Micah 5: 2-5a; Luke 2: 1-7

Nowhere in the Church year is a place so important and that place is Bethlehem. Bethlehem these days isn’t part of Israel anymore, it is a city of 25,000  with large numbers of Palestinian Christians in the Westbank part of the area ruled by Palestinian Authority and is also home to Rachel’s tomb.  It is nestled in the Judean hills not far from Jerusalem.  Christmas and Bethlehem are tied together.  If we were to say:  today in the general vicinity of the Middle East we think was born,” that would not sound right, would it?  No, today was born in Bethlehem, a place you can google, and google Earth and wikipedia was born. It was important for Jesus to be born in a place, a real place.  It is the town of Jesus birth. Let’s reflect on this for a second, about this idea of place.  Place matters.  The town where we are born, where we are raised and where we live matter.  Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa” wrote:  “It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.” Stories and songs take on more power when they are specific about place.  The singer Billy Joel tells of the New York fishing town where he grew up.  He has a song about a fisher man who has to sell most of what he has to have his boat called Alexa.  A bases the story on the men he knows personally.  He could just sing about going to sea, but no, he gets specific and even though we may not know these places, that they are mentioned matters. It gives power and meaning. Listen: “Well I’m on the Downeaster “Alexa” And I’m cruising through Block Island Sound
I have charted a course to the Vineyard, but tonight I am Nantucket bound.  We took on diesel back in Montauk yesterday and left this morning from the bell in Gardiner’s Bay Like all the locals here I’ve had to sell my home too proud to leave I worked my fingers to the bone.” You can hear the love and the familiarity of the place.  It is the same love and familiarity when you hear people in this church who are from Sacramento talk about Japan Town and the Alhambra and Lincoln School and Eddie’s Diner.

In the film Out of Africa Baroness van Blixen played by Meryl Streep is forced to leave the coffee farm she has built.  She has become inseparable from the place and wants it to her as much as she loves it. This is what she says: ““If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?” Her farm in her heart and she wants the land to have her in its heart also.  But she is smart enough to know that the place is nothing without the people.  She talks to her house help as she is about to leave to go back to Denmark.  She says: remember when we were traveling on Safari and you would go ahead and make a fire and then I would see the fire and come there. Well this time I will go ahead and you will follow me and I will be the one who will build the fire.  He then says thoughtfully:”Szabu, you must make this fire very big.”  Of course, they both now the fire is not a real fire in a real place.  It is a fire in the heart.  And so it is, places matter, friends, but they matter because of what our hearts have experienced there.  A few months ago Carolyn, in Viet Nam, for the first showed me the house she grew up in, her grandfather’s house in China town, the rivers near where her father had an orchard.  She showed me her middle school, her brother’s high school, the beach where she played as a child.  They are places in her heart, but because the people are almost all gone, their importance slowly fades.

There is actually a movie called “Places in the Heart.” It is set in the Great Depression, in Waxahachie, Texas around the time a tornado hits.  It deals with the death of a sheriff who gets killed by accident by a young African American boy who is then murdered and it brings out all the ugliness of poverty and racism of the South, but also of the ability of sheriff’s widow Edna, played by Sally Field, to forgive and to take everyone, alive and dead, into her heart.  The movie ends as it begins, on a Sunday with the sounds of a church choir singing “Blessed Assurance”. Both the living and dad characters of the story are there. We see those persons while we hear the priest saying “If I don’t have love, I am nothing”. In contrast with this, Edna did everything out of love : love to her husband, her children, her sister, his new family members. She had a place in her heart for each of them. The last words are “Peace of God” spoken by the boy to the Sheriff he had accidentally killed.

So, ultimately, actual places matter less than the heart.  Let me be clear, in Christianity there are no holy places per se.  In a way there is no Holy Land, where the holiness must take place is in our hearts.  Our hearts are the Bethlehem that matters.   As Luke tells us, at the birth of God into our complicated, sordid world, there was no place for God.  It is an amazing story.  The one Who is behind the birth of all places, had no place anywhere to be born.  This God is interested above all in the real place that matters: our hearts.  Our hearts are the place that must be made holy. Our hearts is where the Christ child must be born.  The question is: “is there room for that child in our hearts?”  With all the stuff we experience and everything we choose to do, especially in this busiest time of the year, is there a place in the inn of our hearts for the Christ, “born this day in our hearts.” Can we make some space for the Messiah to live or are we going to stash Him up in the attic with all the other Christmas stuff. Are we going to be throwing  the baby out with the bath water once Christmas is over?

So, friends, in the end, places matter, but they matter because of the heart.  Bethlehem matters, but it matters because the place it has in God’s heart and because of what it means to our hearts.  It is all about that baby for whom there was no place in Bethlehem.  Is there a place for that baby in the inn of our hearts?