The Way to Bethlehem

 Sermon preached on Christmas Eve at St. Thomas' Church, Bath, New York:  Luke 2:1-20.  You can listen to this sermon here.

          Who can help us find the way to Bethlehem?  That’s the question we wonder about in Godly Play during Advent.  We learn:

          The prophets point us a way, especially the prophet Micah, who told us to look out for Bethlehem because someone special is to be born there.  Bethlehem is a town of promise.

          The holy family—Mary and Joseph—show us the way, the hard way they walked from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, a long journey, like walking from Buffalo to Bath, with only a donkey to carry their belongings and keep Mary off her feet as much as possible.

          The shepherds show us the way to Bethlehem, after they have been scared out of their wits by angels appearing to them in the hills where they have been tending their sheep.  The first news of Jesus’ birth given not to the powerful, but to ordinary folk, who counted for not much in their day.

          Finally, the magi, the wise ones from the east, show us the way, following their wild star that would not stay still but led them to Judea, where they thought they were going to pay homage to a new born king, but found at first only an old, angry king Herod, in Jerusalem. Sent to Bethlehem, they finally found a newborn babe, to whom they gave their gifts. They must have been puzzled as to what was really happening. But they knew enough to avoid Herod and go home a different way.

          Those are the ones who show us the way:  following a promise, on a journey that is hard at times, but full of surprise, and needing us to have our wits about us as we search for something we can give our lives to that is real.

          That is a neat description of the journey of our lives:  keeping the promise always in front of us—keeping our eyes on the prize, as the old spiritual says; remaining persistent through the hard times and the weariness we can feel on the long road; looking not for the familiar but for the strange, the surprise, something so astounding it turns our world upside down. We seek the wisdom to know the truth, and the acceptance that in order to find the truth we must look for love, because truth without love is no truth at all.

          This is the way.  But what do we do when we arrive?  Well, of course, we must remember that in this life we never, truly arrive.  We have arrivals, signposts of clarity along the way, moments when grace and mercy, hope and faith and love break through.  These are glimpses—anticipations—of the great arrival when we will be embraced with love in which we have no doubt or shame or fear, the love that is the complete experience of God.

          But what do we do at these “arrivals” on the way?  Edmund Sears, in his hymn text, “It came upon a midnight clear,” tells us what we must do: “O hush your noise and cease your strife and hear the angels sing.”

          Stop the racket. Listen for something beyond your own noise and the noise of the world.  Stop the strife.  Let go of the horrible tendency we have always to be arguing and to prove our own rightness at whatever expense:  be it the dignity of our opponents, or even life itself.

          We are addicted to noise and strife these days. Perhaps we always have been.  But noise and strife will not get us to Bethlehem.  We will never find the Christ child by noise and strife, never know the peace that surpassed—and always will surpass—human understanding in that barn in Bethlehem.

          We might find the adult Christ by noise and strife, but, if so, we will find ourselves on the wrong side, and be among those who clammer for his death because the love he wants from us is just too much to ask, of secondary importance to the purity of our ideologies.

          Christmas maybe one of those “arrival” moments, when in the babe of Bethlehem we can see at least a glimpse of the love God has for us. The story and its cast of characters—the prophets, the holy family, the shepherds, the magi—may get us to lay down our arms and shut down the noise. But the challenge is to make this a more regular experience.

          The news tonight is that God has come among us and to stay. God has taken up our lives completely embracing us, even our noise and strife.  God knows our daily lives in all our joys and all our sorrows, in all our bravado and all our vulnerability, in all our anger and in all our love.  There is nothing of us that this babe will not grow to experience and so, in the end, we can come to him with anything.

          There is nothing, as St. Paul says, that can separate us from this God made flesh who has come among us.

          But we, like Mary, still have to say “yes.”  Yes, I will let you—Love itself—live in me and change my noise and strife into the grace of calm and the mercy of belonging.

          Merry Christmas my sisters and brothers. May the love you glimpse tonight live in you tomorrow and the days ahead.  Just keep looking for it, keep saying yes to it, and keep saying no to all the noise and strife that threatens your peace, the peace of your neighbors and the peace of the whole world.