I’ll be honest— the Bethlehem Candle is my favorite of the Advent candles. The inconvenience and insignificance of the town has always resonated with me. Why would such a historic happening take place in Bethlehem? Why was it the place?
I’ll spare you all the answers you’ve probably already heard, as I try to steer myself in the direction of other questions. What if Bethlehem’s being the physical location of Christ’s birth isn’t really the most important thing about Bethlehem? What if it’s real importance rests in its characteristics? Its insignificance?
Let’s just face it head on—the story of Mary and Joseph is weird. It’s not one that will likely make the Hallmark movie list. Where else have you heard of a young girl getting mysteriously pregnant by the Holy Spirit? And an angel coming to her almost husband assuring him that Mary’s legit and she hasn’t been sleeping around on him?
WHAT THE WORLD. WEIRD.
We humans have such a curse-gift for dressing up stories in a way that takes away from their reality. Maybe we forget to consider that the preparations for Jesus’s birth might not have been full of joy and excitement. If I were Mary (and especially Joseph…), things would have been hard from all angles of the process. Family, friends, engagement— things looked different because of what was happening. And I think they both realized that things would never be the same again.
Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem symbolized so much. Each happening that turned them towards the city’s direction stripped away something from their old selves and their old lives. They were both pregnant with change— pregnant with something and someone that would bring an unwelcome light into an unwilling world. But it wasn’t until the couple were in their most humble and desperate state that the light was born. At an inconvenient time, in a barn suited for livestock, in a city deemed insignificant.
The questions for me this week are simple. Have I made the preparations that have been modeled by Mary and Joseph’s story? Is the Bethlehem birth story not more of a process than a place? Am I unadorned enough to receive the light of Christ?
It might be time to dress down whatever costume we’ve made of Christmas. Not on the outside, but on the inside— the parts of us that might be too concerned with the event that we’ve lost track of the preparation. We are not Mary and Joseph, and, yet, perhaps we are more than we think. If the road to birthing the change that Christ offers isn’t riddled with difficulty and humility, have we lowered ourselves enough to receive it? And are we willing to come out of the inn to find that change in an animal’s feeding trough?
Unadorn yourself so that you may be Bethlehem. Be present in the preparing. Be made low in the journey. I don’t think it should be easy. May we all feel the birth pains of the change the Christ story offers because we know the transformative power that is to come. Make way for it.