Christmas is about so much more than the birth of Jesus long ago. It’s about where we will find God today. And where we’ll find God today may be quite surprising to many religious people. God is so much closer than we think. Here’s a sermon based on Micah 5.2-5a and 1 John 4.7-12. Offered for the Fourth week of Advent, 2021

“But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,” says the prophet Micah, “you, 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 of days.”

The prophet says that Bethlehem is the place where God planned to do something new, something good, something helpful and healing for all people.

The prophecy is epic, world-changing. The prophecy is meant to stir the noblest imaginations, the most daring acts of hopefulness.

But what is the point of Bethlehem, that small, backwater village, hidden in the hill country of the ancient Middle East? What is its relevance for our lives today?

I was in Ace Hardware a week ago when it was raining buckets and blowing something fierce. I was looking for something when I overheard Moriah Carey singing, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” There, among the tall shelves and narrow corridors, full of pipe fittings and light bulbs, paint cans and toilet plungers, I heard the words, “yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.” I was hoping to find a pair of tall wooden stakes to drive into the soil around the new Ginkgo tree I’d just planted in my front yard. I was hoping to find tree stakes for the little tree because I was afraid the winds would knock it over. I found the pair of stakes, hidden behind fresh cut Christmas trees in the corner of the garden center. As I pulled them out of the pile Moriah Carey sang, “the hopes and fears of all the years, are met in thee tonight.

There was something terribly banal about those words, there, in the midst of Ace Hardware. But I laughed to myself about the synchronicity between the song and my need and how the song fit the moment even if it seemed so terribly trite, anything but sacred.

And now that I think of it, there’s a connection between the banality of Moriah Carey singing to me of Bethlehem at the hardware store, and the Christmas story itself.

The word “banal” comes to us from the feudal system of medieval Europe. It referred to compulsory military service. Then, the word came to be used for things that are common to everyone. For us today, it’s come to mean something so common it’s boring.

Hearing Moriah Carey in the hardware store is a perfect definition of something that is banal—the message of the cosmic Christ-event made so common that the gospel of Christmas descends to such familiarity that it’s nearly lost all meaning, degraded to the function of a Christmas advertising jingle.

And yet, banality may be the very point of Christmas—that symbol that declares that God is for everyone, everywhere, appearing in such ordinariness that God’s appearance could be missed. In truth, Christmas actually happens in the most banal, common, ordinary experiences of our lives. God shows up, God whispers to us, God moves in the depths of our being when we’re doing things like looking for stuff at the store, paying bills, pumping gas, cleaning the bathroom, changing diapers.

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

Bethlehem is a metaphor for the gospel truth that God meets us in the places and moments of our lives when we least expect to find God.

And that, I think, is, to a large extent, what the symbol of Bethlehem means for us today.

But there’s more.

Bethlehem was a little farming village, perched on the arm of a long Judean ridge about 2500 feet above the Mediterranean sea. Surrounded by fields for growing food and grazing livestock, Bethlehem was only a handful of miles from the bigger city of Jerusalem. But it was definitely rural, a place for the most common sort of people. You could say it was a dull place, boring, banal; a place you could easily ignore if you were looking for action. If you were a teenager, it was the kind of place you wanted to leave and only come home to for the holidays and to do your laundry.

Except you can’t ignore it because it was also a town where something important had once happened. 2800 years ago, a shepherd boy named David had been anointed King of Israel by the cranky Jewish prophet Samuel, much to the consternation of King Saul who ruled in Jerusalem. Samuel’s declaration of a new, boy-king, right under the nose of the old king, was an act of treachery, a gesture of political subversion. But Samuel, God’s prophet, did it in God’s name; Samuel anointed a grungy shepherd boy from Bethlehem because it was in full accord with the way God tends to choose the lowly and obscure, the way God tends to honor the ordinary, the way God has a habit of sanctifying the most common, the most banal things and places and people.

Later, King David, once a shepherd boy, became a legend. For a lot of reasons. But the most important reason for the story of Christmas is that this shepherd-king became the ultimate model of kingly rule, an expression of servant leadership rarely ever seen again. A king, according to this tradition, was to be first and foremost a shepherd. Those who were given the power to lead people were never to dominate them; they were to guide them, care for them, and protect them, even lay down their lives in love for them—like a shepherd with a flock of sheep.

Some two hundred years after the reign of King David of Israel, and after one tyrant-king after another, who were more like wolves among the sheep than shepherds for them, the prophet Micah spoke on behalf God who saw the languishing of the people and promised another king who would come not only from the same village as David, but who would be like David, a king who knew what it meant to shepherd people with compassion, generosity, and solidarity, not above the people, but among the people. Common, like they were.

“And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord.

And they shall live secure, for he shall be the One of peace.”

That’s what Moriah Carey was singing about when I was looking for tree stakes at Ace Hardware. Like most of us, she probably didn’t know that she was echoing the ancient prophetic promise of a political system that works for the common person, not just millionaires and billionaires—a prophetic promise we need today at a time when hackneyed populist movements, driven by scarcity, suspicion, and scapegoating, and manipulated by autocratic racketeers, are ascending and new tyrannies are emerging.

But Moriah Carey was doing more than echoing that ancient promise. In the middle of the banality of the hardware store where common people like me were trying to find ordinary things to help them live their lives, she was proclaiming that in Christmas, the prophetic promise so long in coming, had found a new expression.

In the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem we have the symbol of a new light shining—a light of hope for the common person, the promise that God moves not only in a single shepherd-like ruler who will “stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,” but that God also imparts a holy power to a people, a society, willing to embody the divine gift of Christmas.

Our second reading is a witness to that power; it’s a witness to the power revealed and released through the Christmas symbol of the incarnation of God in Jesus, born of Mary, born in Bethlehem. The reading is a witness that all of these things—Jesus, Mary, Bethlehem—are symbols of the holy ordinariness, the sacred commonness, the beatific banality where love is always born.

Where love is born, lives change. When love is born, the world tilts—away from tyranny, away from terror, away from exclusivism, away from injustice.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

Here, in my mind, is one of the high-water marks of the Bible—its most democratic, most egalitarian, most commonplace vision of the unity of all humanity: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Scripture doesn’t say, “Only Christians or white people or black people or brown people who love are born of God and know God.” It doesn’t say, “Only Americans or Republicans or Democrats know God.” The scripture says, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

And then to show us what this love is like, the writer says, “God sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

In ancient sacrificial religions people made sacrifices to God through a priest. People gave from their resources—whether grain from the harvest or a lamb from the flock—to express their love and devotion to God.

But in the event of Christ’s Incarnation, the gift of love doesn’t move from humanity toward divinity, it moves from divinity toward humanity. And that is a revolutionary inversion of the ancient religious system.

That day in Ace Hardware, I not only heard Moriah Carey sing, “The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight,” but also that “God imparts to human hearts / The blessings of his heaven.”

Ordinary, common human hearts are the Bethlehem where the love of God is born. And when love is born in us, when love moves through us, everything can change.

A woman died on Wednesday who believed passionately in all this. She lived this truth. She taught this truth.

bell hooks was an influential cultural critic and feminist theorist, celebrated as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. She taught at Yale and Oberlin College and was the author of more than 17 books, including her great critical trilogy about the way loving one another could heal our land—three acclaimed books: All About Love; Salvation; and Communion.

She preferred to spell her name with no capital letters in order to emphasize the commonness of her shared humanity with all others.

She was passionate and unswerving in her belief in the power of love moving among ordinary people to change our experience of being human, to transform our way of being in the world, and to rescue us from all that wounds and divides and threatens to destroy us.

I’m bringing her into worship today because in this week of her death, it’s right to honor and celebrate the vision of this woman of color who saw the way to heal and transform our humanity. But I also bring her in because she was a fierce and charismatic advocate for the power of the divine gift of Christmas and the way it symbolizes the way God imparts to human hearts the power to transform our world.

“Love is profoundly political,” she wrote in her book, Salvation. “Revolution will come when we understand this truth.”

Elsewhere she wrote: “I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this ‘In order to love you, I must make you something else.”

No, “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”

Again she writes: “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain.”

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”

Look, I realize that to talk of love in this world of disease and disaster, distrust and discord, can sound to some as escapist or irrelevant in the face of such massive problems; to others it just sounds dull, boring, banal.

But Christmas shows us that the extreme ordinariness, the basest banality of our daily lives, is where we do the real work of transformation—ours and our civilization’s. The divine gift that makes transformation possible comes to us in the most ordinary faces and places, and if we don’t unwrap it there we won’t find it anywhere.

So let us love. Let us love here and now. For “no one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us” and loves the world toward wholeness through us.