O Little Town of Bethlehem

Friday, December 6, 2013
"O Little Town of Bethlehem"

The first and third verse of this hymn have my heart today.

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.

I like the idea of a town - perhaps as a stand-in for our whole world - as a whole doing anything, but sleeping without a dream seems heartbreakingly appropriate for our world.  We drift along, the stars and all the wonders of the universe passing silently by us as we drudge along in something of a stupor.

But it is to us that God Himself came.

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Sometimes, when preachers rattle their sabers and whip us up into a fervor, we can forget that the battle has already been won.  That's probably half of what goes wrong in Christianity today -- acting like we're on the frontlines when we're the mop-up crew.  We're the victors, sweeping up the spoils.  It probably doesn't feel like victory to a mop-up crew either.  They see the devastation, the price of war.  So do we.  But it is victory, if we believe.

Jesus won the battle one dreamy night in Bethlehem, a middle-of-nowhere hamlet lost in the vast reaches of the Roman Empire over 2,000 years ago.  That is where the Eternal Light, the Hope and Joy and Victory of God touched down.

Everything else is just fallout.  God Himself became man.  Matter.  Atoms and substance and all the weird gooey stuff that makes up our bodies.  The infinite made finite.  I've tried before to say it in a way that captures it but...words don't go there.

The third verse is a lovely, if wildly inadequate, attempt to articulate that gift:

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still
The dear Christ enters in.

He is still all around us.  He won the victory.

What looks like a battle is just the aftermath of one.