Well, we are up to ten lords a-leaping, if you are keeping track of the twelve days of Christmas according to the song.  We’re almost finished with the twelve days in the church calendar--this Wednesday we will be celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany at noon, here in the church, commemorating the day the three wise men finally arrived in Bethlehem.

 

But of course, according to the secular calendar, the warm coziness of Christmas has already given way to marketing the next holiday and getting back to “normal life.” A week ago I was in Target and they had Valentines Day displays up.  Other places are focusing on whatever your New Year’s resolutions might have been--mostly about losing weight, getting in shape, that kind of thing.  Many schools start up again tomorrow.  The sweetness of the infant Jesus has pretty much evaporated.

 

Even in the lectionary, the sweetness of the infant Jesus is fading fast.  Today, that cute little baby becomes the object of political intrigue, reminding us that the mixture of politics and religion is nothing new.

 

I think that what happened in this morning’s gospel stems from the fact that people are accustomed to talking to their peers.  So three important people--”wise men,” Matthew calls them--are following a star that is going to lead them to the newborn King of the Jews, and it is natural that they should stop off and have a little visit with the man who is currently the king in that region, Herod.  They asked him where the baby was who was born to be king of the Jews.  They seem to have assumed that Herod would be on top of the situation and on board with the idea that a new baby was to become king in his place.  For some reason it seems as though it didn’t occur to them that the current king, Herod, might not be too thrilled at the idea that a new king has just been born in his kingdom.  Power is power, after all, and Herod enjoyed his and didn’t want some baby, or the baby’s grown-up supporters, to take it away.

 

This got even worse for Herod when he figured that it must be the Messiah--picture it:  if it was really the Messiah, how could he stand against him?  But if it was just some baby and some random astronomical phenomenon interpreted by the Easterners, that opened the door for some pretty serious problems if a power-hungry charlatan were to take advantage of the situation and seek to rule in the name of the baby Messiah.

 

So Herod talks to the wise men in secret, and tells them to go to Bethlehem to search for the child, and then to come back and tell him where he is so that he can go and pay him homage too.  The wise men go, find Jesus, and after giving him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they go home by a different route rather than returning to Herod.

 

Apparently they had been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod--it makes me wonder if they had a dream of an angel giving them a dope-slap and saying “Hey!  You can’t tell one king that another king over the same people has been born and not expect trouble!  If you go back there and tell Herod, that baby won’t live out the month, Messiah or no Messiah!  What were you thinking?  Go home and keep your mouths shut!”

 

So the baby Jesus, still so tiny and helpless, is already in danger of his life because he is a threat to some of the most powerful people around.  On one level, it is absurd, and on another, it is a profound demonstration of the truth of God, and of human sinfulness;  of the reason that God became human, and the reason that it was necessary for our salvation that he do so.

 

Religion and politics were mixed up long before the time of Jesus.  This morning’s reading from Jeremiah reminds us of that:  he proclaims the end of the exile of the people of Israel.  To understand what that means, you have to remember that the people of Israel had been given their land by God, with the promise that it was theirs and that God would be their God.

 

Later in history, when Israel and/or Judah (since the original promised land had been broken into two kingdoms) were defeated and occupied, it was a logical political decision to remove the people from their land and send them to serve in the country of the conquerors.

 

Not only did this supply labor to the conquerors, it also strongly handicapped any attempt at uprising in the conquered land--there weren’t enough people left to revolt against their oppressors, and those that were left were demoralized because as far as they could tell, God had abandoned them.  As far as they were concerned, there would be no other way that the conquerors could have conquered--if God had still been on the side of the people of Israel, they could have withstood any amount of opposing power.

 

Meanwhile, at the end of the exile--the time proclaimed by Jeremiah when God would bring his people home--a different political decision had been made.  It turns out that the previous conquerors had themselves been conquered, and the new regime thought that the best way to rule was to keep them happy by letting them live in their own land and worship their own God.

 

I wonder if the idea of conquerors pushing people off of their land sounds familiar to you.  More recently than the book of Jeremiah, when people who look more or less like I do came to the shores of this continent, it didn’t take them long to realize that it would be good for them if they could lay claim to the land that was here.  The problem was, of course, that there were already people here, but the newcomers didn’t bother too much about that--they quickly developed religious reasons to do what they wanted to, which was push the natives off their land, and they felt just fine about what they did.

 

We, today, with 20/20 hindsight, may be appalled and shocked that even religion, even the faith that we claim as our own, did not step in to stop the injustice and bloodshed and in fact encouraged it.  But it’s just another instance of religion and politics crossing and getting confused as to which one is which.

 

The thing is that we human beings can’t ultimately do what is right without God at the center of what we do.  I’m not saying that people can’t do good things without believing in God--obviously, an atheist feeding the hungry is a good thing.  I’m talking about those larger realms, like politics, ideology, culture--it is in those realms that we--and here I use the word “we” in a very broad, collective sense--try to order the world and find, over and over, that despite our best intentions we have fallen short.

 

This is where sin comes into it--sometimes simply in our collective inability to do the right thing even when we are trying--sometimes we can’t even figure out what the right thing is.  This is what leads to a king wanting to destroy a baby he sees as a threat.  This is why we need that baby, the baby who was God, to be born in our lives and to live with us.  This is why, in our collect today, we asked God who “wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature,” to “Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity . .  Jesus Christ.”  Let this be our prayer today.