Winning, Losing, and the Little Town of Bethlehem

We who publish newsletters or host podcasts are seduced into watching the numbers. If those numbers go in the right direction, or if somewhere somehow a post or an episode explodes giving us broader attention, we will have become people of influence. We will have gained the power to shape the thinking of a large number of others. We will have arrived.

And if we aren’t able to see the absurdity of that, a further glance at the numbers will most of the time burst our fantasies.

There is in the dream of influence, or in the longing for a larger church, a more orderly family, or a more Christian nation, a desire for power. Even if we imagine using the power for good, the coveting of power is corrosive.

The pursuit of power lurks in the metaphors which have defined and motivated so much of the church’s mission over the last 100 years. In 1922, concerned that the church was tilting too much in one direction, Harry Emerson Fosdick framed his concern as a great contest, titling an influential sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Years later, fearing that the church was being wooed in the other direction, Harold Lindsell published his bestselling manifesto The Battle for the Bible. In the past fifty years, concerns over society’s moral decline have been termed a culture war, one which will be lost if good men and women do nothing.

Metaphors of winning, of battles, and of war are motivating but they corrupt our vision. Wars and battles pit us against enemies whom we must defeat. The way to win is by being stronger, more agile, more connected, and better funded than our enemies. Victors out-maneuver their opponents, counter their strategies, and reduce their forces. The church and movements associated with her consequently have advanced their cause by aggressive fund raising, strategic political engagement, innovative media campaigns, and sometimes a shady use of questionable statistics. Christians have been pushed to elect sympathetic candidates to positions of political power. Parents have been challenged and shamed to train children as arrows, weapons to hasten the enemy’s defeat. Evangelism has been framed as a countermove to the growing threats of Islam and Mormonism. We are to see ourselves as Christian soldiers marching onward as to war.

And all of this imagery sits uncomfortably with the spirit of Bethlehem.

At Christmas we sing “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie” and fail to appreciate how insignificant and powerless is everything associated with Jesus’ birth. It was ridiculously unpromising to address “the hopes and fears of all the years” in a place of such little consequence. Nevertheless, it was in Bethlehem, in this place where the language of winning and power and war have no place that God revealed the way he would shape the world.

It shouldn’t surprise us, though. It’s in the places of weakness, not power, where God has always shown up.

When the prophet Zephaniah peered into the far side of judgment and exile, he didn’t see the powerful and influential, but “a people humble and lowly.”^⁠¹ God, according to the prophet Malachi, claimed as his own nameless ones who simply “feared the Lord.”^⁠² It’s among these people that Jesus was born. God eschewed the halls of political and cultural power and chose, instead, to be incarnate as a child of a poor couple in a place of complete irrelevance.

The child born in Bethlehem achieved fame and then walked away from it. His goodness was a threat to those in power, and he died in poverty and shame. He could have mustered armies and waged battles, but instead he gathered men and women from ordinary occupations and out of the way places who then took up their cross and followed him. The world was turned upside down by those not seeking to turn the world upside down, but seeking rather to be faithful to Jesus by practicing works of kindness, mercy, and sacrifice as they proclaimed the hope of the resurrection.

Those without power don’t speak of battles and wars. If we, the descendants of Bethlehem, speak of power at all, it is of God’s power made perfect in our weakness.³ If we are to speak of warfare, it is to acknowledge that our weapons are never to be those of power but of weakness. Our only consideration of enemies is to consider how we might love them.

The incarnation stands in stark, condemning contrast to the brashness and arrogance of so much that passes for Christianity today. Its humility, its quietness, its smallness stand in judgment on the Christian lust for victory, triumph, and power.

The model given to the church for engagement in the world is one bathed in the spirit of Bethlehem. It is one of inhabiting the flesh of the lowly. I can easily grow impatient with this steady, slow, unnoticed way of life and ministry. I, for one, need for that reason to be recalled to the humble spirit of Bethlehem which, instead of marching us into battle, sees it as sufficient merely to tend to those our world has wounded.

O little town of Bethlehem, I long that your spirit of humility would captivate my heart and the heart of others, and that I would not care, as much at least, whether this post goes viral or not.

1. “On that day you shall not be put to shame
because of the deeds by which you have rebelled against me;
for then I will remove from your midst
your proudly exultant ones,
and you shall no longer be haughty
in my holy mountain.
But I will leave in your midst
a people humble and lowly.
They shall seek refuge in the name of the LORD,
those who are left in Israel;
they shall do no injustice
and speak no lies,
nor shall there be found in their mouth
a deceitful tongue.
For they shall graze and lie down,
and none shall make them afraid.” (Zephaniah 3:11-13)

2. Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him. (Malachi 3:16-18)

3. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9, 10)