This is the Sunday of the Ancestors in the Orthodox Church. This morning, we heard the geneology of Christ read from the book of Matthew. All those names — Rahab, David, Zerubbabel, Zadok — some of whose stories are known, some of whose names are at least mentioned elsewhere, some whom we know nothing about. And what about those we do know something about? It’s not always a glowing picture: prostitutes, adulterers, murderers, liars, worshippers of Baal and other foreign gods. This is the lineage of Christ. When he emptied himself and took on the form of a servant, He became the descendant of sinners. It would be wonderful if every name read elicited only a glow of pride. There are certainly great heroes of the faith listed, but they all have their weaknesses as well. I heard a religious scholar recently remark that the Hebrew Bible is not the story of how people should be, but how they are. The divine condescension is our joy as we anticipate the Nativity, but the reality of what it means that the Son of God became one of us also has a sudden grittiness to me.

By now, I’m sure everyone has heard this absolutely horrible news. A woman is so desperate to have a child of her own after she miscarries that she comes into another woman’s home on false pretences, murders her in cold blood and cuts the eight-month-old fetus (excuse me — child) from her womb, which she then tries to pass off as her own. It’s really too horrible to be believed. If I had read it in a book, I would’ve thought the author was going for a level of depravity that was more sensationalist that fact-based.

And it happened in Skidmore, a little town with a population of about 300 that’s about two hours north of here. The town where the baby was taken was Malvern, KS — another small town.

Human nature is such a funny thing. Why is it that when you read things like this, you almost immediately want to know where it happened, what kinds of people these were, did the victim act incautiously, as if any of these details can help you remove the circumstances from your world. What is it we want to hear? That it happened light years way away, in precisely the kind of environment and with the type of people that you have always wisely kept your distance from? That there is some snag in the system somewhere, and onces we address it with proper safeguards and new legislation, such things will never occur again? In spite of being jaded by hearing far too many graphic crime stories for our spiritual well-being, I suppose we can never help our automatic inclination to empathize and so, when that is too frightening, we have to immediately find the information that tells us that we have rendered ourselves inviolate and inaccessible to such evil.

The story in today’s paper contained the kind of quote that you always hear from a neighbor or local resident in small town crimes. A woman in Malvern said, “you read about this kind of stuff, but it blows you away when it’s here. This stuff is supposed to be in Los Angeles or New York.” Perhaps in the light of such horror, these are the things that naturally occur to people to say, but I wince at them all the same. This is just the sort of attitude that country people are accused of — bad things only happen in big cities, not out here where we’re decent and upstanding. A Malvern man said, in answer to a question about the killer, “Do I hate her? If it happened anywhere else in the country, I’d hate her. But she’s from here. I just feel nothing.”

I haven’t heard any quotes like that from the town of Skidmore, Missouri. But then, Skidmore may be something of a haunted town, if indeed the whole county isn’t haunted. To a lot of residents, it may seem like the sudden media onslaught is deja vu.

In 1981, a reputed town bully named Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death in broad daylight on a main street in front of at least 40 people, all of whom professed complete ignorance as to the perpetrator of the crime. No one was ever charged. The incident became the subject of a best-selling book and a “60 Minutes” report.

And unfortunately, that isn’t the only skeleton in the closet. The St. Joseph News-Press carried a short article of the bizarre crime history of Nodaway County. Here are a few examples:
* In 1972, a 15-year-old shot a family of four to death for no apparent reason.
* In 1994, a man was convicted of first-degree murder for running over his wife with a combine.
* In 2002, a 71-year-old man walked into an abbey and opened fire, killing two monks and wounding two before killing himself. No motive was ever discovered.
And I’m not including the rest, the organized crime hits and sex crimes and domestic abuse murders that have become all too common but still horrify us and make us wonder what demons enter into our fellow human beings.

These are terrible things to contemplate. And incomprehensible. And unanswerable. As such, perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh on the residents of these towns for not having more to say. I had been a little nonplussed with all the comments about how the baby needs to know she was loved, as if this in any way will be a comfort to this poor individual.

But what do I expect? We’re only human, with a human capacity to process horror and grief and the realization of our fragile sense of our own safety and the rightness of things. Having a baby to focus on might take the sting out of it. Because such innocence and new life always symbolizes hope to us, Baby Victoria Jo Stinnen gives us a ray of light in the unbroken darkness of ruined and broken lives.

Out of the terror of our history, windows are broken when we least expect it. Sometimes without our ability to recognize them, they put the darkness to flight for a moment and enable us to see greater truths that we are too blind for most of the time.

Unto us, a Child is given …