God’s Power in Smallness
Christmas is upon us. The time we have been waiting for is almost here. And in this season of anticipation, this season of Advent we hear a profound truth about God and his gospel: he moves powerfully through small and humble things. The human tendency is to think about God and his bigness, his separateness...as God the Creator of the universe. We think of his infiniteness and our finiteness. God is huge, immeasurable. Remember the power-hungry Jafar from Disney’s Aladdin. When he finally gets his wish to turn into an all-powerful-genie he says, “The ultimate power! The universe is mine to control, to command!” We often think of God kind of like that.
This is not necessarily wrong. He is the Creator of the universe – Big Bangs, cosmic control, and all that are certainly a part of the picture with God. There is a baby in that bathwater as a friend of mine likes to say. This brings another movie to mind. RUDY – the king of all slow-clap moments. Rudy is struggling to figure out if he should keep on pursuing his dream of playing football at Notre Dame and he seeks the counsel of one of the Catholic priests, and the priest says, “Son, in 35 years of religious study, I have only come up with two hard incontrovertible facts: there is a God, and I'm not Him.” I think that guy needs to go back to seminary, but I digress...
It’s certainly not bad to know God’s bigness and our smallness. The issue is that this perspective usually influences our view on how God operates. We think of volcanoes and meteors and global scale conflicts and so on to the point where I have heard many people say, “God has bigger things to worry about than my problems.” The very sad implicit message/belief there is: God does not care about me. We get fixated on the foreignness of God and often get discouraged because he is totally unrelatable. The other side to this coin is it feeds into our typical human tendency that bigger is always better. We join the 1st century Jews and think that God is always gonna come in BIG. He’s gonna rock our worlds through some huge event, or maybe some dramatic miracle. We have a difficult time thinking of God without thinking of big impressive moments of glory...what Robert Farrar Capon called God’s “right-handed power.”
But the Old Testament prophet, Micah, and the subsequent Christmas narratives in the Gospels turn our common notions of God on their heads. God moves powerfully through small and humble things. In Micah 5:1-6 we hear the voice of God prophesy about Bethlehem and he acknowledges its littleness – “too little to be among the clans of Judah” (5:2). It was just this tiny little village of no significance – small and humble – but it was from this place that God says he will bring his ruler of Israel, the Shepherd of his people. His ruler doesn’t come from Jerusalem or anywhere grand or noteworthy – he comes from a small and humble place. It’s like God choosing Pittsburgh, my hometown, over New York City. Or, better yet, Cutchogue, our new hometown, over any city. He defies our expectations.
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem (believed to be built on the site of Jesus’ birth)
Even though from a human perspective this place is lesser than, it does not diminish the power of God’s action. “And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth. And he shall be their peace” (5:4-5a). God moves powerfully through the small and humble thing.
Micah goes on to predict the famous Christmas passages found in the Gospel accounts saying, “until the time when she who is in labor has given birth” (5:3). This brings us to Mary and her famous song in Luke 1. Mary is one of the primary examples of God working through the small and humble. It is commonly held that Mary was probably around the age of 16. She wasn’t a queen, a princess, or any kind of royalty – she was just a common girl, and she knew it. She describes herself in her song: “he has looked on the humble estate of his servant” (48), “he has exalted those of humble estate” (52), “he has filled the hungry with good things” (53). She sees how God works through the small and humble things. He scatters the proud and sends the rich away empty handed (51, 53). He does not operate according to worldly values.
Why is this good news for us? Frankly, because we are small and humble whether we think that about ourselves or not. As we have said, we are not huge and infinite like God. We are finite. God moves powerfully through the small and humble things, which gives us hope because we are in the same boat as Mary. We have no defining marks about us that make us stand out. There is nothing that we possess that would cause God to choose us. We have hope in the fact that God chooses to work through humble things because that is who he is. He loves to lift up the lowly. He chooses to align himself with the finite. That’s what Micah and Mary reveal to us about God...his value system is completely different from ours. He is not about the big impressive display. He is about bringing his power through the unexpected small thing. Capon calls this God’s “left-handed power.”
This is exactly what we are getting ready to celebrate in Christmas – nothing displays this truth more than Jesus. He shows us God’s might by being able to change the world through an infant born to a 16-year-old virgin peasant girl. Jesus was born in a manger in a tiny insignificant town. He never had any money. He lived as a servant and went on to die a criminal’s death. We would be hard-pressed to find a humbler example. Yet, Micah tells us he is God’s “ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days” (5:2). He is the same God, who existed before time, fully divine, and he has come to us. Immanuel, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). He aligns himself with us – with the broken, the imperfect, the scared, the unsure, the poor, the lonely, the sad, the powerless. And in so doing he displays what real power is because he brings something out of nothing – this is the awesome Creator of Genesis at work in us – he forgives your sins. He brings beauty out of ashes; he brings life out of death. And so we join Mary singing, “For behold all generations will call us blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for us, and holy is his name” (Luke 1:48-49). Amen.
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