Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Christmas Eve 2011

It began earlier this year in lower Manhattan’s Zucotti Park—a protest movement that seemed to be going nowhere in mid-September.  But, the relentless protestors continued and their numbers grew steadily, occupying other cities across America.  The protest was interpreted to be about the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the “99% versus the other 1%.”  The Occupy Movement kept picking up steam as the autumn wore on and ultimately came to our own fair city, Little Rock, Arkansas where it still resides as an encampment just off I30 near Capitol Avenue, just blocks away from some of the city’s priciest residential high-rises. Dozens of people, living in tents instead of  the modern “comforts” of home they may had become accustomed to, in order to make a protest statement about society, the economy, the values system, the polarizing spirit that tears communities apart.

But much earlier, somewhere in the portals of heaven, God grew tired and weary of humanity’s pain, suffering, hatred, jealousy, and envy.  Every day, God witnessed even those who knew better, those who professed a religious faith; tear others apart over something as simple as the interpretation of a word.  The very ones you’d expect to rise above all the hatred and rancor, themselves, became embroiled in their own controversy, bitterness, and strife.  It was a very sad time indeed.

So, the heavenly protest movement began.  God sent judges to balance the wrongs and misdeeds, but after a while, they were ignored.  God sent leaders, brave men and women like Moses and Miriam to lead a bondage people out of slavery, but there too, God found humanity eventually unwelcoming to such new-found freedom and liberation.  So God sent prophets who raised their voices in the streets and in places of power.  Some heeded the prophets’ calls but so many others despised the prophets’ words of justice, peace, and harmony because it seemed to be a word that was threatening to the established way of doing things.  The prophets got in the way of progress, and some of them were beaten; some even killed.

Having tried what seemed like everything, this weary and tired God sat down somewhere one day in the portals of heaven and pondered what to do next.  After setting people free from bondage, after giving the Law, after sending the prophets, what else is there to do?  It was as if there could be no messenger, no word, nothing that could convince a people how to live in peace, love, and harmony.  What could be the ultimate protest to humanity’s hatred and inhumanity?  Occupy humanity itself?  Could God do that?  Become human?

That’s exactly what we Christians believe… that God became human in the person Jesus, born of Mary, there in a humble feeding trough in a stable somewhere on the outskirts of Bethlehem.  God’s magnificent and ultimate protest of humanity’s sin and inhumanity to humankind and God was staged right there in Bethlehem as God began a movement called Occupy Bethlehem.  Tiny and fragile baby hands, thrashing about for his mother’s warmth and reassurance occupied Bethlehem, as God in human flesh.  Pitiful baby cries that, at least on that first night, found no solace occupied Bethlehem and filled the stable with noise and fretting.  In all of God’s plans to show love and understanding to creation, to humanity, this would be the most risky.  Most might ignore such a common sight as a baby lying in a make-shift cradle made from a feeding trough. Many would merely look the other way.  Still others would even condemn the “impropriety” of such an arrangement of parentage as found in Joseph and Mary.  But to truly Occupy Bethlehem in the kind of protest God had in mind, this had to be the way to begin the movement.  There were no guarantees.  The risks of misunderstanding loomed like mountains ahead.  Danger was everywhere.

But steadily, the Occupy Bethlehem movement grew.  Unlikely, unsavory characters were willing to sign on to the protest and join the encampment.  Deep in their hearts, they heard and felt the stirrings of God who dared dream such a vision.  Shepherds came, filthy and religiously unfit for anything; they came and knelt as if they were arrayed in finest royal robes and somewhere, God smiled.  Mary the teen-aged unwed mother smiled too.  Joseph, the engaged man, obviously struggling to understand what God’s plan might be relaxed a while, reassured that if these rugged shepherds who had helped many a sheep give birth, could surely give him a few pointers too on how to make it through the exhausting ordeal.  And gradually the movement grew.

Others wrote that wise men came, foreigners from distant lands and they too joined the encampment for awhile… proving that God’s protest of man’s inhumanity to man could one day cease.  Like the shepherds before them, they knelt in their genuinely splendid finery and again, God smiled.

Phillips Brooks, Rector at Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia in 1868 presented an unusual Christmas gift to the children of his parish.  Inspired by a visit to the Holy Land the previous year when he rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, he wrote the beloved Christmas Carol we often sing, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” which has been in our Methodist hymnals for over 100 years.  The last verse reads like a prayer:

O Holy Child of

Bethlehem descend to us we pray;

Cast out our sin and enter in,

Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;

O Come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!

Then, in another verse written just a few years later but never published, Brooks spoke of Christ comes continually, past Christmas and past the festive holiday season:

Where children pure and happy

Pray to the blessed Child,

Where misery cries out to thee,

Son of the Mother mild;

Where charity stands watching

And faith holds wide the door,

The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,

And Christmas comes once more.[1]

Occupy Bethlehem, occupy our hearts, and occupy us today and every day.  Even so, come Lord Jesus.  Amen.