The walls of Bethlehem.
Micah 5.1-5a
Matthew 2: 1 -- 18
Preached Canberra Baptist Church, 23 December 2007

O Little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see, you lie!
Above your deep dreamless sleep
the silent stars go by.
Yet, in your dark streets shining
the everlasting light,
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in you tonight.

How often have we sung this Carol?  How often have we associated the birth of Jesus with the sleepy, peaceful town of Bethlehem?  Bethlehem slumbers beneath our romantic and dreamy associations.  A clear starry glow shines in the sky overhead as all the hopes and fears of life are wonderfully taken up in the gentle birth of Jesus.

Along with the story of Bethlehem we tell a story who of the wise men year by year, singing songs like  “We three kings of orient are”. You may have heard or read of the media stir in this week when Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested that much of our idea of the visit of the wise men to Bethlehem is actually legendary.  Rowan Williams simply points out that the Christmas picture of three Kings is largely legendary. Some people have been quite upset by the comments of Archbishop Williams and local church leaders sprung to the defence of traditional Christian faith whether or not it is anchored in an accurate reading of scripture.

Despite all attempts to protect it behind a vision of peace, or by reinforcing the cultural traditions that have grown up around it this idealized picture of Bethlehem is a romantic fiction!  It was a fiction in the time of Jesus as a simple reading of Matthew's gospel about the wise men coming to Herod will make clear.  When Herod heard the news, he was filled with fear for what all this talk of a new king meant for his own power.  He called in his soothsayers and bureaucrats and asked of them where this new king would be born.  In Bethlehem of Ephratha came the answer.  What follows is a cynical exercise of political power.  The king, claiming a desire for worship, commissioned those adoring wise men to bring him news of the child.  They, being warned in a dream, returned to their land another way and Herod unleashed on unwitting Bethlehem the slaughter of all baby boys under two years of age.  Hardly a dreamy romantic village story!

This was not the first time Bethlehem had known disaster. Matthew quotes of the Prophet Jeremiah, who spoke of the voice heard in Ramah – the voice of Rachel. The Tomb of Rachel lies close by Bethlehem. Jeremiah’s immediate context was the suffering of Israel in the Exile of the 6th C BCE but he uses the echo of an even earlier layer of grieving tradition - the voice of Rachel weeping for her children.

In this story and quotation Matthew skillfully weaves together three widely separated moments of grief in Israel’s story: the slaughter of the innocents under Herod, the suffering associated with the Exile addressed by Jeremiah, and the primal level of Israel’s patriarchal origins, in the death of the sorrowing Rachel following the birth of Benjamin the last of the 12 sons of Jacob.

Lest we think it was only in ancient days that Bethlehem knew violence and grief it was only five years ago, shortly after Easter in 2002 that the Israeli Defence Forces invaded Bethlehem with tanks and troops. For many days and the town was under curfew. The fighting lead to extensive damage in some of the churches and other buildings of the city. People were killed and at the climax of the struggle a number of militants and took refuge in the Church of the Nativity, one of Christianity’s holiest shrines.  (see Mitri Raheb, Bethlehem Besieged, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2004)

The prophecy on which Herod relied is found in Micah chapter 5, versus 1-5a.  It is the well known prediction that from Bethlehem, one of the little clans of Judah shall come forth one who is to rule in Israel – “one whose origin is from of old, from ancient days, and he shall be the one of peace”.  In one of the great ironic juxtapositions of Scripture, this verse is preceded by a fragment of another Oracle, an oracle directed to the fortunes of Israel.  It refers to Israel being walled around with a wall, to siege being laid against us (i.e. Israel). Modern-day visitors to Bethlehem are surprised to see that an 8 m high concrete wall is to be found on three sides of city.  Just what the wall is for and who is being besieged is an issue one of the great arguments of contemporary world politics! When Revd. Sion Hughes (who preached here earlier this year) visited the city in October, he found Israeli military guarding checkpoints leading to and from the city and refusing access “for reasons of security”. He was driving with Bernard and Mary Sabella who simply drove on a few kilometers, did a U-turn and entered Bethlehem by a back road.  As a former commando Sion recognized immediately that this was not a serious security operation and concluded the action of the soldiers was merely to control the civilian population.

Bethlehem is a contested space: it is walled in by the myths and expectations of so many different interests.

There are the walls of legend and accumulated meanings that stop some people hearing the story in of Bethlehem without the cultural filters of the West.

There are the walls of romanticism and the airbrushed pictures of a peaceful, kindly place that stop people from entering into the reality of Bethlehem and discovering the fullness of the gospel message.

There are the walls of modern political reality, the hard 8m nigh concrete walls that physically surround Bethlehem on three sides, an expression of the current political conflict and violence that is entrenched in the contemporary Holy Land.

As the sad illustration on the cover of our bulletin this morning shows, Bethlehem is still a place of conflict and warfare, of tears and suffering.

My purpose alluding to these things is not to enmesh us all in the morass of a modern politics.  It is simply to point out that the present context is very similar to the ancient context.  This is not incidental. In Matthew’s gospel it is vital to the story that we are told of the machinations of Herod and his court, of the violence directed towards the innocent. It is not just window-dressing but central to the telling of the story. Matthew wants to tell us that this is the environment into which the Christ-child is born. 

There is so much in our own telling of the Christmas story, which masks these terrible realities.  The vision of Bethlehem as a gentle, nostalgic and romantic birthplace does no justice to the circumstances of Jesus’ birth nor to the circumstances of our own contemporary situation in which we have to make sense of Jesus’ birth.

What is Matthew trying to tell us of the birth of Jesus Christ?  One thing is clear is that Jesus is identified very early on with those who suffer under the arbitrary and defensive use of royal power.  Far from being an innocent baby born in peace and tranquility Jesus comes into a world in which his very life is at risk from the moment of his birth.  If you read on in this chapter you see that Jesus and his parents flee into Egypt as refugees. From his earliest days, Jesus is caught up in the whirlpool and of politics and the tempest of violence and suffering. When Matthew quotes the text ‘out of Egypt I have called my son’ in reference to Jesus’ return, we hear the echo of the original prophecy of God’s call to the slaves whom he rescued from Egypt – the foundational event of Jewish history. At every turn Matthew is reinforcing associations with the God who acts to save those who are enslaved, occupied, displaced.

At the beginning of this month, a delegation of Australian church leaders visited Palestine and spent time with Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in the Holy Land seeking to understand the contemporary situation.  I had been invited to join them but  through personal issues was unable to attend.  Upon their return, they issued a statement, copies of which are available in the porch of the church if you wish to read it.  In response to this statement, criticism has been levelled by the Jewish press and last Monday the Israeli Ambassador e-mailed the leader of the delegation (the President of the Uniting Church) complaining of the lack of balance of the itinerary of the group:

We … “question the motivation and the statement … is not helpful at this volatile moment of a resumption of negotiations. Make no mistake about …. what we feel about unfair treatment and [the] attitude that is displayed against us by those who are supposed to be sensitive to this delicate issue in a particularly critical time.”

The day after the ambassador made this call for diplomacy and sensitivity at this delicate and critical time, his government assassinated 13 militants in the Gaza Strip in targeted air attacks. The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, has called for a cease-fire, a call rejected by Israeli leaders.

We will have variety of views around what is happening in Israel and Palestine.  The situation is very complex and moral and historical judgments are not easy to make. But the story of Herod and his politics, of doublespeak and deception, of violence and killing is not ancient history: it’s in the papers this week! Matthew tells us the coming of Jesus into the world is against the background of violence and political turmoil. The gospels present a deep conviction that the birth of Jesus Christ leads towards disruption and disturbance within patterns of human power.  It also leads to the resurgence of optimism and hope, to a vision that change is possible, that things can be different.  In the words of our hymn: it is both the hopes and fears of all the years that are met in Bethlehem on the night in which Christ is born.

The Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, wrote the following 2004:

"I'm not sure if it is my destiny to write books during difficult times, but writing in such a context becomes an act of non-violent resistance: resisting being silenced, resisting being a spectator, and resisting giving up. Writing under siege overcomes the siege imposed on us, and publishing while in the apartheid-like wall is being built enables me, in a sense, to transcend the wall.  I was able to write this book under such circumstances only by the grace of God.  It is a grace if one is given a word to speak in times of trouble.  It is grace if these words are not those of hate but of hope.  It certainly is grace if these words can make a difference in the lives of those hearing and reading it in the little town of Bethlehem and around the world.

“The turmoil in our country has been going on for so long that the biggest threat is for people to become indifferent -- when watching events unfold people can see, and yet not see, when hearing breaking news people can hear, and not yet hear, thus leaving hearts untouched, closed and cold."

Much as we might like to leave Bethlehem slumbering peacefully in our dreams and our gentle carols the gospel invites us to take seriously the violence that is there, our own complicity in it, and the mysterious coming of Jesus, the Prince of peace, into our lives and into our world. Christmas is ultimately not about presents and pudding, about family and feasting. It’s about the way the world is and where God takes his place in it, and those with whom God chooses to identify. Christmas challenges us more than it comforts us! As Mitri Raheb says “the biggest threat is for people to become indifferent, when watching events unfold people can see, and yet not see, when hearing breaking news people can hear, and yet not hear, thus leaving hearts untouched, closed and cold.”

May God give us eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to respond to the coming of the Christ-child!