Micah 5:2-5a
Advent 4 - Year C
Oh, yeah? Well my little brother can take out your whole clan! So There!
That is one way to read the power of "the least". It is not the most helpful approach, but it does seem to be a go-to position in most cultures.
This is not the ascension of the youngest, Jacob, Joseph, David which comes as a surprise, every time. This is an intentional insult.
The power of the least comes out of its triggering of our memory, a surprise. We have become so accustomed to prestige being associated with the richest and biggest that have made ourselves immune to this sort of surprise. We keep forgetting to look in all the dusty corners for our next hope and only keep our eye on the entertaining flash in the center. May we not try to console ourselves by trying to predict a particular small becoming the biggest. We usually miss the real question and surprising resolution.
Of course this is a convenient passage to use to proof-text David's kingly return and Jesus' divine birth (ahh, the divine right of kings), but without that wrenching of the text for a power purpose, there is not much new here.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
What is the length of labor? For some minutes and for some days.
This promise in the face of a siege would be a word of encouragement in that situation. As time passes and the eventual fall of the city occurs a note in the NISB suggests, "this text became an excellent candidate for reinterpretation by applying it to Jesus."
We are always searching for meaning and will attach it where where we can. An old image or a new vision both can be used to try to make sense of what is going on around us at the moment.
A part of our work is doing this mining for meaning in an honorable way. In this Christmas season, which genealogy do we use and will we get folks who are into that activity battling one another about which one is the more accurate, the truer? Do we look at birth from a cosmic point of view with John or track the angels and Joseph in Matthew or the angels and Mary in Luke or throw it all up and go for baptism in Mark? Which gives us the encouragement we need in the midst of whatever siege we are experiencing?
With what lens do we use fulfilled and unfulfilled words of life and transition? If you were to apply this to today's world of church and human realities what would you pull out of your bag of memories and apply? What little, no-account place or person or event might be lifted up to bring forth hope for capitols and and homeless on their streets, for corporations and individuals?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/december2003.html
Without asking for it or even dreaming about it, a currently insignificant spot is incorporated into an integral part of a new story. A king's birthplace will become an anti-king's birthplace.
Where a king brings order and pacification, an anti-king brings peace and energy. Both bring forth "security" after their own kind. Security has again raised its head as an eternal quest object only to be obtained by leaving it behind.
As we finish off another time of waiting for a reincarnation of the past or a harbinger of the future we still look for security in the dead and gone or the not yet conceived and horizonless. We re-fight a last war and prepare against a previous attack, obsessing our remembrances and compulsively narrowing down future options. We yearn for sentimental warmth of mangers past and for cold judgment coming on a storm cloud.
If a little town of Bethlehem can birth kings and anti-kings, there is no security as usual. We've been looking for security in all the wrong places. Micah asks us to imagine government and religion not being about order and indestructibility, but about justice coming forth based on having experienced injustice in exile and under our own leaders. The peace of Bethlehem is a renewal of justice.
- - -
o little house of bread
how easily distracted
by fancier fare
perhaps
"... an undigested bit of beef,
a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese,
a fragment of underdone potato"
dream of ghostly transformation
through past mistrust
current misery
future emptiness
prayerfully concluded
"God bless us, everyone!"
dream deep
house of bread
of but a little wine and
a creation beginning song
"Peace on earth, goodwill to all"
dream of a feast of love
with thou and thou and thou
each feeding each
in pastures of plenty
'til exiled justice
is welcomed home
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
Sometimes we are simply stuck and cannot get out to a comforter with perspective. When everything has been tried and there is no where else to turn, the last resort is an appeal to the future. May something be born out of this failing!
Our anticipation of Christmas is better oriented to failure than to success. We have done everything we knew to do and it came up short. This recognition is prelude to a wonderful surprise, unanticipatable. To make lists and check them twice is antithetical to the surprise of real Christmas that occurs every day. A new incarnation rises from an abysmal defeat. Without prelude and against expectation, peace breaks forth to affront the principalities and powers who will do all in their power to run the cycle another time.
At some point the bullies will get it. Keep a symbolic Bethlehem alive in your time and space.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/12/micah-51-5.html