he sent and killed	2:25
	all the children in and around Bethlehem	2:28
	who were two years old and under.	2:31
	According to the time that he had learned from the Wise Men.	2:33
	Then was fulfilled what had been spoken	2:37
	through the prophet Jeremiah.	2:40
	A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,	2:42
	Rachel weeping for her children.	2:47
	She refused to be consoled because they were no more	2:51
	"I just can't believe that President Clinton	3:01
	"has done what they said he has done,"	3:03
	said the earnest student to me last fall.	3:05
	Really? I replied,	3:10
	I can, of course I'm a Christian.	3:12
	And I'm conditioned to believe that politicians,	3:15
	well anybody in power is capable of doing almost anything.	3:18
	And at that moment, I realized that as a Christian	3:23
	I really am conditioned by a lifetime of going to church	3:25
	and hearing not too nice stories about politicians.	3:30
	So that, after you've been to church long enough	3:35
	and you've listened to enough pieces	3:38
	like this one from Matthew,	3:39
	you can believe that people in power	3:44
	will stoop to almost anything.	3:45
	Christmas is barely two days or in Matthew's Gospel	3:49
	about 12 verses old.	3:53
	And already Matthew inserts this horrible story	3:56
	of King Herod's massacre of the boy babies in Bethlehem.	4:00
	In a way,	4:08
	the church is always doing this sort of thing.	4:11
	You come to church on Christmas,	4:14
	Sunday after Christmas and the music is so sublime	4:17
	and the setting is so beautiful.	4:21
	And you're thinking such good thoughts	4:23
	until you get to the Scripture and the sermon,	4:25
	and then everything just seems to collapse	4:29
	and all this ugliness and horror.	4:31
	The church is good at that sort of thing.	4:35
	Few years ago I had to speak,	4:38
	do some academic hardship duty speaking in Hawaii,	4:42
	and we went about a week early	4:46
	and we did all the tourist things in Hawaii,	4:49
	and it was our first visit to this tropical paradise.	4:52
	And it really is a paradise	4:56
	with the sun setting over the beach.	4:58
	And the tour guides were	5:00
	telling us about the perfect climate in Hawaii	5:01
	about all the native plants in Hawaii	5:04
	and they said here in Hawaii,	5:07
	you have all these different ethnic groups	5:08
	living as one, Hawaii could be a model	5:11
	to the rest of America.	5:14
	And it was just this beautiful tropical heaven on earth.	5:17
	And we might have believed that,	5:22
	except we spent the next week with a church.	5:24
	And I was speaking to all these clergy in Hawaii.	5:28
	And during the sessions,	5:32
	the pastors started telling me about	5:34
	all the social problems in Hawaii.	5:36
	The racial conflict that comes out when people are together	5:38
	in groups and, they noted that	5:43
	they're more working parents in Hawaii	5:48
	than any other state in the nation.	5:50
	There's more child poverty in Hawaii than any other state.	5:51
	The drug abuse is just rampant.	5:55
	The alcohol abuse a huge problem.	5:57
	And I said, leave it to the church	6:01
	just when I was thinking positively about this place,	6:03
	you hang out with the church long enough,	6:06
	they started going to bring about	6:08
	all this negative dirty laundry and airing it.	6:09
	And I feel a little bit that same way here	6:13
	on this Sunday after Christmas.	6:15
	Christmas Eve we sang about the little town of Bethlehem.	6:19
	But then you come to church on this Sunday	6:25
	and you hear about the rest of the Bethlehem story.	6:28
	King Herod the Great, threatened by all this talk of	6:34
	a new king of the Jews that might threaten	6:38
	his political alliance that he had made	6:41
	between the Jewish authorities and the Romans.	6:45
	King Herod decided to stand up and act like a king.	6:49
	He massacred all the boy babies around Bethlehem.	6:54
	Down through the ages enumerable kings,	6:59
	governments, dictators, parliaments	7:01
	have tried to solve their problem by murdering Jews.	7:04
	Today's Gospel is a horror story about that.	7:08
	And how that story contrasts	7:16
	with our cherished views of Christmas.	7:17
	O little town of Bethlehem how still we see the lie.	7:21
	That's a lie.	7:27
	O little town of Bethlehem made miserable	7:29
	by the birth of Jesus.	7:32
	Streets running red with blood	7:34
	while mothers wail for their lost children.	7:36
	That's the way the Bible does Bethlehem.	7:41
	Let there be peace on earth	7:45
	and let it begin with me, we sing.	7:47
	Christmas cards are inherently sentimental,	7:51
	and TV tales of a snow covered winter wonderland	7:54
	where Christmas evokes just about the best in everybody.	7:57
	While you will note that the first Christmas evoked	8:03
	the absolute worst in King Herod.	8:05
	Matthew's Christmas Pageant ends,	8:10
	not with tensile covered angels for claiming goodwill.	8:12
	But with Rachel weeping for her slaughtered babies.	8:17
	Christmas in Bethlehem, and it's the real Bethlehem.	8:21
	See, Herod was no fool.	8:27
	He'd been in power long enough to be able to tell	8:30
	a political rival when he saw one.	8:33
	What those dumb shepherds might see is just a little baby,	8:36
	distant relative of King David.	8:40
	Herod knew that the angels were right.	8:43
	He was a threat, he was a threat to everything	8:45
	that Herod had built his kingdom upon.	8:48
	Thus Herod joins other great political leaders	8:54
	of this century Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao	8:57
	who didn't mind a little murder, particularly of children	9:04
	in order to advance great political ideals.	9:08
	The world calls it Beirut, where Ronald Reagan	9:13
	and the Israelis devastated in order to bring peace on earth	9:16
	to the Near East,	9:21
	or Bosnia, where the world stood by quietly amid	9:23
	the genocide or Beijing,	9:26
	where we did nothing as the tanks rolled over the students	9:30
	because we wanted to send Pepsi to China.	9:34
	The world calls it Bosnia or Beirut or Belfast or Beijing.	9:38
	The Bible just calls it Bethlehem.	9:43
	We bed down so easily with the powers that be,	9:48
	we say to ourselves, well, peace on earth, goodwill,	9:52
	that's fine, but sometimes you've got to exercise	9:57
	a little Christian realism.	10:00
	I very well remember what a Duke professor	10:02
	who had been raised in China.	10:04
	Right after China's borders were opened,	10:07
	he went there and visited.	10:09
	And he said he remembered when people	10:11
	were starving in China, but nobody was starving today.	10:12
	What a great tribute to the communist government there.	10:17
	A reporter asked him "Well, aren't you bothered	10:20
	"that six or 7 million Chinese were killed by Mao?"	10:23
	And he said, "Well, six or 7 million	10:27
	"but the point is nobody's starving today."	10:30
	These things sometimes hurt.	10:33
	That's our kind of realism.	10:37
	That's the way we run the world.	10:38
	And Doctors Without Borders say	10:40
	that maybe 100,000 Iraqi children have died	10:41
	from lack of food and medicine during our embargo.	10:46
	We don't like this Christmas story.	10:51
	It's not as many of us here today	10:55
	as were at services in the chapel on Christmas Eve.	10:56
	To hear the shepherds and the angels	11:00
	and the little baby Jesus.	11:02
	Christmas for us becomes an escapist fantasy.	11:04
	For that one day of the year	11:08
	when everybody becomes miraculously transformed from scrooge	11:09
	into one who suddenly does right by Tiny Tim.	11:14
	It's hard to be honest about ourselves.	11:18
	It's hard to be honest about our real situation in Bel Air,	11:22
	or Birmingham or Bunnlevel or Boca Raton.	11:26
	But the Bible thank God, always tells the truth.	11:31
	And it calls it Bethlehem.	11:37
	If we will turn down the muzak in the shopping mall	11:41
	for just a moment, you might hear still the wails	11:44
	of mothers screaming, weeping for their lost babies.	11:47
	Wherever today the slaughter of the innocence is re-enacted.	11:52
	Let us go even unto Bethlehem	11:56
	and let us take a look at this thing which has come to pass.	11:59
	We lie about this Christmas story.	12:05
	A few years ago, at Christmas,	12:09
	a best selling religious book was The Celestine Prophecy.	12:12
	Aside from reservations about its bad grammar and syntax,	12:16
	one might also wonder why such saccharine spirituality	12:20
	should be so greedily consumed now.	12:25
	It's part of the avalanche of New Age spirituality	12:28
	and affirmation.	12:33
	We are good, amen.	12:35
	We are making progress every day getting better	12:38
	and bigger in every way, amen.	12:41
	We mean well, we are doing the best we can meditate,	12:43
	marinate in a hot tub in California.	12:48
	Unleash the good in you, unleash the God in you.	12:52
	Only a century that has produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust	12:58
	could so earnestly need to lie	13:06
	about us and our affinity to Herod.	13:10
	At the end of perhaps the bloodiest century,	13:19
	the world has ever known.	13:22
	If you just count up the bodies of those killed	13:24
	by their own governments to say nothing of the war.	13:27
	At the end of another year in the streets	13:32
	of any US city including Durham,	13:34
	we are beckoned by the Bible to go even unto Bethlehem.	13:39
	You don't have to call it Bethlehem,	13:45
	you can call it Buffalo,	13:46
	where this year a doctor who had aborted thousands	13:48
	of fetuses is gunned down in his own home	13:51
	by somebody who did it because he believes	13:54
	in the right to life.	13:56
	We just don't know any other way to get what we really want	13:59
	for Christmas other than violence.	14:02
	Oh we call it the right to choose,	14:05
	or others call it the right to life.	14:08
	Matthew just calls it Bethlehem.	14:11
	At the end of the story of The Nativity,	14:17
	after the angels go back to wherever they came from,	14:20
	and after the shepherds go home and the Wise Men	14:22
	and the baby Jesus and his family	14:26
	head for Egypt as refugees.	14:28
	We hear the screams of mothers weeping for Jewish babies,	14:31
	and our nose gets rubbed in the politics of it all.	14:37
	And the blood, and the pain, the blood and sorrow	14:40
	before the Bible will let us leave Bethlehem.	14:45
	And even though this is not the Christmas story we want,	14:50
	it may be the Christmas story we need.	14:56
	Because any God who is unwilling to come to Bethlehem	15:01
	won't do us much good.	15:06
	If any God is going to save us,	15:11
	us,	15:14
	God will have to come down	15:16
	down to where we are.	15:19
	Because we can never get up to God.	15:23
	On Christmas Eve,	15:28
	we gathered in this chapel	15:30
	and we heard those sonorous phrases	15:32
	from the opening of John's glorious gospel.	15:35
	In the beginning was the Word, the Word was made flesh	15:39
	and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.	15:44
	The Word became flesh and dwelt among us	15:50
	and we beheld his glory.	15:53
	Christians call that the incarnation.	15:56
	Our belief that God Almighty maker of heaven on earth	16:01
	came here and took on our flesh	16:04
	and forgave us and redeemed us and saved us,	16:09
	that we might be brought to God.	16:14
	Well today, this is Matthew's way	16:19
	of telling the very same story.	16:23
	John calls it the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.	16:27
	Matthew just calls it Bethlehem.	16:32
	Just before Christmas,	16:39
	this student was telling me about the twist	16:41
	and the turns in his romantic relationships.	16:44
	I love listening to that sort of thing from students.	16:49
	(congregation laughing)	16:52
	And, you see, he thought he was deeply in love	16:53
	with this young woman and it was meant	16:56
	to be the right relationship.	16:59
	And it was love, it really was love but she had given him	17:02
	his walking papers on Thanksgiving and he was out,	17:06
	and he was crushed, and he was heartbroken	17:09
	and he was confused.	17:12
	In his misery, he said,	17:14
	"If it's love, why does it have to hurt so much?	17:17
	"Why does love have to be so darn painful?	17:24
	"Love ought not to be that way,"	17:31
	he said.	17:33
	Oh my dear dumb sophomore.	17:36
	(congregation laughing)	17:38
	Don't you know that love, real love is always that way,	17:41
	painful, because if there's real love,	17:46
	there's got to be risk and if there is risk,	17:50
	there is always a possibility of failure and pain.	17:54
	It is a risky, potentially painful thing	18:00
	to get your life mixed up with another human being.	18:02
	Today's,	18:09
	today's Gospel says that	18:11
	Christ came first to Bethlehem	18:16
	to real people living on this real Earth.	18:22
	God didn't come to angels God came to us	18:26
	in Bethlehem.	18:31
	Love came down at Christmas we sometimes sing,	18:34
	If love, God's love is to come down to us where we live,	18:39
	there's gonna be some pain.	18:46
	Yes, and there will be blood too.	18:49
	Somebody is gonna get hurt	18:53
	because we are terribly hurtful	18:54
	in both our loves and our hates.	18:56
	If our allegiances are gonna be dethroned,	19:00
	if there is going to be another king other than Herod,	19:04
	it's not gonna be pretty	19:09
	because we hold on tight to our gods,	19:12
	and we won't let them go without a fight.	19:16
	At Bethlehem, we see a prelude to events that take place	19:22
	later at a place just up the road called Calvary.	19:28
	The one called King of the Jews goes head to head	19:35
	with our kings and our kingdoms, our politics and our power.	19:38
	And there is pain and violence	19:46
	and there is weeping and blood.	19:48
	At last Herod will get his way with Mary's baby.	19:52
	And Matthew says, all of this	19:58
	was for us and our salvation.	20:02
	All in the name of love, all for us.	20:07
	And it began	20:14
	in Bethlehem.	20:17

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)

Description:

Sermon start time: 00:10. Sermon end time: 20:20.
In this sermon, the preacher interprets Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’ nativity, allegorically. He parallels it as the place of massacres, sufferings, and great pains under the dictatorship of oppressive political powers. It is to this place that Love came down at Christmas in the Incarnation. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “In a way, everything that the Bible means by Christmas can be said in that one name, Bethlehem.”

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4wp9tn6s

Date:

December 27, 1998

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Christmas

Biblical Book:

Matthew

Chapter and Verse:

Matthew 2:13-23

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-0938
ref10027_4jf
uachapelsermaud
duke:321169
dcrau001582
ark:/87924/r4wp9tn6s
1b11a173-acb8-495e-9c08-7045af3dcc01

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)

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1. William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)

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William H. Willimon - "Blood in Bethlehem" (December 27, 1998)

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