Summary: Many years ago, when the late Dr. James Cleland was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, he preached a sermon entitled "Bedlam in Bethlehem." You have to wonder, how could there ever have been anything even approaching bedlam in a sleepy little out-of-the-way community like Bethlehem? Jerusalem, yes. That was the big city. The capital. The center of politics, finance, and religion. I live in New York City. It bustles with activity all the time...from the good activities of tourism and Broadway and Madison Square Garden to the occasionally frightening activities associated with sirens and violence, with social injustice and discontent. Every December, our streets are seas of humanity, with visitors from all over America and all over the world, inching their ways down 5th Avenue and Madison, standing in mass outside the windows at Bloomingdales or Lord and Taylor's or before the tree at Rockefeller Center. Simply walking outside my office in Manhattan in December, I experience an ancient Jerusalem kind of moment--a busy, vital city teeming with people and all the hustle bustle movement and electricity in the air. But Bethlehem, as Micah put it, was "small among the clans of Judah." It was more Mayberry than Manhattan. Not many people in Bethlehem--and not much mischief to get into. I grew up in a small Southern town like that. It had blue laws, preventing the sale of anything considered non-essential on Sundays. You could go to a drug store on Sunday, but only for a prescription. If you wanted makeup or toothpaste or a new hairbrush, you had to come back on Monday for that. In the entire county where I was reared, you couldn't even buy a beer, let alone anything stronger. When I was a teenager, my mother used to say to me: "Son, you are a good boy for lack of opportunity." And that's how it must have felt in Bethlehem, that little ancient Mayberry a few miles down the road from the big city of Jerusalem. There wasn't much trouble to get into in Bethlehem. So, how could there have been bedlam?
