O Little Town Of Bethlehem Series

O Little Town of Bethlehem,

So you probably know the story, the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her the exciting news, she’s going to be a mom, even though she is still a virgin, they work out the details but then there is the entire process of telling her parents and her fiancé, in Australia we’d say that would be a bit of a sticky wicket.

And you can imagine that Joseph, the man she was engaged to, wasn’t all that excited to hear the news. “You’re pregnant and you want me to believe the father is the Holy Spirit. Got news for you, little lady. I didn’t just fall off the turnip wagon. We are through, and maybe you can sell that story to some other sucker.”

And really, you can’t blame him. Sure, we know the story, but he didn’t until the same angel appears and tells him in Matthew 1:20 As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

There was more to the conversation, but the end result is found in Matthew 1:24–25 When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus.

Have you ever noticed how people communicate? Some people give you just the essentials, and others go to great extremes to make sure that you know the entire story and everything that led up to the story. I just want to shake them and say, “Spit it out.”

Matthew and Luke are like that as they tell the Christmas story. Luke spends 30 verses and over five hundred words telling us the story. And that doesn’t include the back story where he tells about how Mary’s cousin Elizabeth became pregnant.

What does Matthew do? One verse, forty words: Matthew 1:18 This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The same thing happens with the events that follow, Matthew tells us in Matthew 2:1 Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the reign of King Herod. . .

Which, if you just want the story, is kind of cool. Kind of Like “Denn was born in Chatham when Diefenbaker was King.” But really, that doesn’t tell you the whole story, does it? Why Chatham? Mom and Dad weren’t from the Miramichi. They didn’t stay there very long, and I didn’t go back for almost forty years.

Matthew answers the “where” and when rather nicely Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the reign of King Herod. But there are a lot of questions that he leaves unanswered. And some of those questions are answered in Luke’s account and others we have to dig for. The most obvious question is “Why Bethlehem?”

This year our Christmas series is entitle Songs of Christmas, and we will be using a different Christmas Carol each week as the theme of our message. This week, going along with our Advent reading is O Little Town of Bethlehem. It was written in 1868 by an Episcopalian Pastor by the name of Philip Brooks.

It was originally a poem he wrote for his Sunday School students and was inspired by a trip he had made to Bethlehem in 1865.

Then he decided it would be a great song to be sung in the Sunday school Christmas Service and so he asked the church organist, Lewis Redner, to set it to music. Redner struggled with it a bit, but finally came up with the tune the night before rehearsals for the service were to begin.

Neither Brooks nor Redner could have imagined that lasting legacy the song would have. The felt that it was a one and done type thing. As a matter of fact, Redner would later go on to say, “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

Here is a picture of Bethlehem taken about the time Rev Books visited.

At Christmas we sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem and Once in Royal David’s City, but do we ever really think about Bethlehem?

Presently its population is around 29,000 which is four times what it was in 1948 when Israel became a nation and probably close to 15 times what it was when Jesus was born. It is called the city of David, but everything is relative, and apparently cities back then weren’t what they are today.