1/4/2026 - Feast of Holy Innocents + Epiphany - When Light is Threatening

When Light Is Threatening

Jeremiah 31:15-17
Matthew 2:1-18

We begin Epiphany where the church often hesitates to linger: with grief.

Before the star settles over Bethlehem, before gifts are opened, before revelation feels beautiful, there is weeping. “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation.”
Rachel weeps for her children, and she will not be consoled.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents interrupts Epiphany because it tells the truth: the revelation of God does not arrive in a neutral world.
Light enters a landscape already shaped by fear, violence, and a power that knows how to protect itself.

“When King Herod heard this”—that a child had been born who threatened his rule—“he was frightened.”

Fear is the first response to Epiphany.
Not wonder—fear.
Because the light that reveals Christ also reveals the world as it is. And when power depends on darkness—on secrecy, control, silence, and forgetting—light becomes a threat.

Dorothee Sölle, a German theologian, poet, and activist writing in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, insisted that Christian faith must confront suffering and political power. She rejected the idea of a distant, controlling God and proclaimed instead a God who suffers with the world and calls human beings into courageous, compassionate action.

She has been an especially important voice to me during this last year as I tried to discern how my exhausted mind and body should face this moment.  

She reminds us that darkness is not only suffering; it is numbness.
Numbness—that quiet acceptance or looking away of what should never be normal. 

God’s light does not anesth-etize us. It awakens us.
It restores our capacity to feel—to grieve, to be disturbed, to be moved to responsibility. That is why light is dangerous. Once you see clearly, you can no longer pretend not to know.

She writes, “Every acceptance of suffering is an acceptance of that which exists. The denial of every form of suffering can result in a flight from reality in which contact with reality becomes ever thinner, ever more fragmentary. It is impossible to remove oneself totally from suffering, unless one removes oneself from life itself, they no longer enter into relationships, if they make themself invulnerable.”

Herod sees clearly enough to understand the danger. He does not attack the star. He does not challenge the Magi. He targets those who cannot defend themselves.

Judith Butler gives us language for what happens next. In Frames of War, she argues that societies are organized around unspoken decisions about whose lives count—whose lives are visible, protected, and mourned. Some lives are publicly grievable. Others are treated as expendable.

The children of Bethlehem fall outside the frame.
Their names are not recorded.
Their deaths are absorbed into political necessity.

And yet, Holy Innocents refuses that erasure.

Scripture itself breaks the frame. It refuses the lie that some lives are disposable or forgettable. 

As Butler names it, the biblical witness insists on grievability: that these lives are worthy of mourning, worthy of public lament, worthy of being remembered. Their deaths matter. God hears the cry of parents whose children have been taken by fear—disguised as security, by power masquerading as protection.

Epiphany light exposes not only who God is, but how violence works—how it hides behind necessity, order, and control, and how it depends on rendering certain lives ungrievable.

One of the most impactful moments I’ve had in the last few months was sitting with our teens as they wrote petitions for the Prayers of the People. I listened as they named what they see happening in schools: gun violence, addiction, bullying, housing insecurity, mental health. They were not looking away. They were telling the truth.

This is why the Feast of the Holy Innocents matters. When you look honestly at the stories of this place, you can trace a 135-year lineage of Epiphany light—people willing to see, to name, and to refuse numbness. The AIDS quilt in the back—that is Epiphany light.

And notice how God responds to violence. Not with force.
God responds by remaining with the vulnerable.
By entrusting life to dreams and warnings, to people willing to flee in the night.
By relying on the quiet courage of those who refuse to cooperate with violence.

The Magi, having seen the light, choose resistance.
They return home by another road.
This is Epiphany faith—not certainty, but discernment. Not triumph, but costly obedience.

Sölle would call this awakening. Butler would call it reframing the world, so threatened lives are no longer invisible.

Epiphany asks us:
What is the light revealing today?
Whose lives are still treated as ungrievable?
Which children remain exposed while power claims necessity?

Holy Innocents reminds us that Rachel still weeps—and that God does not ask her to stop.

Light does not erase grief. It names it. It dignifies it. It refuses to let suffering be hidden or explained away. And it calls those who see the light to choose another road.

Epiphany does not promise safety.
It promises truth.

And the truth revealed in this child is costly love—a love that sides with the vulnerable, exposes false frames, awakens us from numbness, and refuses to look away.

Beloveds, as we give thanks for the light that has already shone among you, may it embolden courage within us.
May we follow the light that tells the truth.
May we grieve what the world would rather forget.
May we protect the lives fear makes expendable.
And may the Christ revealed among the threatened make us brave enough to live as people of the light.

Amen.