|
Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's December 25, 2005 Sunday worship service. A Village with a History Micah 5:2-5; Luke 2:15-20 Bethel 12/25/05 Christmas Day Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD Even before 1868 when the pastor of Trinity Church in Boston, Phillips Brooks, made it a memorable piece of America’s Christmas lore, Bethlehem had long been a village with a history. In his famous Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Brooks created a masterpiece of nostalgia and feelings of hearth and home fit for those wintry New England scenes that we now know best through the commercial success of the Hallmark Greeting Card Company. The lilt and lyricism of Bethlehem’s “deep and dreamless sleep” and the silent rhythm of “the wondrous gift given” stay with us as much for the gentle mood they create as for the theology of the incarnation they describe. But long before Brooks penned his lines about Bethlehem, this modest village five miles south of Jerusalem was known as a fruitful and fertile place, where grain and fruit could be easily grown and ancient wells provided an abundance of fresh water. The word “Bethlehem” means, literally, “house of bread,” owing no doubt to its rich soil and productive fields. It was not a great market town or trading center, and certainly it had not the status of Jerusalem, the great capital of the United Kingdom and the center of worship and ritual and influence. But it was a village with a history. It was a village dear to the heart of the Jewish people because, there, Rachel, the favored wife of the patriarch Jacob, was buried; there, Ruth the Moabite widow gleaned in the fields of the Jewish landowner Boaz before he took her as his wife and thus gave her a lineage and, thus, Ruth, a foreigner, later became the great-grandmother of Bethlehem’s most distinguished son, David; there, David himself was born into the family of Jesse as the youngest of his brothers, yet exalted as the anointed King by Samuel. Bethlehem is a place rich with sacred memories. But Bethlehem also served as a prophetic foil for the seductive dangers of its nearby – somewhat cosmopolitan -- neighbor, Jerusalem, what with all of Jerusalem’s worldly splendors and corruptions, political machinations and excesses. The prophet Micah pronounced judgment on Jerusalem’s failure to be the city on a hill that would be God’s light to the nations. Instead, for Micah, it was the modest city of Bethlehem, least among the princes of Judah, that would be the place out of whose past would come Israel’s future hope. Namely: a Messiah. Micah the prophet promises that in the midst of bad things, great things shall come from a small village. More than the object of a warm Christmas nostalgia, Micah and the prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition declare that Bethlehem is a symbol of God’s displeasure with “business as usual,” not only in Jerusalem, but in the realm of all earthly kingdoms. God has a plan for a better way, and it begins with a child. And if you read Matthew’s version of the nativity, radically different than Luke’s, you know that Bethlehem is the bloody place where Herod sends his troops to massacre all male children under the age of 2, fearing that the Magi’s prediction of rival for his throne might come true. And if we dare read the prophetic word as a word for our own time, this village with a history also pronounces judgment on all those cities and nations and governments that ignore the biblical mandate to feed the whole flock and to stand up for peace. And while it may be a long reach from ancient Judah to our own homeland, from Herod to the Herods of our day, the prophetic word is that America’s deluded quest for empire and the garnering of the wealth of the nations, our own banal debates over the merits of “merry Christmas” vs. “happy holidays” when millions have no health care and the homeless shiver on a park bench and our prisons overflow as a nation with the highest crime rate in the world, that all of that and so much more is what really needs redemption and hope, and not more political power plays or attempts to cover up more secrets. Of course, what everyone, our friends and enemies alike, really need is to be stilled by the magnitude of God’s great love shown at Bethlehem toward us -- to recall that the miracle of God, in his divine economy, is that God can make much of nothing and something of almost anything – even of the messes that we make. A little town becomes the focus of the world’s last best hope; a baby comes to oppose the forces of Caesar and fear, and human flesh and human life are dignified and made whole as never before. I had occasion in June, 1984 to visit this village with a history as a tourist-pilgrim and, once I recovered from the shock of entering a Wal-mart equivalent selling all manner of mass-produced nativity sets (it seemed not possible that this was the O Little Town of Bethlehem), I and the group I was with visited the Church of the Nativity, reportedly the oldest church in Christendom, which has been built over and around the traditional site marking the birth of Jesus in a cave, now a grotto, that once upon a time, tradition has it, served as a stable. There are Greek orthodox monasteries clustered like barnacles around this church, one of the holiest destinations for pilgrims in all the holy land. Upon entering that sacred space, one passes through dungeon-like corridors and descends worn stone stairways where oil lamps lighting the way seem to absorb more light than their orange flames emit. I recall, descending, hearing what I thought were Christmas carols being sung by other groups of pilgrims, songs that reverberated through the stone chambers, making it difficult to identify either source or exact words, but the sound remained eerily familiar and comforting. Descending still, down more dark and smoky stone stairs, we finally reached bottom: the Grotto of the Nativity. It smelled of wet sand, the air thick from burning oil lamps and the press of pilgrim bodies. Kneeling to reach inside this cavelike crypt, we each took a quick turn touching the venerated hard rock where the ancient Church said Jesus once laid his head. I would like to say that that experience was, for me, a holy one when I felt the rustle of angels wings, but the pressing crowd and the air made it hard to feel holiness. Sometimes, it is difficult to reconcile Bethlehem as destination for pilgrims, seekers, tourists, and the merely curious with the Bethlehem of our Christmas imaginations. But to me, that only adds to the mystique of this village with a history. What we do with that history is, of course, entirely up to us. But if Christmas is to remind us of anything, it tells us that the world of little Bethlehem was real, Caesar Augustus was real, Herod was real, taxation was real, death and slaughter were real, despair was real. And in the midst of all of this, God had to be made real, and was made real not as an ideal but in the flesh and in the blood. The promise of Bethlehem is that God does not abandon that which God has made. Incarnation declares: God becomes one with us so that we may become one with God. Thanks be to God! Amen.
|
