HOW STILL WE SEE THEE LIE
Luke 2:1-7
"O Little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie." I sing that line, as I've sung that hymn so many times when I was a kid, and I picture a quaint Thomas-Kincaid-esque village encased in one of those little plastic bubbles; you know, the kind that you shake-up in order to make it snow. It conjures in our imagination frosty-edged images of Mary and Joseph, riding on the family donkey, chatting peacefully under a starlit sky on the way to the ancient city of Bethlehem.
"How still we see thee lie." Those words seem so ironic to me tonight, because I was in Bethlehem several weeks ago, with a delegation of 14 other Presbyterians. And I can attest that Bethlehem is a place that is anything but still.
In sharing a bit of my experience with you tonight, I'm not seeking to grind a political axe, or take sides in the tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but to simply tell what we saw, to bear witness to the unstill reality that is Bethlehem today.
First of all, to get to Bethlehem, a town in the occupied West Bank, you have to go through a wall, a gate in a wall--what the Israeli government calls a separation barrier to prevent terrorism, and what the Palestinians call an "Apartheid wall." The morning we arrived in Bethlehem, we visited the famous Church of the Nativity. This church is perhaps the oldest church in continuous use in Christendom. It was built over the place that was said to be the cave where Jesus was born.
You find, if you visit that place, that one feature of the land includes many natural caves, and in biblical times people would build their houses next to those caves, and put their livestock in them. There was not such a separation between livestock and people in those--you lived with your animals; they were sort of part of the family. And in the way hospitality worked in those days, there was no Howard Johnson's in downtown Bethlehem; most people relied upon the hospitality of strangers. So Mary and Joseph probably stayed in one of the caves where people would keep their livestock, and they might have put the baby in the little stone space they would put the hay.
The Church of the Nativity is built over just such a cave. But we learned that this same church, built over the place where the Prince of Peace was born, was also the site of a 39-day siege 3 1/2 years ago--the scene of a stand off between the Israeli military, and some Palestinians who'd taken refuge in the church, which was damaged and burned.
While we were there in Bethlehem, we stayed in the homes of people who were hosting our visit. During the first night of our stay with our hosts, a young couple named Maher and Iliana, my roommate, Professor Gordon Mikoski of Princeton Theological Seminary and I settled in to watch the evening news. We watched in horror what had happened around 5:30 that same morning, less than a mile from the Church of the Nativity. An Israeli tank and a Caterpillar bulldozer descend on two four-story apartment buildings, less than a mile from the Church of the Nativity. Over the course of 35 minutes, as we watched the event unfold on the screen, the military bulldozer methodically destroyed both of those apartment buildings, one of which housed a suspected militant from Islamic Jihad who was living in a rented apartment. He was crushed in the building, apparently along with a woman and her child. We saw a young man throw a stone at the tank, and get shot.
We were dumfounded and shocked to see this--what we'd never imagined could be happening--and we wondered why it is that no one knows what is happening in Bethlehem. Why is it no one knows this is happening?
We heard many stories of such violence--including the stories of Jewish Israeli victims whose family members were killed by a suicide bombers; we heard of the violence done by Palestinians against Israeli Jews.
We were humbled...to see firsthand such a vicious cycle of violence, the kind of eye-for-an-eye blindness, to feel it and hear it in the tragic stories of those we met. We thought: what can we do, amidst these powerful, seemingly intractable forces that create such violence? It seems so naive to think we can do anything. We thought: what can we naive Presbyterians from New Jersey possibly do? What can we do to heal Bethlehem?
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie?
Bethlehem does not lie still. Not now. And not then either, despite the romantic words of the Hymn.
We can imagine that Bethlehem, the Bethlehem of Mary and Joseph, was not that different from our present day picture. It was also a land under occupation--under Roman occupation. Mary and Joseph, remember, are forced to travel that 70 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem because the Emperor, Caesar Augustus, wanted to count them for the imperial census.
The writer of Luke's gospel wants us to be sure we get this context. He insists that we see the larger geo-political context, the macroscape, that locates this event--the event of God's incarnation--in place and time.
"In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be enrolled." We should hear this also as ironic. Think about that phrase for a moment. "That all the world should be enrolled." As if Caesar is able to count "the world." As if somehow, "the world" is subject to Caesar's accounting of it. That's how Caesar understands it, and probably most of his subjects--that the world belongs to Caesar.
We all remember scene later, when someone asks if it's lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. We forget what Jesus does before he answers the question--and we miss the irony in that scene. He asks for a coin: "Whose face, and whose title." He asks what it says on the coin--we all know whose face. Do you know what it would have said? Here's what that inscription would have said: "Caesar Augustus, the son of God."
Caesar is claiming for himself "the world." And Luke is challenging us to believe and act as if we know better. That the real Son of God, love incarnate, is not Caesar, but was born in a place completely unnoticed by the empire: a cave in Bethlehem.
I want to circle back to the point I made this morning: that the one force Caesar is powerless to defend against is the power of love. And it is a power that is not arrayed on the battlefield, but within the soul of humanity.
Because you see, God longs to be born, not in some frosty-edged hallmark manger scene 2,000 years ago, but in the stony cave of the human heart.
This Christmastime, perhaps you feel some extension of that same feeling that we encountered in the violence of Bethlehem--the powerlessness one feels in the face of such monumental powers, the power of Caesar that seems on first view to be in control of "the world." For you that power might be the feeling you are stuck in your marriage. Or that power might bear the name Depression. For you perhaps you know Caesar's power by that which has enslaved you to some addiction or compulsion. Or perhaps you are just wandering in the spiritual miasma of modern life, longing for meaning and purpose.
My exhortation, my prayer for you, for me, is to do what we shall sing in a moment: "Let every heart, prepare him room." My exhortation is to prepare this year for the possibility that God might lodge in your heart. I don't care how you do that--crack open that dusty Bible on the shelf, go to the Crisis Ministry down in Trenton or Princeton, become a Big Brother, protest something morally outrageous down in Washington, go to Africa and fight aids, take a week of silent retreat at a Monastery. Do any or all of them--but prepare for the possibility that God might be born in you. Prepare him room in the trust that what might lodge there is the most powerful force in all of human history--a power that has outlasted Caesar, and every ruler and army since: the power of love. A power that came down from heaven as a little child, born in a cave, in the unstill, in the violent, in the poor and lowly city of Bethlehem, 2,000 years ago; and now, and here, in these humble human hearts.
Yet in the dark streets shineth
The everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
December 24, 2006 Jeff VamosAmen.
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