God's Strength through Man's Insignificance
Rev. Richard A. Bolland

Micah 5:-24
(Dec. 21, 2003 Sermon Transcript)

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        "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times." Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.

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        ...and it makes logical sense, actually, for this is the God of all the universe, and we are but poor sinners, fallen under sin, fallen in a state of being not at all what we were created to be, and far less than what our first parents were. And so we are not always able to understand all the ways of God. And indeed, it is a good thing. I would suggest that we cannot. For indeed, if we were able to grasp all the mysteries of God, it would be clear that we would have managed to have shrunken God down to our own size, and made Him out to be less than what He truly is.

        In the season of Advent, now quickly drawing to a close, it has never been more apparent that God works in ways that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Ways to wonderful to understand in all of their fullness, according to the expectations of men.

        For our Old Testament reading today, we hear the words of the prophet Micah, who says that out of Bethlehem, of all places, will come the one who will establish the kingdom of God forever.

        It is interesting to me to ask the question, perhaps speculatively, if we had been placed in charge of picking the city in which our Lord would be born, if God, for instance, had somehow and for some misunderstandable reason granted us that privilege, what city we have picked?

        Now I would suggest that if we were Jewish, it would be a nobrainer. Of course it would be Jerusalem! Naturally it would be Jerusalem. After all what makes more sense than that the coming prince of peace would be born in the house of peace, which is, of course, the meaning of the name Jerusalem to begin with.

        And even, since we’re gentiles, we might also have picked Jerusalem, since it is the epicenter of the faith. But we might have considered other great cities. How about Rome, the Eternal City? Or perhaps Paris, the City of Lights? Or Denver, home of the Broncos? Something like that!

        But no, God in His graciousness, has checked off all of those and found them lacking. And instead, we have Beit-Lechem, the "House of Bread". Micah foretells that the Messiah will be born there, in that little backwater town not too far from Jerusalem. And yet it seems that God does this quite consistently throughout His ministry to men on earth, in that He uses what mankind considers insignificant to accomplish His divine plans and bring about the salvation of mankind.

        How very different from the wisdom of man. For indeed, we tend to think that power should be exercised by powerful people living in powerful places. As Americans, of course, we are very proud that we are the strongest, greatest nation on earth. Or at least we keep telling ourselves that. And it is probably true in this particular time in this world’s history. But it may not be that way forever. It’s only true for now.

        How many other nations in history have made the very same claim? Permit me to give some examples. The great and huge empire of Alexander the Great, that no one thought would ever fall. Or perhaps, if you like, the vast realm of Gengis Khan, stretching all the way from Asia into Europe. Or perhaps you might think of the great and vast Roman Empire establishing 500 years of the Pax Romana. And then you might consider the British Empire, on which it was bragged the sun would never set. Or if you like, how about the great dynasties of China that lasted thousands and thousands of years. Or the ancient civilizations of Egypt that now we simply go and look at the ruins thereof. Or perhaps the ancient Mayan or Incan empires in the Americas might catch your attention.

        Please note. They are all gone. They vanished from the scene. They are disappeared, and their greatness is now simply a footnote in our history books, if you will.

        We forget the lessons of history. And if we don’t, we will not become, perhaps, so enamored of our own greatness and our own strength that we forget that nations and fall but the kingdom of God lasts forever. The falling of earthly kingdoms is simply of question of, not if, but how and when?

        We perceive, as human beings, political powers that currency of change in the world, and so it has been thought of down through the ages. And please, again remember the lessons of the past. The Soviet Union, whose dreams of world-wide revolution, crumbled with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. And the arrogant dreams of Hitler’s "Thousand-Year Reich" was destroyed and bombed to dust by 1945.

        And sometimes we think perhaps of wealth as power. And so we think perhaps of athletes who make tens of millions of dollars a year, and we look at them sometimes in admiration almost of heros of the culture. Or we make lists of the Fortune 500 companies, and keep close due of those marvelous stocks that always seem to be strong and rising, and we think of them, and the people they represent, with awe and admiration. Oh yes! And jealousy.

        Or perhaps we might think of size as an expression of power. You know, we Americans, we love to shop at the biggest malls in the Americas. We are impressed by the largest football stadiums. And oftentimes people will opt to go to mega-churches that have thousands and thousands of people attending. And we consider them to be a success, even if they teach a theology that is utterly bankrupt.

        We are impressed with size. Consider it equal with power.

        But quite in contrast do we see what God does and how God manages to do it.

        God insures that His greatness, His power, His plans, are accomplished by the seemingly insignificant things of like. Consider the very consistent pattern of how God brings about His plan of salvation. After all, He chose an ordinary, powerless man by the name of Abraham, out of all the people of the world. Not some great king, or prince, or ruler, but just a simple man of faith. To become the father of the nation of Israel.

        And then, consider Israel itself. For Israel was essentially coming from Abraham, but was born in slavery in Egypt, and was returned to slavery in Babylon due to their unfaithfulness. God chooses ordinary men, of common background, and does so with such amazing grace!

        It is a shepherd boy, the youngest one of the family, from whom the least is expected, who became King David, the greatest king in the history of Israel. It was the common men whom God chose to serve as His prophets. God chose an eccentric, strangely dressed man to serve as His immediate forerunner in the form of John the Baptist as the final and last and greatest prophet.

        And God chose, yes, you guess it, as we sang in our hymn, the little backwater town (of Bethlehem), perhaps 5000 people at the outside, and half that size at the time, to be the entry point of God’s son in His not-so-grand entrance into the world. His own son, God in human flesh, God incarnate, becomes an itinerant preacher who never travels more than 200 miles from the place of His birth. And yet, from what this man said, without any newspaper coverage, without any TV coverage, without a single radio reporter being around, changes the entire history of the world, and redeems the entire lost mankind from their sins.

        This son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, another unimpressive place in the land of Israel, at the time becomes nothing less than the one who redeems the world.

        As they same sometimes on TV, who woulda thunk it?

        And then, consider the people that Jesus chooses for His apostles. The story just gets, well, almost humorous in a way. For He chooses people who no particular standing in the culture. Fishermen and tax collectors, people who are unimpressive or perhaps even questionable. And He calls these men to represent the faith after His passing, and to save the world.

        God routinely uses that which looks unimpressive, that which seems very insignificant, to accomplish His greatness and His grace in this world.

        And why does our God do such strange things? And does so in such a strange and seemingly unpredictable way? Well, it seems that He acts in such fashion that it becomes abundantly clear that the amazing things that God accomplishes by these unimpressive means and men is His doing, and cannot in any way be attributed to the men themselves! In all things it is God who receives the glory, and God who accomplishes. Not the men He chooses.

        It must be plain, all through the ages, that what Christ accomplishes has been done by God’s might and by His power and through His compassion and by His grace. Not that He has chosen great men to do these things, but that rather, that He has chosen common men to accomplish His greatness.

        Our gracious and merciful God has come in human flesh to accomplish the greatest achievement in the history of human kind, and does so by the seemingly weakest possible means. So that, by all means, we might finally be rescued from our brokenness caused by sin. That we might be rescued from sin, and death, and the grave, and the devil. It seems that that seeming weakness of simple preachers, even men like me, fallen sinful man, is privileged to send to word out to you, and to all the world that God in Christ has redeemed the world through Him.. Through His death and through His resurrection.

        What can we say? What has He done in the guise of weakness? Let me refresh your memory, on this last Sunday of Advent.

        Through the seeming weakness of one human life lived in accord with God’s law, His lawkeeping is given to you. We who break the law with impunity, we who sin without discretion, we who think that sin is sometimes ok and rationalize its deadliness away, thinking that it’s ok because everybody else does it. Or it’s ok because it feels good. Or it’s ok because it’s just not popularly considered to be sin. He comes and He keeps the law that we can’t keep. And the seeming weakness of one man doing it. Through the seeming weakness, I would add, of a criminal’s death on a Roman cross of execution. I mean, how great is that? The redemption that we desperately need, the salvation that we must claim, is there for us because the one who dies has the nature of God, and is God. He is God in human flesh! And His death is so incredibly precious that it pays the price of all our sin. And our sins, as a result, are finally forgiven.

        And through this seeming weakness of the tomb, that thing that we view as the final victor and the end of human life, the thing that we cannot escape, through His escape from that escape, we have our own resurrection, our own victory over sin, death, and the grave. And our own complete victory.

        How God uses such seeming weaknesses to bring about greatness.

        And then finally, I might add this. What about us? Yes, we too are redeemed through the seeming weakness of God, and through the seemingly insignificance of the things God chooses to use. And we too are claimed by Christ through something as simple and common as water, at the fount of Holy Baptism. And of course, that baptism brings to us the blessings of Golgotha’s bloody cross.

        But what’s more, we too, if we are honest, are common and insignificant people. There’s nothing particularly special about any of us, although God has graciously given us all gifts and talents and abilities to be used on behalf of Him and His kingdom. Ahh. And there’s the rub, you see. It is precisely through people like us that God continues to do His work. His magnificent, His amazing, His mysterious, His incredible work of redeeming the world! For when you engage in spiritual conversation that people might know Christ in the venues in which God has placed us, in the vocation that He has given to us, then we are doing amazing, incredible, unsurpassed, divine work.

        And God is using even the likes of us to speak His word of life and light. And nothing is more amazing in this world than that.

        So, dear friends, every time we think of ourselves as less, perhaps, than God intends us to be. Or perhaps when we think of ourselves as common     people, or just "plain folk", think about Bethlehem. Think about that little town of seeming insignificance and unimportance. And remember how God used it. And this was the entryway of Christ into the world. And the solidification of our salvation. In Jesus’ name, Amen.