The WHERE of Christmas
The WHERE of Christmas by Rev. L. John Gable
December 15, 2019
To quote a good friend and fellow Tab member, Alan McKenzie, retired English professor at Purdue, “Every story has a geography and the better you understand the geography the better you understand the story.” That certainly is true of the Christmas story. In the few short verses we read this morning from Luke he mentions five different towns, cities, regions and countries. Apparently, Luke thought geography was important to the telling of this story.
This Advent season we have been looking at the Christmas story from various perspectives. Like any good story it has “a who, a what, a when and a why” aspect to it, and today we look at the “where” of Christmas.
Of course, the expected answer to the “where” question is in Bethlehem, but why there of all places? Bethlehem is just 6-7 miles south of Jerusalem, so why not in Jerusalem, the capital city, the religious center of the nation, the site of the Temple? Wouldn’t that have made more sense as the birth place of the promised Messiah of God? To find the answer to that question we need to go back in the Biblical story – way back – perhaps as far back as to the book of Genesis where we read the Jacob story: remember the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Jacob buried his beloved wife Rachel in Bethlehem after she died giving birth to their son, Benjamin, the youngest of the brothers of Joseph. We read in Genesis 35:20, “Jacob set up a pillar at her grave; it is the pillar of Rachel’s tomb which is there to this day” and it is, still, there to this day and it is often a point of conflict between the Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers because the border wall separating those two nations runs right through Rachel’s tomb.
Fast forward in Scripture and we are reminded that Bethlehem is also the site of the Ruth and Boaz story, and later still, and perhaps most importantly, it is the hometown of King David. Remember he was the son of Jesse chosen by the prophet Samuel to be the next king of Israel even though he was overlooked, even by his own father, because he was only a shepherd boy? David did indeed grow up to be king of Israel and a great king he was. He was the one who captured the walled city of Jerusalem making it their capital, making a home there for the Ark of the Covenant and laying the groundwork for the building of the Temple. Over time, Jerusalem would come to be called the City of David, but long before that it was Bethlehem that was called the City of David. Fast forward again in the Biblical narrative, centuries later, the prophet Micah prophesied that the promised Messiah would come from Bethlehem, why? Because all of the messianic expectations of the day were grounded in the hope that the coming Messiah would be another David, someone from the line of David, who would set his people free from their oppressors and would reestablish the greatness of the nation of Israel.
O, little town of Bethlehem, did indeed have a place of prominence in Old Testament history and in Messianic prophecy, so it is little wonder that when the Emperor Augustus called for a census, centuries later, Joseph and Mary had to make their way to Bethlehem from their hometown in Nazareth, not an easy journey even under the best of circumstances much less when one is pregnant, because Joseph was from the house and lineage of David. While Nazareth would have been a much easier place for all concerned, it is completely understandable that Bethlehem had to be the “where” of Christmas, so God, in all His wisdom and sovereignty, used the unsuspecting Emperor Augustus to make sure that Mary got to the place where the baby was promised to be born.
Nearly every Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land includes a visit to Bethlehem, typically for a couple of hours for a quick tour of the holy sites and it is the very best place to buy pieces of beautifully carved olive wood, but it is admittedly a very difficult place to get to because it necessitates crossing the border wall which separates Israel from the West Bank, a massive boundary wall which serpentines through the countryside with checkpoints guarded by Israeli soldiers strapped with AK-47s. While the city is now predominately Muslim, it still is home to the majority of Christians living in the West Bank. When I visited Bethlehem during my sabbatical in 2013 I stayed a week by myself in the guest house of the Bethlehem Bible College. I spent my days walking the streets, hours at a time, up Manger Street to the Church of the Holy Nativity and the Shepherd’s Field, and back down again on Star Street. I walked for miles along the 30 foot tall barrier wall, as tall and oppressive as any prison I have ever seen, decorated with graffiti calling for a peace that seems nowhere to be found. I continue to follow the Bethlehem Bible College on line and I recently saw a video posted several weeks ago by its president showing Palestinian protestors in the street right outside the college and the air filled with tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers. Bethlehem is still very much a part of the “where” of this story.
But there are other “wheres” in the story as well. There is the “where” of the place itself where Jesus was born, whether a stable, a cave or an annex added to a family home; certainly there was no “inn” such as we might imagine it. The setting could not have been any more humble, particularly given that this was the birth place of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. “Even now” writes Ann Weems, “we simply do not expect to find a deity in a stable. Somehow the setting is all wrong, the swaddling clothes too plain, the manger too common for the likes of a Savior, the straw inelegant, the animals reeking and noisy, the whole scene too ordinary for our taste. And the cast of characters is no better. With the possible exception of the kings, who among them is fit for this night? The shepherds? Certainly too crude. The carpenter, too rough; the girl, too young. And the baby! Whoever expected a baby! Whoever expected the advent of God in a helpless child? Had the Messiah arrived in the blazing light of the glory of a legion of angels wielding golden swords, the whole world could have been conquered for Christ right then and there, and we in the church – to say nothing of the world!- wouldn’t have had so much trouble today. Even now we simply do not expect to face the world armed with love.”
What does the humble setting of this story tell us about the child who was born there? That there is no place, no condition, so low, so mean, so humble or depraved that He will not meet us there still.
Another “where” in the Christmas story is in the womb of an unwed, teen aged girl named Mary. The open-hearted reception of both Mary and Joseph to the announcement of this birth is surely part of the miracle of this story. Each of them, and certainly both of them together, represent the obedience and bravery of faith that we too should strive to emulate. May our first response to God’s invitation and prodding be that of Mary’s, “Let it be with me according to Your word.”
But the greatest miracle of the Christmas story is that God would even choose to enter the world in this way at all. Who would imagine that God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the Lord of all, would choose to take on human flesh and come to live among us? “Who would have sufficient daring of imagination” writes John Henry Jowett, “to conceive that God Almighty would have appeared among us as a little child? We should have conceived something sensational, phenomenal, catastrophic, appalling! The most awful of the natural elements would have formed his retinue and we could have become chilled and frozen with fear, but He came as a little child. The Great God ‘emptied’ Himself.”
And even if He did so choose to take on human flesh and come to us who could have imagined that He would come as a little baby born of a young, as yet unmarried, peasant woman.
Deep within the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth is a grotto which is believed to have been created as early as the 3rd or 4th century. Carved in to the altar there is this Latin phrase: “Verbum caro hic factum est”, translated, “The Word was made flesh or the Word became flesh here.” That grotto and the Roman Catholic Church that was subsequently built over it is believed to be the site of the first century home of young Mary. It was there that it is believed the angel Gabriel appeared to her to tell her the Good News that she had been chosen by God. So, the inscription carved in to the altar suddenly takes on new meaning. Not only is it stating the cornerstone affirmation of our faith: that in Jesus Christ, God Himself took on human flesh; but that universal truth takes on an air of particularity in that particular place as the inscription reads, “The Word of God became flesh HERE, RIGHT HERE!” Again, the better you know the geography the better you know the story. Surely the womb of Mary is part of the “where” of the Christmas story.
And finally I will pose to you that our hearts are also part of the “where” of this story. Augustine famously said, “This birth is always happening, but if it happens not in me what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me!” To hear this story but not to have experienced the reception of the Lord into our own hearts is kindred to saying that you know about a place because you looked it up in an atlas without ever having visited there; it is the difference between reading the list of birth announcements in the local paper and actually celebrating the birth of your own child or grandchild or the child of a good friend. To know Jesus, not merely as a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger but as your Savior and Lord compels us not only to celebrate His birth, but also to emulate His life. In his Christmas sermon in 1543, Martin Luther said, “The inn was full…there are many of you who think to yourselves: ‘If only I had been there! How quick I would have been to help the baby!’ Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor. You ought to serve your neighbors, for what you do to your neighbors in need you do to the Lord Christ Himself.” How similar are Luther’s words to those of Jesus we have carved in to our chancel rail: “As you did it to the least of these you did it unto Me.”
Let it be our prayer in this season of Advent as we prepare ourselves once again for the coming of our Lord that our hearts may be as open to hearing and receiving and believing the Good News of the coming of the Christ child as were Mary and Joseph’s; that our bodies may be temples of the Holy Spirit set apart for Christ’s birth within us and for our doing of the work of the Kingdom He came to announce and establish; that our homes may be as open to visitors and strangers today as were the hosts who warmly received those weary travelers long ago; and that our church and community may be as blessed as was Bethlehem to be the place where Jesus dwells and His Kingdom purposes lived out. May these also be part of the “where” of Christmas. Amen.