Bethlehem - The House of Bread

Bethlehem – The House of Bread Micah 5; Luke 2:1-4; Matthew 2:1-5 I wanted to take this season of Advent to further dwell on the devotionals around the Advent wreath and tell the rest of the story behind them. With these three scriptures from Micah, Luke and Matthew we can have a fuller picture and appreciation of how intimately God works to have His will unfold out of His great love for us all. There are a number of tantalizing features in this drama over the course of 700 hundred years from the time of Micah to Jesus. One of them is that it took over 700 years to unfold and yet the situation in Israel wasn’t all that different; that is, they were still at war, or being occupied or oppressed by foreign rulers, and yet God had a plan for their salvation, in spite of themselves and errant ways and betrayal of His ways. Micah’s concern was the injustice he witnessed, or learned of, in the twin kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This injustice stemmed from the corruption of the leaders in both capital cities, which set the tone of widespread corruption elsewhere in the two nations. Israel and Judah were weakened by their division; the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the twelve tribes of Israel, were at odds with each other. They were politically and spiritually corrupt and vulnerable to foreign occupation and the ideas and gods that came with them. So Micah confers judgment but also hope and deliverance. With the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem another fascination occurs. Herod the Great had a summer palace called the Herodium. He was the Herod who had John the Baptist beheaded and called for the male children to be slain in hopes of killing this prophetic child born in Bethlehem. Guess how far Herodium was from Bethlehem? A little over four miles. Herodium was on the tallest hill outside Jerusalem; situated to catch the summer breeze off the sea and situated overlooking little Bethlehem nestled down in the valley. You have to catch the irony of it all. Here’s Herod within sight of, walking distance from - Bethlehem, right where Jesus was born. One king looking down upon the King of kings. Jesus’ father Joseph may well have worked as a mason and carpenter at the Herodium. What juxtaposition, what a concurrence of fate that is. What a crazy God we have to set this up, it’s almost laughable, and yet what power and intention and message God intends with these two kings being in spitting distance of each other. We also have to appreciate the infamy of Herod the Great. He was a ruthless man who died a miserable death. Recently, doctors have agreed that Herod the Great succumbed at age 69, with chronic kidney disease complicated by a very uncomfortable case of maggot-infested gangrene of the… well, let’s say, his private areas. Jesus, on the other hand, would also suffer a miserable death, only to become the Savior of the world. These two kings could not have been further removed from each other in their impact on the world. All that 2 Herod built, and he was magnificent in his building projects, is rubble and ruin. All that Jesus built, in the hearts of believers, will be nothing less than everlasting life in heaven, whose streets are paved with gold. And while we wait for that day, we may live in abundance of the heart and soul in this day. Speaking of heaven and earth, the ancients often believed that heaven and earth were separated by but a few feet, or that heaven was just “behind the veil.” That phrase comes from the veil that separated the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the Temple where the priest would enter once a year to perform the ritual for the atonement of the people, from The Holy Place, where other rituals were performed on a more regular basis (Exodus 26:33), screening from view the Ark of the Covenant, the cherubim and the chariot throne. The veil which screened the Holy of Holies was seen as the boundary between earth and heaven. It was this veil that was to be torn upon Jesus’ death, meaning that God had come out of the Temple and into the world of humankind to enter the hearts of believers as God’s new temple of the Holy Spirit. Christmas can be understood as a thin veil between heaven and earth. The famous 20th century Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that thin places are ever more prevalent than we believe, but we just don't see them. He wrote, "Life is simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time ... if we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes ... the only thing is, that we don't (let ourselves) see it." We miss those glimpses of the kingdom of God, breaking in on the earth, which is ironic given the fact that Jesus taught us to pray that we might see the kingdom come "on earth as it is in heaven." Perhaps one of the most significant thin spaces between heaven and earth that we miss on a regular basis is the celebration of Christmas. In the midst of all the preparations for Christmas, we might get too caught up in thinking that this is just another Christmas season with the same traditions and myriad obligations (most of them self-imposed) that require all of our attention. We can miss the fact that Christmas really calls us to consider the thinnest place between heaven and earth the world has ever seen -- not a temple veil, but a manger; and not a feeling, but a Person in whom heaven and earth both fully dwell. Christmas is a thin place. Bethlehem is a thin place. The prophet Micah called the people of Judah to focus hard on finding a thin place, a glimmer of hope, in the midst of the thick and foreboding threat of foreign invasion. Like a raging storm, the Assyrian invaders were bearing down on them to sweep them away as God's instrument of judgment against His people. They would dodge that particular fate at the hands of Assyria, but they would not escape the later Babylonian 3 invasion. Like so many of us, the people of Judah made the mistake of thinking that God was far away, so they built thick walls of defense to protect themselves, holding God at a distance. God would break through, however, and their walls, both literally and figuratively, would eventually come tumbling down. And yet, even in the midst of all this impending doom, God offers a word of hope through the prophet with a promise to create a new place for His people -- a remote, out-of-the-way place that was populated with only a few shepherd families and a lot of sheep. In Bethlehem, in a place few expected, God was going to bring the life of heaven to earth in a very personal way. Bethlehem was, of course, King David's hometown, and it was there that he was chosen as the unlikely successor to the reign of King Saul, who was Israel's idea of what a king should look like. God, of course, had a very different idea. The shepherd-boy David was anointed and would rule Israel successfully until his own moral downfall, but even then God would continue to honor the promise He made to David that one of the king's descendants would sit on the throne of Israel forever (2 Samuel 7:16). Despite all that was about to happen to the remnants of David's kingdom in Micah's day, the prophet assures the people that God was not going to abandon the promise that a king was coming from David's hometown to rule Israel, one "whose origin is from of old, from the days of eternity." This King, in other words, would represent God Himself. Interestingly, most people in Micah's day thought that the ultimate place between heaven and earth was the temple in Jerusalem, which was the place where it was thought that God dwelled with His people. But Israel's salvation wasn't coming from the temple. It was to be destroyed, more than once. Security wasn't to be found in relying on the temple, but in God's true King who would bring security and peace through Himself. Instead of a temple, the place where heaven and earth came together, the place where God would dwell with His people, was going to be the feeding trough in a back alley of the tiniest and most insignificant of places. It was to be more hectic than holy. If you visit Bethlehem today, you'll find that it doesn't have the same kind of pastoral, quiet and mystical aura that we envision it to have. There's jostling with a long line of pilgrims waiting to get into the Church of the Nativity, monks yelling instructions to be quiet, cameras flashing, security officers mulling about - all for people to get one chance to touch the star in the cave below that church that marks the traditional site of Jesus' birth. It's more hectic than holy in there on any given day, which makes it hard to fathom that whole idea of a "Silent Night." 4 During this Christmas season, it's not the Bethlehem of modern-day Israel that we need to pilgrimage to in order to experience Jesus' birth. We can do that right where we are by simply focusing ourselves on the humble, obscure and yet powerful ways in which God chooses to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. He doesn't come with chariots rolling or guns blazing, but in the soft skin and helpless posture of a baby, born to a family who number themselves among the poorest of the poor. Life was thin, sparse, meager for Mary and Joseph, but the life Mary brought forth in the manger was full of more than God's people and, indeed, the whole world could have ever imagined. In Jesus, God broke through the barriers between Himself and humanity by becoming one of us. We don't worship a God who is distant, cloaked in clouds, and oblivious to our world. Instead, we worship a God who has deigned to humble Himself and take the road to a cross. This is a God we can know because He has a human face, and in Him the best of heaven and earth come together and show us what is possible for us and for the world. So, as we prepare for Christmas, perhaps the best preparation is to take some time to go to a quiet place and consider that God is not far away, that the King is quite near and His kingdom is at hand. Experience Immanuel, the reality of who God is, the God who is with us, and what God has done in Jesus. The famous preacher Phillips Brooks, while visiting the Holy Land during Christmas week in 1865, wrote a letter home saying, "After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine. ... Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. … Somewhere in those fields we rode through where the shepherds must have been. ... As we passed, the shepherds were still "keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold." Several years later, Brooks sat down to pen a hymn about the experience. The result is the beloved carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem," a moving meditation on the power of this humble place to inspire believers. Truly, it felt to Brooks, both at the time, and as he wrote about it later, that "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight." One last thought… Bethlehem; the name literally means, “House of bread.” As we come to receive Holy Communion, let us appreciate one more fascination; that in this house of bread was born the Bread of Life, Jesus Himself, who said, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48). Jesus is the One who is our staff of life, our sustenance for today and our Savior for the Eternal Day.