Waiting for the Right One

Micah 5:2-5(a)

December 23, 2018

Advent 4

William G. Carter

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace. 

I dare say if it weren’t for the three Wise Men, we wouldn’t be paying any attention to this brief passage from the prophet Micah.

Micah’s book is largely in the shadows. It’s not as big as Isaiah’s book, and not nearly as poetic. It doesn’t bleed like the poignant heart of Jeremiah nor report the dramatic visions of Ezekiel. It’s a thin little scroll, kept on the shelf, mostly out of sight.

Some of the book sounds derivative. The prophet repeats what we have heard before. There will be a time of judgment followed by a season of restoration; a lot of the Biblical prophets talk that way. There’s the famous peacemaking passage from the second chapter of Isaiah (“they shall beat their swords into plowshares” and “nations shall not learn war anymore.”); Micah likes that and copies it into chapter four.

In the passage we heard today, he repeats a familiar line from Isaiah 40 (“he shall feed his flock”). He must have like that one. He also reminds us that King David, the greatest of Israel’s kings, came from Bethlehem, a small village that has never otherwise shined like the glory of Jerusalem. That's it. OK, Micah, thank you for your work. We will roll up the scroll and put it back on the shelf for another seven hundred years.

That is, until the day when the three wise men knock on the door of the palace and ask, “Where is he, who is born the king of the Jews? We have seen his star at its rising.”

You might remember the story. King Herod is curious, then threatened, then defiant. “What do you mean, you wise guys? I am the king. What are you talking about, that some new king that has been born?” These wise men may be pious, but they are vague. They have followed a new star across the desert, but the directions you can get from a star are somewhat ambiguous.

It’s then that Herod turns to the Bible scholars on his staff. You see, every king worth his salt ought to have some Bible scholars on his staff. These scholars don’t even have to thumb through the scrolls. They already know. Micah, chapter five, verse two: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” 

That verse has been sitting on the shelf, hiding into the shadows for seven hundred years, until the moment that the wise men knock on the door to ask, “Where is the king?”

The answer: in Bethlehem. And you have every reason to ask, “Why Bethlehem?”

The prophet suggests three reasons, in light of what we know about Jesus. The first is that he is born, not only in the hometown of King David, and not only as his great-great-great grandchild, but in the tradition of David. David was the great king. He was the best king anybody could remember. That was three hundred years before Micah wrote his book, a thousand years before Jesus – but people in the Middle East have really long memories.

In all those years between, there were an awful lot of kings. We can take that literally: there were a lot of kings, and they were awful. Oh, there were a couple that were OK. Solomon built the temple, but he had too many girlfriends. Josiah was a great reformer, but the kings before and after him were idiots. When you have terrible national leadership, you grow accustomed to inconsistencies, erratic behavior, and outright brutality.

After a while, you start longing for the best thing that you can remember – and it was David: strong, good looking, fully human David. He was a little rowdy, and certainly playful, but he brought people together. He was a builder. The nation flourished. So that’s the first reason for Bethlehem: we want somebody like King David.

A second reason is due to a recurring theme in the Jewish scriptures that the little guy shall rule over the big one. As you recall, David was the youngest of the eight sons of Jesse. He was the littlest, and he became the king. That’s like Joseph, the young son of Jacob, who dreamed of his older brothers bowing down before him. Or Jacob himself, the younger of the twins, who swindled his older brother Esau out of the family blessing.

That’s a theme that comes up over and over in the Bible. It was how Israel the nation began to understand itself in the world: we are the little guys, we are small but we are mighty. God doesn’t always pick the big guys, the loud ones, the arrogant ones, the pushy and obnoxious ones. God says, “O you, Bethlehem, one of the little clans of Judah.” The inference was that the Messiah would come from a little town, a town with a great memory but not much of a future. So there’s that, too.

And third, Micah is looking forward to Jesus himself. He will not be flashy, but hidden in the hills, living among the peasants. He will be the king, but he is certainly not born in a palace. He will tend the flock with special attention to the weakest and the most broken – and Jesus was known as a healer. And when Jesus speaks, he will turn the world’s values upside down: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek.” Not the mighty, but the meek.

The key to understanding the authority of the Messiah is his gentleness. That is why he is so misunderstood. When the Messiah rules, he will not stand on tiptoe, bearing down and further oppressing the people. No, he will stand on the soles of his feet, as a shepherd among the flock. This is what Micah can see.

As the Bible scholars will later point out, this brief poem from the prophet is a lampoon on every misdirected human ambition. The prophet is poking fun at Jerusalem, the Golden City, which had gotten to be quite tarnished. He’s joking about Assyria, the dominating world empire of his own day. God’s new king is to be born in a humble little town. This king will be a shepherd like David, but he will be surprisingly free from imperial ambition. He will rule over his people, but he will not exploit them or make them afraid. His scepter shall be his compassion.

This is still difficult for so many people to understand. The three wise men did not know it, could not know it, apart from the revelation from the prophet Micah. King Herod didn’t get, either, ruling in obnoxiousness stoked by his own paranoia. Even the Bible scholars on the king’s staff couldn’t imagine what this would ever look like. They had the text in Micah’s old scroll, but they had lived through centuries of nothing actually happening.

And then Jesus is born. Those who saw him, who heard him, who loved him, could recognize that he was the one that they had been waiting for. Is there anybody here still looking for him? For as you know, what matters is not merely Bethlehem, but who is born there?

In the year 1865, the greatest preacher of Philadelphia took a year off. He was thirty years old and needed a break. His name was Phillips Brooks. He was six feet, six inches tall, and his reputation even taller. He had recently preached a sermon at Harvard University at the end of the Civil War that so good it was printed and distributed around the nation. But he was worn out, so he took a breather.

That December, he found himself on horseback in the Holy Land. On Christmas Eve, he rode across the hills from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, past the fields where the shepherds heard the angels announcing the birth of the Savior. As the village opened up into view, he stopped his horse and took in the scene. It was quiet, it was peaceful, in sharp contrast to the four violent years of Civil War that had concluded back home. The spiritual moment was seared in his heart forever.

Three years later, back in Philadelphia, Christmas was coming. The memory of that night in Bethlehem was still as clear as a bell. So, for the children of his Sunday School, he wrote five stanzas of verse. Then he gave the poem to his church organist, Louis Redner, who quickly imagined a fitting melody, completely harmonized. The result was the Christmas carol that we will sing in a few minutes. I think you know it:

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.

As I said, there are five stanzas, although only four make it into our hymnals. I think it’s the forgotten stanza, the one left out, that may be the most poignant. Let me give it to you:

Where children pure and happy pray to the blessed child,

Where misery cries out to thee, son of the mother mild;

Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door,

The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.

That’s what we want. For Christmas to come again, for the Messiah to come among us, for Christ to be “born in us today.” It’s the kind of Christmas that the prophet Micah dreamed: “He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.”

This is the promise for you and for me, which by faith we find completed in the birth of Jesus.

No ear can hear his coming; but in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.

I pray that you have a blessed Christmas.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.