It’s the fourth week of Advent, and today, we’re looking at God’s unexpected choices in the Christmas story. Our Scripture readings are Micah 5:2-5a and Luke 1:46b-55.
Part of the inspiration for this sermon came from Tim Brown’s reflection in this week’s ELCA World Hunger Sermon Starters email.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our coming savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
The other day, I was trying to figure out what the busiest time of the year to work in a church is. Obviously, it’s either Easter or Christmas.
Easter has four days of services in a row, but I think Christmas wins as the busiest because there’s also a weekend after Christmas to plan. Easter takes over a Sunday, but especially this year, the day after Christmas we’re back here to worship again. I love it, it’s wonderful, and I hope you’ll be here, but it’s a lot to plan all at once each year.
One of the big challenges for Christmas especially is fitting in all the good Christmas carols. I’m fully aware the key to a good Christmas Eve service is more singing and less preaching, so I’ll do my best, but we do still need something besides just the carols.
Each year, I have a debate with myself over what to include for Christmas Eve. Obviously, we need to hear the Christmas story from Luke with Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and angels, and I also think it’s important to include the more cosmic story from John about the Word becoming flesh, but what else should we hear?
I think we’d appreciate the meaning of Christmas more if we included some of the prophecies foretelling Jesus’ coming, but some scholar counted and found some 574 verses in the Old Testament connected to the coming Messiah. Even a more narrow list of fulfilled prophecies includes around 300 verses. (source) No one wants all that in a Christmas Eve service!
So, usually I limit myself to one or two extra readings. One of them—from Isaiah 9—we cheat and do as an opening litany. The other one we usually read is the same reading from Micah we just heard today. I cut it out for the Christmas in July service, and I debated a lot for this week, but if we read it on Friday, it gives us an excuse to sing O Little Town of Bethlehem, so we’re doing it, even though it won’t be the main focus of the service.
But today, we have time to talk about it, so I do want to look at this prophecy, because it matters that the Messiah is born in Bethlehem.
Most obviously, the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem is an identifying mark, the fulfillment of a prophecy. It’s one of the ways we know he is who he claims to be.
If the prophecy says Bethlehem will be the birthplace of God’s Messiah, someone born in, say, Hebron can’t claim to be the Messiah. It’s hard to change where you were born. Your birth certificate is what it is!
But why Bethlehem in the first place? Well, mainly because God said so. But I think there’s some deeper meaning here as well.
First, there’s the meaning of the word. The name “Bethlehem” in Hebrew means literally “House of Bread” which is a wonderful place for Jesus, the “Bread of Life” to be from. One children’s sermon suggestion I saw for today is putting a communion bread loaf into a manger, because the baby Jesus grows up to give himself to us as the bread of life.
But beyond the wordplay, the city of Bethlehem was not a particularly notable place. You know how you can look up a town or city online and Wikipedia will list famous people from there? Greene has three: Iowa governor Frank D. Jackson, US federal judge Henry Graven, and Thomas Braden, author of the book Eight is Enough.
If you looked up Bethlehem in Micah’s time, or even in Jesus’, you’d probably find one, but he’s a big one. Bethlehem was famous for being the hometown of King David. But, that’s about all it had going for it.
It’s hardly the sort of place you’d expect the Messiah to come from. It’s hardly where you’d expect God to act. Of course, if you know the story of David becoming king in the first place, you might have some suspicions about Bethlehem. David himself was the youngest of eight brothers, and when the prophet Samuel came looking for a new king, his father Jesse didn’t even think David was worth mentioning as a possibility. But that’s who God chose and used to defeat a giant and lead God’s people.
The choice of Bethlehem is unexpected by any standards of this world. It’s a small town outside the capital city of Jerusalem when Micah makes this prophecy. By the time the prophecy is fulfilled, the nation has been conquered by the Romans.
I guess I don’t know for sure, but I strongly suspect the emperor Augustus had never heard of Bethlehem. It’s not even somewhere Joseph and Mary intended to go—the only reason they’re there is because of that pesky census the Roman emperor insisted on taking. But Bethlehem is where God chooses to enter the world.
So, as Tim Brown writes in his commentary on this story:
“The neat thing about Bethlehem being a no-name place is that, well, if God in Christ can show up in the no-name place and make it holy, there’s hope for our little town of Minot, North Dakota. Or Greene, Iowa. (I’m adding Greene – he didn’t actually mention it in his commentary. He actually said Britt, Iowa, which is more than twice as large as Greene!)
And there’s hope for our often not noteworthy day-to-day existence. If God in Christ can show up in a little manger in a little town, God might indeed show up in any little moment. In our own little lives!”
It’s the same principle as in Mary’s story, right? The thing that’s special about Mary is that she said yes to God. She had the faith to trust God and she allowed God to use her.
In the verses we read today, she says, God “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”
Mary was not a princess, or the daughter of the high priest, or any kind of famous celebrity. She was merely a person who believed in God, who said yes to God.
The story of Christmas, the story we celebrate this weekend, is the story of God changing the world by working through the most ordinary people and places. God enters into creation, God enters into our world. God enters into our lives.
God’s choosing doesn’t work the way our world expects. You’d think we’d have figured that out by now, but it’s still startling to hear Mary sing about God bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, scattering the proud, filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty.
If we weren’t so familiar with the story, it’d be surprising, even offensive for night-shift shepherds to be the first ones to greet the newborn king. But this is the way God works.
This is the Lord’s doing, not ours. God chooses to show up in Bethlehem, chooses to make this little town the place where “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee” not because Bethlehem is such a great place, but because God chooses to show up there. God works in Mary because God chooses to work in Mary.
God chooses to claim you, God chooses to redeem you, God chooses to love you and give you eternal life not because you or I deserve it or because we’re good enough or anything like that, but because that’s who God is.
Because God chooses to love you. Because God wants to be known and loved by you.
Blessed are the ones who believe there will be a fulfillment of what was spoken by the Lord.
Amen