Sunday, December 22, 2024, Fourth Sunday in Advent
Christmas Hymn Service
“Though You Are Small”
Psalm 115:9-15; Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45
Hymns: #379 “O Come, All Ye Faithful”; #368 “Angels We Have Heard On High”; #374 “Gentle Mary Laid Her Child”; #380 “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”; #361 “O Little Town of Bethlehem”; #364 “Away In a Manger”; #370 “What Child Is This”; #387 “Joy to the World, the Lord Is Come”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen
BIG things are popular in this world we live in. BIG houses, BIG cars, BIG trucks, BIG SUV’s; the bigger the better, right? BIG companies and mega-corporations. BIG pharma. BIG auto. BIG industry. BIG projects and BIG ideas. BIG government programs, that come with really BIG budgets (and really BIG taxes to pay for them.) BIG churches. BIG money, BIG offers, BIG promises. The BIG-shots and BIG dealers and BIG power brokers run the show down here.
Our God is different, though. Oh, He’s a BIG God – the biggest, in fact; mighty in power and great in glory, a God who fills the whole universe. (Can’t get any bigger than that!) But God’s heart seems very much to be focused on the smaller things. Weak and powerless people. “Poor in spirit” people. Little children. Our God, big as He is, has a really BIG heart. In fact, if you read through God’s Word, the ones He seems to love most of all are those who are weak and powerless and small. And the one thing God seems to hate most of all is when those who are BIG and powerful and strong, use their power and strength and BIG-ness to abuse or take advantage of His little ones. Above all things, God hates a bully.
We had that reading from prophet Micah this morning; and what happens in Micah is a pretty good illustration of the point. In the Book of Micah, God had been taking the rulers and leaders of Israel and Judah to task for being, well, bullies. Their leaders and priests and prophets had been taking advantage of the people they were supposed to be leading, taking advantage of their high and BIG positions to cheat the poor people and make themselves rich, operating on a system of graft and payoffs, and dispensing “justice” to those who could pay for it. God really hates that!
How much does God hate it? Micah says, to those people who have gotten too BIG for themselves, that God is about to punish them for what they’ve done. How? By sending them a bigger bully! The BIG, bad king of Babylon is coming, Micah says. Babylon, at the time, was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Large and evil. BIG horses. BIG chariots. BIG armies. Too BIG and strong for Israel to resist. They were going to come and put all Judah’s leaders in chains, and take all God’s children into exile, and leave Jerusalem in a heap of ruins.
But even in the middle of all that; even in the middle of that really BIG disaster, God still had His eye on His little ones, on the poor people, on the ones who suffer most when the whole world falls to pieces. In the middle of it all, God makes this BIG promise: "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." This is one of the clearest places in God’s Word where He promises to send us a Savior, and it’s really quite specific.
Micah was written some 700 years before the birth of Christ, yet Micah names the exact place where the Savior will be born. The “little town of Bethlehem” was located in what was called the region of Ephrathah, just a few miles away from Jerusalem. (The name Bethlehem, or “Beit-Lechem”, means “city of bread.” So the One who’d be called the Bread of Life was born in the City of Bread!) Bethlehem was also known as the City of David, being the place where King David had been born so many years before.
All this is important, especially in the Christmas story, because of the way Mary and Joseph came to be in Bethlehem when their child was born. The BIG people in the world – the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus, to be specific – had ordered a census to be taken in all his BIG empire, for the purpose of collecting more BIG taxes. And his decree required all the people of his kingdom, no matter how little or poor they were, to register themselves at the place of their ancestral birth. Never mind the inconvenience, or the circumstances going on in your life, or how far you had to travel; I doubt the Emperor gave much thought to how his order would affect the little people. The BIG guy in Rome said you had to go, and he had the law and the soldiers on his side to enforce his decree, so you had to go.
So Joseph and Mary, instead of being comfortably at home in Galilee for the birth of their Son, had to hit the road. Mary was “great with child,” yet they were compelled to travel ninety miles on foot to be where the Emperor said they had to be, when he said they had to be there. And when they got there, they found the inns all crowded with fellow travelers, because of the Emperor’s decree. And since a noisy and crowded inn isn’t the best of places to have a baby, they settled for a place in the quiet corner of a stable instead.
Do you see what God did there? God used BIG old Emperor Augustus to fulfill a prophecy that had been made hundreds of years before – and the Emperor had no idea what he’d done. And God used little people, poor people, inconsequential people – a Galilean peasant carpenter named Joseph, and his bride, a young girl not even out of her teens – to bring His Son into the world, in exactly the place He always said He’d be born.
Our Gospel reading this morning is another beautiful illustration about how God makes BIG things happen using little people. Here, Mary has been “found to be with child by the Holy Spirit,” God having used a very small and humble person to accomplish His purposes. Joseph, wisely, has sent his new bride to visit her Aunt Elizabeth, before she begins to show, to protect her from nosy town folk and prying eyes and people that like to talk.
Elizabeth is another small person in the Christmas story, a person who’d been sad and poor in spirit. She and her husband, a priest named Zachariah, were childless, and they were getting old. Elizabeth was barren, unable to have children; and all her neighbors would have seen that as a sign that God had cursed her for some unnamed sin. Unfair, and untrue, but people are the way they are.
Then God chose barren Elizabeth to be the mother of John the Baptist, who’d be a really BIG man one day; and Elizabeth was happily and joyfully “with child” with him, when Mary walked in. You talk about God working through little things? Elizabeth was only five months along in her pregnancy. Little John was half-formed, tiny, small enough you could have held him in your hand. And Jesus, inside Mary, was tinier still. Yet John leaped for joy inside his mother at the presence of his Savior. So here’s preborn John praising God while still swimming in amniotic fluid; praising the Savior of the world inside Mary, who’s still the size of a walnut. “From the lips of infants and children You have ordained praise,” the Psalm says.
Ah, and what can a BIG God do with little things? What can God create, what can He bring about, from things that appear to us to be weak and insignificant and small? Micah says that child born in Bethlehem “will stand and shepherd His flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord His God… and His greatness will reach to the ends of the earth… and He will be our peace.”
John the Baptist grew up to be a great man, the greatest of all the prophets. Jesus called him the greatest man who ever lived. Yet when Jesus began to preach, John didn’t hesitate to point to Him and say, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” And then John stepped out of the spotlight and said, “He must become greater, and I must become less.”
When Jesus came into the world, He came in great humility; no house, no home, no place to lay His head. Oh, He was still BIG, make no mistake about that. He was always the Son of God, powerful in words, and powerful in signs and wonders and miracles. “Power went out from Him,” and He was able to heal everyone who came to Him looking for help, in mind, body, heart, or soul. He could have demanded, and rightfully so, all the wealth and glory and honor this world has to offer; but that He didn’t do. He was BIG, but He chose for our sakes to be small. “He made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant,” St. Paul says.
Our reading from Hebrews says: “When Christ came into the world, He said (to His Father): "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body You prepared for Me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings You were not pleased. Then I said, 'Here I Am -- it is written about Me in the scroll -- I have come to do Your will, O God.'" When God sent His Son into the world, He didn’t set Him up on a high throne, and demand that people bring Him gifts and sacrifices and offerings – although that’s what He rightly deserved. Instead, God gave Him a very human body, a body that could be hungry and thirsty and tired, a body that could be hurt and feel pain. Like Father Abraham once did for his son Isaac, God the Father prepared the body of His Son to be sacrificed. Jesus was born not to be BIG, but to be weak and humbled and helpless, first in a manger, and then on a cross.
And Jesus willingly accepted the assignment. He could have refused. He could have said no. But instead He said, “Not My will, Father, but Yours be done.” God’s will, as St. Paul tells us, is that “all men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.” It’s all men, all people, all of us, that God in His mercy wants to save. All people, the little ones and the BIG ones, too. God in His mercy loved us all so much that He sent His only Son to die for our sins. And Jesus, “for the joy set before Him, became obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
“And by that will,” our reading in Hebrews says – by the will of a loving Father to save sinners like us, and by the willingness of Jesus to die for our sakes – “we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Once we were the smallest and weakest of sinners; now that we’ve been forgiven, we’re holy, and BIG as BIG can be in God’s grace.
The world around us will go on reaching for BIG things, thinking the bigger they are, the happier they’ll be. That’s the way the world is. You can have good things, too, don’t get me wrong; enjoy all the blessings, BIG and small, that God gives you, and thank Him for them. But do keep in mind that it’s the little things God values most of all. One of the holiest things on earth is a children’s choir. Some of the holiest places I’ve been to on earth are hospitals and nursing homes - the places where God is most likely to be found. Who did Jesus spend His time with while He was on the earth? With the tax collectors and the sinners, with the deaf and the blind and the lepers. “I haven’t come to call the wealthy, but the sick,” Jesus said. Why did Jesus call really ordinary men – fishermen, of all people - to be His disciples? Why does He call you and me?
I pray that we’ll be a Church and a people that know the value of things that are small. I pray we’ll notice the little people, the poor souls, that the rest of this BIG world tends to undervalue and overlook and pass by. I pray that we’ll carry out God’s will for us in little acts of kindness, and in little words spoken in an ear, and in the mercy we show to the least of God’s children. Though we are small, that will make us all BIG where it matters the most. In Jesus’ name; Amen.