Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23).
Holy Innocents 2021 comes with news of a Covid surge from the omicron variant causing a sharp increase in pediatric hospitalizations. Covid vaccine is now available for children who are at least five years old, but the youngest children cannot yet be vaccinated, pediatric vaccination rates are low, and unvaccinated children living with unvaccinated adults are at especially high risk. The urgency of protecting our children has reached far too few parents, and the failure of our leaders to require vaccinations or mandate mask-wearing or do enough in any way to protect children and others has not only directly made our children vulnerable, but has contributed to a misguided idea that Covid isn’t dangerous for children. Churches that gathered families for unmasked Christmas services and children’s programs bear responsibility also, again not only for the children directly infected from such gatherings, but from the unspoken message that it’s okay to gather as if our wish that this pandemic were over had magically become a reality.
Holy Innocents 2021 comes also after a lackluster COP26 gathering in November made little progress toward mitigating climate change. In an interview by KK Otteson published in The Washington Post , Greta Thunberg says:
Right now, what’s holding us back is that we lack that political will. We don’t prioritize the climate today. Our goal is not to lower emissions. Our goal is to find solutions that allow us to continue life [as it is] today. And, of course, you can ask, “Can’t we have both?” But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that. We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been much smoother. But now it’s a different situation.
Greta Thunberg is one of the younger climate activists who know that climate change will be a dominant force for the rest of their lives because of our failure to recognize the danger and address it responsibly before we got to this point. When I read about expected changes in sea level rise and loss of species and food production as the earth continues to warm, I often imagine a baby born this year and how old that baby will be as these changes, challenges, and catastrophes unfold. (When my heart can bear it, I calculate how old my own young grandchildren will be as these changes occur, and try to imagine how their lives might be impacted.)
Throughout this pandemic, I’ve sensed parallels between our response to climate change and our response to Covid. The parallels are becoming starker and clearer as 2021 comes to a close and our remembrance of the Holy Innocents points to how little children have mattered to too many powerful people throughout history.
What do the two crises have in common? A few of the parallels are a desire to hold suffering —especially the suffering of the most vulnerable people in our world — at a comfortable arm’s length, an inability to acknowledge and grieve the enormity of the loss of life (both human and nonhuman), a puzzling concession to people who bully us with their “right” to spread disease or pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases or otherwise undermine the public good with their own willful ignorance and greed, and an overall failure to love our neighbors as ourselves and to care for the little ones — the most vulnerable ones — in our communities and our world.
The people with power in this world and those of us who passively allow them to continue doing what they do differ from Herod, of course in this: No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children. The objective instead is to maintain political power or a sense of “normalcy”, which rightly or wrongly is taken to entail inadequately addressing a difficult problem. The objectives are to accept (and not look to closely at) a high number of hospitalizations or deaths for some people so that others can have a sense of “getting back to normal” and to ignore the effects of climate change so that we older people can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed while allowing the wealthiest among us to make huge profits producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources. We don’t intend to harm the children; children are simply the collateral damage of our failures with respect to Covid and climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars.
However, we do have something in common with Herod: Herod didn’t care one way or the other about the children who were slaughtered. His objective was to eliminate one child; the others were collateral damage to his cause. When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to really see and work to end the Covid pandemic and climate change, we aren’t really all that different from Herod. And the grief of the mothers of today’s innocent victims is no different from the grief of the mothers of Bethlehem or the grief of Rachel or of mothers throughout history who have seen tyrants treat their children as expendable, as collateral damage to their own selfish schemes.
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with your in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Collect for The Holy Innocents, The Book of Common Prayer)
Lord, have mercy on us.
