Advent’s Fourth Perspective from Bethlehem: Where?
(#4 in the Advent series: The Fifth Perspective)
But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.
(Micah 5:2)
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea,
wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking,
“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”
(Matthew 2:1-2a)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 20, 2015
(Volume 5 Number 21)
St. James United Methodist Church, 321 Pleasant Valley Drive, Little Rock, AR 72212
During Advent we’ve been making our way toward Christmas Eve, to what I’ve called, “The
Fifth Perspective.” We’ve been following the candles of the Advent wreath week by week in a
way that offers us five different Advent perspectives. I wanted, first, to anchor this series in the
Land itself, so we’ve assigned each candle a different geographical site connected to the
Christmas story, each site bringing us closer and closer to the manger.
The first candle’s perspective was Babylon, a 900 mile journey across the ancient caravan routes
where, 600 years before Jesus was born, we found Israel, defeated, exiled, its glorious Davidic
dynasty crushed. The wilderness around the Jordan River was the perspective of our second
candle, coming now only some 20 – 25 miles from Bethlehem where John the Baptist, the cousin
of Jesus, preached a message of repentance and baptized, preparing the Way of the Lord. Last
week we came to Jerusalem for the third perspective, now only 5 or 6 miles from Bethlehem.
This morning, at last, we arrive in Bethlehem to consider our fourth perspective, which will be
followed this Thursday, Christmas Eve, with The Fifth Perspective, our attention focused like a
laser on the manger itself.
It’s not just the Land that our series has been tethered. Each candle’s geographic perspective has
been coupled with one of the five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Simple
questions? To be sure, yet they constitute a fundamental tool for conveyance of a story, and
what is our mission, if not the conveyance of a story of Hope and Salvation. It’s a first lesson of
journalism, that to communicate a story in a compelling manner, one should frame its telling
along these five basic perspectives. The most penetrating of those perspectives – The Fifth
Perspective -- is ordinarily the last, “Why?” On Christmas Eve services we will use that question
as an invitation to explore the divine purpose behind the Incarnation. Why, would God intervene
in this way?
So, allow me to wrap these five candles up as gifts and put a bow on them, place them under the
Tree of our Telling of the Advent story. The first gift comes from faraway Babylon, where the
exiled nation asked, “Who?” “Who will arise to save us? Who?” Theirs was a search for a
champion, a hero. The first gift, then, is Hope, the promise of a coming Messiah-champion, a
Branch that will spring up, giving new life to the Davidic dynasty. the coming Son of David.
The second gift is from the Jordan River, people coming from miles around to hear this wild man
of prophet. Why, it was as if John himself lit the second candle, and the people believed, asking,
“What shall we do? What?” The second gift, wrapped by John, was new light for a new path.
The third gift, Joy, we discovered in Jerusalem, asking with the believers, who sensed that his
Coming was near, “When?”
Today we place a fourth gift, wrapped in Bethlehem, under the Tree of our Telling, which is
Peace. Asking, “Where?” we hear the prophet Micah’s answer, that Messiah’s coming would be
in Bethlehem. That’s when we know we have arrived, and experience Peace.
Then, on Thursday, with the lighting of the Christ candle within the circle, it will be as if we
have entered the cave itself to find the manger and, as we ask “Why? Why would God come to us
in this way?” the gift that we receive will be Wonder.
Well, we are now very close, having arrived in
Bethlehem. When the magi came to Jerusalem,
sometime after the birth of Jesus, they asked,
“Where is the child who has been born king of the
Jews? For we have observed his star in its rising,
and have come to worship him.” Matthew’s telling
of that visit of dignitaries from the east answered
with a quotation from the prophet Micah, a
prophecy already over 700 years old, connecting
Bethlehem to the messianic hope.
I love this image of a shepherd with his flock, out
in the Shepherd’s Fields near Bethlehem. There’s
a rural loneliness in this landscape. It seems hardly
a place from which a mighty king might emerge.
In these Shepherd’s Fields the young David would
have kept his flock, the loneliness aiding his
devotion and nearness to God. King David was a
legend by the time of Micah, having lived almost
300 years earlier, and Micah’s words tell of another
David-like king who would arise unexpectedly
from the same village of Bethlehem
Micah’s career spanned three kings of Judah, most
notably the last, Hezekiah, in the late eighth century B. C. It was a time of grave uncertainty in
which Israel and Judah was under assault by the Assyrians, the Mediterranean power at that time.
The northern kingdom of Israel collapsed in 722 BC, after which Sennacharib continued his raid
south toward Jerusalem, “caging up Hezekiah like a bird in his royal city” and yet sparing the
city when Hezekiah paid tribute (as the annals of Sennacherib discovered in Ninevah claim).
The biblical story agrees that Sennacharib’s armies surrounded Jerusalem, but adds that the
armies were decimated by a plague which God sent midst the gathered troops. Both agree that
the armies returned without having destroyed Jerusalem. Jerusalem stood, the Davidic dynasty
continuing for another century and a half, when the new power of the Middle East, Babylon,
crushed it and its temple entirely.
This was the world of Micah, living in a time when Israel’s marginal status in the Middle East
was obvious, her neighbors far more powerful. Israel, on the international stage, seemed like
shepherds in the midst of great armies. Would God’s promise to David stand in such a world?
Micah believed it would, offering an oracle affirming God’s promise, prophesying that God
would enter this perilous world in a surprising way. From out in the Shepherd’s Fields a star
would shine. God’s power manifested, as always, in an unexpected manner. God’s covenant
will be fulfilled with a new leader from the line of David, and from the same Bethlehem of
David. This new king, like David from Bethlehem, will not exercise military might but rather
will guard and provide for his people as a shepherd keeping his sheep and, as the Hebrew bible
says, ve-haya zeh shalom, “He will be the one of Peace.”
Micah was looking back to the ancient times of David in order to look forward to a new hope.
Caught in a bewildered world of terror, uncertainty, and economic disruption, he saw hope in an
old promise. While there is much that separates us from eighth-century B. C. Judah, these
dynamics are not entirely unlike the world in which we live. We too know the fear terror at an
international and even a community level. Something seems unhinged and we, too, seek hope
that the world will be different, yearning for safety and peace, for us and for our neighbors.
So here we are. With Micah, with Mary and Joseph, with the shepherds, with the magi, we
have come to Bethlehem. It occurs to me that each one who met the Savior in Bethlehem had
to take a road to get there. They didn’t just materialize, like a Christmas crèche, anymore than
those who will be here on Christmas Eve will just materialize in the pews. There will be
different road taken to arrive here, in Bethlehem. Some live at such distance that they will be
flying in to be with family (call it a High-flying Perspective atop the clouds and, perhaps, on their
descent into Little Rock their seeing of familiar downtown buildings will give them a joyful
sense of coming home). Others will be driving long distance over the Interstate, as Sherry and I
did for our ten years in Michigan (call it an Express-Perspective cluttered with billboards and
spaced with exits, convenience stops for provision, both fuel for the automobile and for the
body). Others will arrive by a more rural route, the highway (call in the W inding Perspective, a
slower pace driving through small communities, each with a cluster of remembrances to add to
the Christmas spirit). And, of course, many others will have a short trip (call it the
N eighborhood Perspective of the everyday and the familiar). By many roads we will gather, each
bringing us here, to the manger, to consider T he Fifth Perspective.
Mary and Joseph’s road to Bethlehem was a Highway Perspective from Nazareth we may call
‘‘T he Road of Interrupted Lives.’’ Mary was not expecting to be expecting, nor was her fiancé.
Their plans were ordinary. Get married, start a carpentry business, settle down to a quiet life in
Nazareth. On the outskirts of the larger and wealthy, Roman-populated city of Sepphoris, it
would be a bit like living in the suburbs. All of that was shattered when Gabriel announced to
Mary that she, blessed among women, carried in her womb the salvation of the world.
Sometimes our plans are interrupted, our journey not dictated by our own plans, but by others.
Luke says Caesar in Rome sent forth a decree that disrupted many plans, Joseph and Mary’s
among them. So on Christmas Eve, Joseph and Mary find themselves far from home, on a road
distant from their once-dreamed dreams, yet strangely open to a new dream.
Are you on a similar road this Christmas? Perhaps something happened last year that you were
not expecting, involving your health, your work, a relationship? Like Mary and Joseph, your
life is not where you expected it to be, not where you wanted it to be this Christmas. ‘‘W here,
where am I headed?’’ you may be asking yourself. W here? My wish for those who are traveling
today, distant from your once-dreamed dreams, is that your eyes will be strangely open to a new
dream, and that you will know Peace.
If Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem by the highway, the shepherds came from the
neighborhood. They didn’t travel far, yet their road was filled with the miraculous. We’ll call it
‘‘T he Road of Inspired Vision.’’ It started out as an ordinary night, but suddenly an angel of the
Lord appeared and the glory of the Lord shown around them as the heavenly host told of the
Savior’s birth. The shepherds went with haste into Bethlehem to find Mary and Joseph with
the child, sharing with them about this most mysterious experience out in the Shepherd’s Fields.
Are you on a similar road this Christmas? You need go to no exotic place to experience God’s
calling. It can happen right where you are, right in the neighborhood. Perhaps you are
encountering something beyond the ordinary, an encounter in which you feel spoken to,
awakened by something external to yourself, inexplicably inspired as if by angelic muses.
‘‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,’’ and you feel you must be ready, for how
else to explain this gift of a teacher you are experiencing? You may even be hesitant to speak
about it for fear others won’t believe, nor understand. You’re not even sure that you understand.
But on this road you are, headed to the birth of something new born in a Bethlehem not far
away, easily within reach. You feel drawn here, in a mystical, holy way. Forget rationality!
This is more, a sense of the extraordinary that you dare not ignore or shun. Call it, a Calling.
When we feel Called, often rationality has nothing to do with it. If this is your road, my wish
for you is Peace.
The wise men’s road was more of an Express Perspective. Their long journey must have included
exits off the caravan routes known as caravan-serai, spaced at about a day’s journey so that
travelers could have a place of provision and protection. Perhaps here, resting overnight as they
came closer and closer to their destination, they opened their scrolls and studied. Theirs was
‘‘T he Road of Intellectual Search.’’ One of the most striking things about their story is that it
contains no miracles, no angels, no messages from God. These ancient scholars were using their
minds and doing what ancient scholars did in those days, which was to follow the stars. That set
them on a journey. When they got lost, they stopped and asked for directions. It is all very
rational.
Are you on a similar road this Christmas? This thought may come as a relief to those of you
who have never had a mystical experience. Not everyone saw and heard angels on the night
Jesus was born. If yours is a skeptical mind and a searching heart, too can discover the Christ on
this road, though it may be a long journey. For you, creches and sermons and hymns are all
quite nice, possessing a lyrical, liturgical beauty. But you need more. I say follow whatever light
or star you have, learn from the scholars who have traveled this road before you. You may
occasionally lose your way, but you need no mystical experience to find Jesus at Christmas. Stay
on the road of searching honestly, and eventually, I believe, you will come to doubt your doubts.
If you are on this road, I wish for you, Peace.
May this Christ child be for you --- ve-haya zeh shalom --- the One of Peace.