O Little Town Of Bethlehem Sermon

What Comes From Small Places

There is a kind of smallness that the world has always found easy to overlook. Not poverty exactly, not failure exactly, but the quiet obscurity of a place that nobody puts on the map, a village that the great movements of history seem to pass by without stopping. Bethlehem was that kind of place. And it is precisely that kind of place that the prophet Micah names, seven centuries before the night in question, as the origin of everything the world has been waiting for.

We have sung about Bethlehem since childhood, many of us. The carol has made it luminous, wrapped it in starlight and silence, set it forever in a kind of amber glow. But before it was a carol, it was a prophecy. And before it was a prophecy, it was simply a small town in the hill country of Judah, known mostly as the place where David had grown up, where his family had kept their sheep. By Micah's time, centuries after David, it had slipped back into obscurity. The great centers of power were elsewhere. Jerusalem held the temple. The empires of Assyria and Babylon held the armies. Bethlehem held nothing in particular. And yet Micah, speaking into a moment of national crisis and imperial threat, points to Bethlehem and says: from here.

Let us stay with that prophecy for a moment before we move to the stable, because the prophecy is doing something important that we can miss if we rush past it.

Micah 5:2 reads, in the Christian Standard Bible: "Bethlehem Ephrathah, you are small among the clans of Judah; one will come from you to be ruler over Israel for me. His origin is from antiquity, from ancient times."

Notice what Micah does not do. He does not say that Bethlehem will become great. He does not promise that the village will be elevated, that its fortunes will turn, that it will finally get the recognition it deserves. The smallness is not removed. It is the condition from which God acts. Bethlehem is small among the clans of Judah, and from that smallness, one will come. The contrast is the point. The ruler whose origin is from ancient times, from eternity itself, will emerge from the most unremarkable of places. This is not an accident in Micah's vision. It is a theological statement about the way God works.

We should sit with that a moment, because it runs against almost everything we instinctively believe about power and importance. We expect significance to come from significant places. We expect the world to be changed by the centers of influence, the capitals, the institutions with resources and reach. Micah says otherwise. And the gospel says otherwise. And the reason both say otherwise is not that smallness is romantic or that poverty is noble in itself. The reason is that when something great comes from a small place, there is no confusion about where the greatness originates. It does not come from the place. It comes from God.

Now turn to Luke, chapter two, and watch the prophecy become event.

Caesar Augustus has issued a decree. The whole empire is to be registered. Luke is careful to name the emperor and the governor, to anchor this story in the machinery of Roman power, because he wants us to feel the contrast. The greatest political authority in the known world issues a command, and that command, entirely without intending to, moves a young couple from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Joseph goes up because he is of the house and family of David. He takes Mary, who is pregnant. And while they are there, the time comes for her to give birth.

She gives birth to her firstborn son. She wraps him in cloth and lays him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

Luke gives us this detail without drama, without commentary, almost without pause. No guest room. A manger. The one whose origin is from ancient times, from eternity, arrives in the place where animals eat. The ruler promised by Micah, whose coming was to be like rain on new grass, like showers that water the earth, enters the world in the most unassuming way imaginable, in a town that nobody put on the map, in a shelter that nobody prepared for him.

And here is what I want us to hold together this morning, because this is where the two passages speak to each other most deeply. Micah says the ruler will come from a small place. Luke shows us that the ruler arrives in the smallest possible way within that small place. The smallness is not incidental. It is not a problem to be apologized for. It is the shape of the incarnation itself.

God does not arrive the way empires arrive. Caesar's decree goes out from Rome with the full weight of imperial authority behind it. It moves populations. It registers names. It asserts control. And in the middle of all that imperial machinery, quietly, without announcement to the powerful, a child is born in Bethlehem and laid in a feeding trough. The empire is busy counting people. God is becoming one.

This is the central claim of the Christian gospel, and it is worth saying plainly: the one promised by Micah as ruler over Israel, whose origin is from antiquity, from ancient times, is the child in the manger. The eternal enters time. The one who will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, whose greatness will extend to the ends of the earth, begins here, in cloth wrappings, in a borrowed space, in a small town that the world was not watching.

And this matters for more than our Christmas sentiment. It matters for how we understand the nature of God's power, and therefore how we understand our own lives before God.

Consider what it means that God chose this. Not what God permitted, or what God worked around, but what God chose. The incarnation was not a compromise with difficult circumstances. Mary and Joseph did not fail to secure better accommodations and so God had to make do. The whole movement of the story, from Micah's prophecy to Caesar's decree to the manger in Bethlehem, is purposeful. God is making a statement about the kind of ruler this will be, the kind of kingdom this will inaugurate.

Micah goes on to describe what this ruler will do. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majestic name of the Lord his God. They will live securely, for then his greatness will extend to the ends of the earth. He will be their peace. The peace Micah promises is not the peace of imperial domination, not the Pax Romana that Caesar's census was meant to reinforce. It is the peace of a shepherd who knows his flock, who stands among them, who leads them not from a distance but from within.

And that is exactly what the manger announces. The shepherd has arrived. He has not arrived above the flock, looking down from a position of untouchable authority. He has arrived within it, subject to cold and hunger and the vulnerability of infancy, born to a young woman far from home, laid in the place where animals feed.

This is what the Church has always called the mystery of the incarnation, and it is a mystery that rewards long attention. The one who is fully God becomes fully human, not as a disguise, not as a temporary inconvenience, but as the definitive act of divine love. He takes on our smallness so that our smallness might be taken up into his greatness. He enters our obscurity so that our obscurity might be seen and known and redeemed.

For those of us who feel small in the ways that matter, and most of us do, at some point, in some season, there is something here that is not merely comforting but theologically serious. The God who chose Bethlehem has not changed his mind about small places. The God who was laid in a manger has not revised his opinion about humble beginnings. The incarnation is not a one-time exception to the way God normally works. It is the clearest revelation of the way God always works.

That does not mean suffering is good or that obscurity is to be sought for its own sake. Micah's vision ends in security and peace, not in permanent hardship. But it does mean that the places and people and moments the world overlooks are not outside God's attention. They may be precisely where God is most present, most active, most purposeful.

As we approach the Table this morning, that is worth carrying with us. We come to this Eucharist not because we have made ourselves worthy, not because our lives are impressive or our faith is without question, but because the one who was born in Bethlehem invites us. The same Lord who arrived without fanfare, who was laid in a manger before he was laid in a tomb and raised on the third day, sets this table and bids us come. He does not require that we come from significant places. He requires only that we come.

The collect for this season asks that we may be found ready to receive him when he comes in glory, having received him now in word and sacrament. That readiness is not the readiness of the powerful or the prominent. It is the readiness of those who have learned, perhaps slowly and with difficulty, to look for God in small places, to expect the eternal in the ordinary, to find the shepherd not only in the great cathedrals and soaring liturgies, though he is there too, but in the manger, in the bread, in the cup, in the quiet arrival of grace in the middle of an unremarkable life.

Bethlehem was small among the clans of Judah. And from that smallness, the world was changed. Not by the empire that counted it, not by the powers that overlooked it, but by the child who was born there, who grew and lived and died and rose, and who reigns now as the one Micah promised: shepherd, ruler, and peace.

Come to the Table. He is here.

Sources Consulted

Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Micah 5:2-5 and Luke 2:1-7.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. Collects for Advent and Christmas, and the Order for the Eucharist.

Mays, James Luther. Micah: A Commentary. Westminster Press, 1976.

Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1997.

Wright, N. T. Luke for Everyone. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.