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Here’s a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent by my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones.

Luther Memorial Church, Des Moines, Iowa

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father

and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today’s gospel reading alludes to something we rarely think about when we hear the Christmas story from Luke on Christmas Eve. When Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem because of the Roman empire’s tax laws, it was likely not the first time she’d laid eyes on the little town that the carol says lay so sweetly among the hills above the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Luke tells us today that this young woman, engaged but pregnant, went to visit her older relative Elizabeth in the hill country. Like the Hill Country of Texas south and west of Austin and my home territory of the Black Hills out in South Dakota and our own Loess Hills here in Iowa, the Judean hill country is a distinct geographical and geological territory. If you said you were going to the Hills, I’d guess people back then knew what you were talking about, even up north in Nazareth in Galilee at the source of the Jordan River.

But when Luke points out the Judean hill country and the town of Bethlehem later this week on Christmas Eve, he’s got more in mind than simply giving us an arrow on a map with the words “you are here” next to it.

In his account of Jesus’ birth in the very next chapter of his gospel, Luke lists the names of the rulers in place when Jesus was born: the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus and Quirinius who was the governor of Syria. Luke did the same thing two Sundays ago when he gave an even longer list of rulers in his story of John the Baptist as a precursor to Jesus. Most of us don’t know anything about Quirinius or about Lysanias the ruler of Abilene (that’s in Syria not in Texas). So those names stand out.

But because we’ve heard about Bethlehem every Christmas and sung carols about it and had kids act out the story in church pageants, we skim over the fact that Bethlehem has significance. Bethlehem isn’t a random location. In fact, the entire history of God’s chosen people, the Israelites, led both to that little town and to Mary’s womb, because Mary is the embodiment of everything that God had been doing in the world throughout history and that culminates in that place.

In our Old Testament reading today, the prophet Micah tells the Israelites that a coming king will arrive to judge and redeem God’s people who had become corrupt to their bones and faithless in their hearts. The situation was nearly hopeless.

Israel’s kings had no fealty to God. Men were marrying pagan Canaanite women and raising families who didn’t know the Lord. The temple’s priests accepted bribes. And the people’s offerings were literally lame: sickly lambs, blemished calves, and paltry coins in the coffer. God was serious about the creation he’d made and the people he’d chosen with his blessing, and neither the seriousness nor the blessing were offered back to him. In the next chapter Micah announces exactly what God’s vision for our lives looks like: “He has shown you, O people, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Jesus’ identity is wrapped up in this kind of barren, faithless world because he’s tied into it through his family line. And that family became identified with Bethlehem hundreds of years before when his many-times-great grandmother traveled to the valley of Ephratha, to Bethlehem, when she herself had been pregnant.

Rachel was the beloved wife of Jacob, the scoundrel grandson of Abraham who’d cheated his brother Esau out of his inheritance and father’s blessing. Rachel was the second and more beautiful of Jacob’s two wives.

The whole convoluted family system is as tangled as Israel’s history. Rachel’s older homely sister Leah bears four sons (Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah). But Rachel can’t get pregnant, so she gives Jacob her servant as a kind of surrogate, and Bilhah has two sons (Dan and Naphtali). Leah does the same thing with her servant Zilpah who has Gad and Asher. Then Leah gives birth to Issachar and Zebulon. Finally Rachel conceives and Jacob’s favorite son is born. That’s Joseph of the famous technicolor dreamcoat whom the others would sell into slavery.

But it’s the last of the twelve sons in this crazy dysfunctional family, Benjamin, who’s most important today. Benjamin is born in Bethlehem because Rachel traveled to the hill country when, like Mary, she was far along in her pregnancy. While she was in Ephratha, as Luke would later describe Jesus’ birth, it came time for her to be delivered. That birth formed a matched set of bookends with the Bethlehem of the Christmas story. The tragedy is that Rachel died in childbirth and was buried in an unknown place somewhere in the hill country. Bethlehem became a kind of holy family site for the generations that followed. My family has a similar holy gravesite in the Black Hills in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota, not far from the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Ida Cale’s grave marker was probably carved by my great grandfather James Cale, a stone mason, when she died after giving birth to my grandpa Buster. In November 1906, James and Ida had already had two little boys and lost a third. The new baby was given away to a childless couple, Art and Betty Jones, to raise, and that’s why I’m a Jones not a Cale.

Several years ago while home for a high school reunion, Mary and I made a pilgrimage to that cemetery, and it felt like holy ground. Just like visiting the shack my mom’s family left behind outside Berlin when they escaped East Germany’s secret police, the grave in Deadwood grounded me: “ Aha! This is where my story starts. I have roots. I’m not a random occurrence.” I had a bookend.

When we encounter the hill country of Judea when Mary visits Elizabeth and when we arrive there with Mary and Joseph for the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria, we need to have that sense of bookends in mind. Something begun way before our own memory has gestated and is now coming to fruition. What God intended by choosing a whacko family to bear witness to his faithfulness and reliability has come full-term. Both Mary and Bethlehem are fully-loaded and ready to deliver the deliverer, to raise up the lowly and make the rough places plain. It’s in the hill country that the one who will straighten out the whole convoluted tangle of Israel’s history and human sin and once and for all make it make sense again. In some way, we can say that Mary is the embodiment of that history. She’s the human counterpart of Bethlehem as the vessel through which God’s promises appear.

That could wind up being mere ancient history I’m spinning out for you or a lurid family soap opera, but for one thing: that ancient story is the womb of your salvation. The time has come for you to be delivered, and one other will die in your birth. The fulfiller of Bethlehem’s promise and the child born in Ephratha’s hill country will die on a hill in that same country to give birth to your deliverance. Jesus, born in Bethlehem and dead and resurrected a few miles away in Jerusalem, has come to tie you eternally to the God who continues to make promises.

In the Judean hill country you have a place where you can find not only your roots but also your future. The babe at whose presence Elizabeth’s child leapt, at whose birth the angels sang, and at whose crucifixion the distant cousins in that convoluted set of descendants of Jacob mocked and jeered, is also the one the angel in the tomb announced was risen. Born, died, and resurrected, Jesus of Nazareth and of Bethlehem is for you.

When we sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” we sing these words: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Bethlehem exists wherever your own hopes and fears take place, wherever your family makes you shrug your shoulders, whenever the world has no welcome for you, and in those times when you think it can’t get much worse than this. In the lowly Bethlehem that is your life, God wants to take up residence. The hill country of gravestones and desperate situations is the exact place God likes to show up. In fact, he’s doing it again today when he gives himself to you in the Lord’s Supper so you can swallow him and bear him, like Mary, in your own body in the coming week. It might seem like above your deep and dreamless sleep only the silent stars give witness to your need. But in the hill country an undying light has been shining undimmed for you in order to make you into someone who can do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. He meets you today in your town, on your street, in your life, and promises to set down roots there and never, ever, leave. You can count on it. Amen.

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