Sermon: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

2nd in the "Forgotten Verses of Famous Carols" series.
Delivered December 6, 2009 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Luke 2:1-7

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The reading today comes from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 to 7. You'll find that on page 935 of the Bible under the seat in front of you. Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 to 7.

"In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them."

We live in a noisy world. We live in a world that's big, loud, and busy and we've surrounded ourselves with every possible electronic way to stay in touch with all that noise. So some of us get so many phone calls at work or in our private lives that we carry part of our phone in our ear for much of the day. We have our iPods running. We have radios on. If we have cable TV, some of us might have 307 channels, and all of them are shouting something at us. It's a big, loud, busy world. But big, loud, and busy doesn't necessarily mean important.

Now right now it's the time of year I have to be thinking about giving a present to loved ones in my life, and that's important, but you know, when you think about the whole trajectory of life, of all the things that are going on right now in my life and of what is going on in the world, when you think about all those things what we choose as a present is not necessarily among the most important things. And yet over the next three weeks I will constantly be bombarded with messages about what I should buy. Big, loud, and noisy.

What is it that I might not be hearing? What is it that I might not be seeing because of all the noise? I know you've experienced things like this, whether it's at a crowded restaurant, or in a pub, or at a concert. You're in a conversation with someone and there's so much background noise that all of a sudden something important is being brought up, and you're straining to listen, but you can't really hear because of all the rest of the noise.

Well right now, whether we know God, whether we're seeking him, or even if at the moment we're sort of ignoring God, there is a conversation happening. There are words being spoken and gifts ready to be given. And yet are we missing some of it because of all the rest of the noise? Some of the most important things that God is doing in our lives, some of the most important things God is doing in the world is happening quietly.

Our passage begins with the big news, with the loud stuff, with the things that everyone would know about. It begins by saying, "In those days Caesar Augustus." That's the big news. Everybody would know that Augustus is Caesar. He has control over the entire Roman world. His personality, the personality of the person who became Caesar would affect the wellbeing of the entire empire.

Big decisions were made in Rome. Rome was where the news was, and the big news at this point is that, "Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world." This changes the lives of so many people because it's a huge undertaking. People from Spain to the Red Sea are being counted. And the way they did this in many of the places is that you weren't counted where you live. You were counted at the town of you ancestral line. And so people are being displaced and they were having to move to other places for a period of time until they can be properly counted. It's uprooting the lives of so many people, and in that crowd we find Joseph and Mary. And that's the part of the story that isn't the big news.

The rest of this passage here talks about, "Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David." And he goes with his wife, who's pregnant. This is not the big news. They aren't famous people, and the town they're going to is a small quiet town that wouldn't even be known by anyone who didn't live in Israel. But yet it's with Joseph and Mary that God's big news is happening. The important world-changing thing that God is doing, the hinge point of history, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ begins at this moment with people that no one even notices.

Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, the Messiah was prophesied to be born in Bethlehem. We heard it just a moment ago, Micah, chapter 5, verse 2:

"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."

Spoken hundreds of years before Jesus was actually born. And yet God is using the big-news-guy. God is using Caesar in ways that Augustus would never have understood. Because it's because of his decision to do a census that Joseph and Mary move from Nazareth to the city of the promise at just the right moment.

So there are all these big news things going on, but the profound thing that God is doing, he's totally in control of this, but what he's doing is inside, hidden inside of that moment, unnoticed, silent, quiet. God at work to give the world, to give each one of us, a gift that's beyond our imagining. God is at work at this moment to offer himself in a deep and sacrificial way to a world that's at rebellion. He's stripping himself of glory, stepping into our world, to take our place so that we can be in fellowship with him forever, and God does this almost invisibly.

The quiet way God is at work, in this passage in Luke, is captured by today's featured hymn. During advent we're looking at important theological truths that we find inside of these great Christmas carols. And sometimes they're not in the first verse that we all have memorized. Sometime they're hidden in the second or third or fourth verses.

Today we're looking at O Little Town of Bethlehem. O Little Town of Bethlehem (wikipedia link) was written by Reverend Phillips Brooks from an experience he had in Bethlehem in December 1865. Now Brooks was a pretty famous guy in his day. He had become pastor of a dynamic and influential church, Holy Trinity Church, in Boston. But being a spiritual leader through the terrible years of the Civil War had taken its toll on Brooks' own life and spirituality.

Because every week people would come into the worship service wearing black, having on black arm bands, wives who had lost their husbands, parents who had lost their children, children who had lost their father, week after week seeing the crowd grow larger and larger. And every week people coming, wanting some kind of comfort, wanting some kind of inspiration. And time after time Brooks had to come to this pulpit. He had a thousand people in children's Sunday school. And in this moment, trying to bring hope, trying to bring a sense of what God's will is in the midst of a world that seems to have gone crazy.

Even after the war ended, it didn't get better, because so soon after that President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. Gloom covers the country. Gloom covers Brooks' own life as well. Brooks was a famous enough person that he was selected to be the pastor to do the funeral message for President Abraham Lincoln. Totally beaten down spiritually, finds himself having to speak a Word from God to the entire nation.

Somehow he found the words, but afterwards he felt like he needed to get away from all the noise, from all the pressing demands, and he took a sabbatical and he went to the Holy Land with hopes that somehow, when he got there, he would receive some kind of spiritual renewal and would regain his own faith and hope. So he finds himself in Bethlehem only a few months after the assassination. He's weary. He's wounded. He's dry. He's spent.

It was on Christmas Eve day that he found himself in Jerusalem amid all the crowds of pilgrims, and he decides that he just can't take the crowd. He doesn't want to be involved in all these festivities. So he borrows a horse and he goes off into the countryside. People tell him not to do it because there are all kinds of bandits out there. He goes anyway. He's there in the wilderness in solitude and silence and he enjoys that experience the whole day.

Around dusk he finds himself coming into Bethlehem. Under a clear sky he's starting to see the stars come out and he sees the humble little village where Jesus was born. He joins a group of pilgrims there and gets shown the very fields where we believe that the shepherds were watching their flocks when they heard the message about Jesus.

Later that night he joins a worship service with a group of people, and there in the worship service in Bethlehem he feels like he can almost hear the voices of the angels proclaiming the reality that God is there. The gift is real. Welcome the Savior. He feels like he's received a gift at that moment. He felt his faith come back. He felt repaired inside.

Now for years Brooks tried to figure out a way to convey the peace, the hope, and assurance that flooded his heart that night in Bethlehem, and no matter how he preached it, it just never seemed to connect with the congregation. It was about three years later that Brooks tries again, but this time he didn't try to shape it into a sermon. Instead he just sat down and wrote the images that were still so strong in his mind. It came out as a poem; a poem that talks about the incredible gift that God gives. God gives a gift of a Savior, a Savior for the entire world. And yet it goes almost unnoticed by the very people God came to save.

And he wrote these words.

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

For Christ is born of Mary,
And gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King,
And peace to men on earth.

But it's the third verse that captures what we've been thinking about perhaps best.

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is giv'n!

He notices just how nearly unnoticed and how quietly God worked in giving us Jesus Christ. And then he reflects on how that's still true in the way God is at work in us now.

So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heav'n.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him, still
The dear Christ enters in.

Now he wrote another verse to this, but I'll stop here.

When he finished he ran over to the house of a friend to get the friend to put it to music. The friend, Lewis Redner, was the organist for the congregation and he tried to put it to music for hours, but failed. He goes to sleep, December 24th, Christmas Eve night. Now you know you think that Brooks should have at least given him another day, you know? He comes on Christmas Eve, "Put it to music!" He goes to sleep knowing he doesn't have a melody for the poem that he had received.

In the middle of the night that night he wakes up with the melody that we know going on in his mind. He writes it down and O Little Town of Bethlehem, as we know it, was complete. It became a bestseller in Philadelphia among the churches for the next six years and has now become one of the most beloved carols in the world. You find it in language after language translated.

Phillips Brooks' own life is almost like a parable of how God works in the world where there's the big headline stuff, but what God is really doing to impact the world might be hidden inside of it. Because Phillips Brooks later became Bishop of Massachusetts, and maybe we think that that's why he would become famous is because he was Bishop of Massachusetts. He later became a leader in Oxford, not Oxford, but in Harvard. Maybe that's why he's famous. Could it be because he was at an influential and large and powerful church? Or maybe we'd figure he'd become famous because he was the person who preached the funeral of the most famous president we've had.

But Phillips Brooks is most famous today because he was brokenhearted, and at the end of his spiritual reserves, when in the silence of a December evening, God spoke to him and restored his soul. And out of the power and beauty of that moment the whole world received a gift of this song, a song that wasn't composed when life was good and he seemed like he had all the answers, but when a servant of God was so beaten up by the things that the world had thrown at him that he knew he didn't have the answers.

So instead, in the quietness of that night, he received a gift that only God could give. What Brooks saw that evening in Bethlehem as he reflected on the Scriptures was that the answer for the sin of the whole world was not in the big, loud, busy news of Jesus' day. The gift was given silently as mortals slept. And ultimately what spoke to Brooks' heart, that moment when he connected with God, was not in the big, loud, busy world of the American Reconstruction after the Civil War; God gave Brooks a gift of spiritual healing and renewed faith in a moment of silence and in a moment of worship with God's people.

And so that's a warning to us. There are some things that should make us alert to the fact that our most important answers, the things we most deeply need, the things that will speak to our souls and actually meet the need that we carry around, are not likely to be found in the big, loud, noisy, busy world around us. The gift that God can give to renew and refresh our lives might come in silence.

So let's turn off the phone for a minute. Shut off the iPod. Turn off the TV. And let's make some time for those moments when God can speak to our need. We might be totally alone, we might be at something like quiche and quiet, which has designed into it a moment of silence. It might be at the service that focuses us on Christmas morning, if there's some grief in your life. There are lots of moments when we give a little space and you can take it on your own.

We all have stress in our lives. As senior pastor of this church there is stress in my life. Man, I just pray for a year that I don't have to make a big decision. It hasn't happened yet. Every year there's some new big decision. And what has kept me sane in the midst of it is working out to carve out some time to be quiet and to be with God.

Went on vacation, the first half of vacation was study leave, and that was the sweetest part because Debbie and I, every morning, we'd just separately go and we'd just study the Scripture, study good Christian books, pray, quiet, silence. And in those times God could speak and heal and give, because God is still speaking. God is still healing. God is still giving the gift of himself. It's still happening. So let's make some room to hear and to receive. And in that silence maybe we will find that we want to join Brooks in the prayer that he wrote as part of this Christmas carol.

The final verse is a prayer and we might want to join him in that prayer.

O holy Child of Bethlehem!
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Immanuel.

Let's pray: Lord, there may have been another time in our lives when we first asked you to come into our lives, to enter in. And yet even if those decisions have been made, Lord, there's so much that happens in our lives, so many things that take our energy, move our attention, things that wound us, things that shake our faith. Lord, even if we've already made a decision to follow you there come those moments repeatedly in our lives again where once again we have to say, "Come. Abide with us. Come in and cleanse and renew." And so we pray for that work in our lives right now.

And Lord, if we haven't ever invited you in at all before, Lord, you still speak, you still heal, you still cleanse, you still come to us individually by name to draw us into your family. And so Lord if this is the first time that we desire to invite you in, we pray that. Come. Enter in. Abide with us.

Lord God, we thank you that you are still powerful. Now open up our hearts and our lives that we can receive it, the incredible gift of yourself, that you're willing to give and all of the blessings that come with it. For we ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org