Advent Anticipation: Unexpected Hope

Micah 5:2-5a

Georgetown Presbyterian Church

Rev. Stephen H. Wilkins

December 24, 2006 (Sunday morning service)

When I look at my Bible, I notice that these verses in Micah are less than twenty pages away from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Less than twenty pages stand in between the promise and the fulfillment of the promise. Yet the truth is, Micah lived 700 years before the birth of Christ. 700 years is a long time to wait for God to fulfill his promise. We have a hard time waiting ten minutes in the drive-through line at Wendy’s; can you imagine what it must be like for a people to wait 700 years for a promise to be kept?

What does it say about God, that he would take 700 years to fulfill his promise? It all depends on your perspective. From the perspective of human beings who gauge time according to the rising and setting of the sun and the orbit of the earth, it seems like God is dragging his feet. But from the perspective of eternity, perhaps 700 years is not so long for God to act upon his promises. After all, the psalmist reminds us, "A thousand years in [God’s] sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night." When you look at it from that perspective, God fulfilled his promise in less than a day!

But what it really tells me is that while we may be tempted to give up, while we may be tempted to forget about promises that seemingly go unfulfilled, the stories of the Bible remind us that God never forgets, God never gives up. That is what we proclaim at Advent and Christmas: God is faithful, and God’s love for you and me and for the world never fails, and there is nothing--not even seven centuries of time--that will ever prevent God from working out his plan for the salvation of the world.

700 years before the birth of the Messiah, the prophet Micah proclaimed to the people of Judah the words of hope: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the rulers of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel..." And since Matthew tells us that the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem fulfills this prophecy, it is easy for the Christian to assume that there is no more reason to dwell on this text, for what it says has already come to pass.

But the truth be told, the prophecy is about more than predicting something that has now come to pass. Just because Jesus was born in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago is not to say that this text from Micah has no meaning for us today. It is about more than prediction. It is a text that reminds us that God offers us hope when we are being besieged by life’s struggles, and God gives us grace as an answer to the judgment that is upon us. And it is a text that reminds us that the hope and grace that God gives to us come in ways that we ordinarily would not expect.

Micah was written at a time when Israel was under attack by foreign armies. Micah was a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah, and so he witnessed with Isaiah the siege which the Assyrian army laid around Jerusalem. Israel and Judah were troubled kingdoms, trouble largely brought on themselves by their apostate ways. And while it is the role of the prophet to condemn ungodly practices and call the leaders to account for leading the people astray, the word of judgment is rarely the last word proclaimed from the lips of the prophets. For God does not stop with the pronouncement of judgment; rather, the word of judgment is followed by a word of grace, a word of hope.

Take a look at what Micah says in the verse that immediately precedes this morning’s reading: "Marshal your troops, O city of troops, for a siege is laid against us. They will strike Israel’s ruler on the cheek with a rod." A word of judgment. Followed by a word of hope: "But you, Bethlehem... Out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel... He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord... [and] his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth."

A word of judgment, followed by a word of hope. That, my friends, is the basic rhythm of Advent and Christmas, isn’t it? For the truth is Christmas is not just a warm and fuzzy expression of God’s love for us. Christmas is serious business, for it is God’s answer to a world under the judgment of sin and death. We have Christmas because ours is a world in desperate need of a Savior. Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world where war and terror are daily realities? Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world where teenage pregnancies out of wedlock are so common that we don’t even blink an eye. Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world where diagnoses of cancer, and Alzheimer’s, and heart disease, and diabetes, and so many other diseases occur with such great frequency to people we know that we have become numb to their severity? Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world that still treats people differently according to the color of their skin or the size of their bank account? Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world where you can communicate with someone halfway around the world, but not even know the name of your neighbor? Don’t you think we need to be saved from a world that cries out, "Me, Me, Me", at the expense of everyone else?

Christmas is serious business. We are a world that stands under judgment.

And God meets our judgment with words of hope, words of promise, words of grace.

And the hope that God gives comes to us in unexpected ways. The hope that God gives comes to us from unexpected origins; it comes to us in an unexpected king; and the hope comes to us in an unexpected size.

The hope that God gives comes to us from unexpected origins. Take Bethlehem, for example. In the 21^st century, we have these idyllic visions of the Bethlehem where Jesus was born--a quiet little hamlet on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Clean streets, nice people, a little barn somewhere that could house Mary and Joseph and the little baby, almost warm and inviting.

But the truth is, Bethlehem wasn’t much of anything. It was big enough to serve as a sort of county seat, since people had to go there to be recorded in the census. It was never considered to be a significant city. It was little more than an afterthought on the way to Jerusalem.

Yet God chose Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Savior of the world! The word of hope that God proclaims to a people under siege and under judgment is that salvation will come from the most unlikely of places! But isn’t that just like God, to choose the lowly and humble as the instruments by which God achieves his purposes?

And the king that Micah describes is not the kind of king that one would expect to deliver a people under siege by enemy armies. For the king to come out of Bethlehem will not be a mighty warrior, but a shepherd. Who would’ve thought it would be that way? We live in a world where people think that the best way to peace is by being stronger and more powerful than the next person. Ours is a world where people think that peace can best be achieved through violence and aggression. The best hope for peace in our world is to have the most weapons and the biggest army.

But that is not the kind of hope that God gives to us. The hope that God gives to us comes not in the form of a mighty warrior leading his troops into battle, but in the form of a gentle shepherd leading his flock. Instead of an image of warfare and violence, God provides us with an image of care. Evil will be overcome, says God, not by equivalent acts of violence, but by good. Instead of rallying the troops on the battlefield, our Savior-King will lead us along the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake, and through the valley of the shadow of death, where we will fear no evil, for our Shepherd will be with us, comforting us, saving us.

And finally, the hope that God offers to us comes in an unexpected size, for it is much larger than we ever imagined. The hope that is declared in Micah is bigger than the deliverance of Israel, for God declares that the Savior’s "greatness will reach to the ends of the earth." The people of Israel weren’t looking for a king who would rule over the whole world; they simply wanted a king who would deliver them from their immediate captivity and protect them from enemies. Instead, God gives them a king who will not be for them only, but for the whole world.

Do you see what this means? The salvation which we proclaim at Christmas involves more than you and me and our own little spheres of influence. The hope that God gives to us is bigger than we are capable of imagining, and it includes people that we would never consider. The Savior whose birth we will celebrate in less than 24 hours is the Savior of the world!

My friends, God comes to us and acts among us in mysterious ways. If there’s anything that I’ve been reminded during this Advent season, it is that God’s ways are not our ways. I don’t know what God’s going to do next. But I do know enough about our God to know that his way is just, and his way is wise, and his way is love.

May God bless you beyond your wildest expectations.

Amen. And Merry Christmas.