Matthew 2:2-12
Of course, Johnny wasn't born in Norfolk, he just grew up there. That's the most important thing. Unless of course you're talking about someone like President Ford who was born in Omaha but barely lived there. Whether born or raised or both, small towns put a lot of their identity into who came from there. Wahoo Sam Crawford came from, of course, Wahoo (whose other claim to fame was being the 'home office' for David Letterman). There was Richie Ashburn from Tilden. And then there's Larry the Cable Guy, from Pawnee City. I lived a little while in Sedan, Kansas, whose largest building was the Emmet Kelly Museum. Now maybe it was because not too many people remember who Emmet Kelly is anymore that the town had to get another claim to fame and tried to set itself up as home to Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. In Lincoln we had William Jennings Bryant, the Buffalo Bills of presidential politics. Of course we also had Charles Starkweather. Maybe the best of them all though is Riverside Iowa, future home of James T. Kirk.
I have to wonder if people in Bethlehem ever celebrated that Jesus was from there. I'm not sure that communities then were much different than they are now. Maybe I'm reading too much into things like the woman at the well in Sychar seeming pretty proud of the fact that the well there was built by Jacob (John 4). Did the town have any clue what was about to happen there? I do find it interesting that Magi were very familiar with the prophecy that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. How familiar was Bethlehem to this same prophecy? Did they have a sign hanging to greet visitors that said "Welcome to Bethlehem: Future Home of the Messiah"? I don't know, I get the sense that while even all of Jerusalem was disturbed by this rumored birth of the king of the Jews, I almost wonder if Bethlehem mostly slept through it. Other than the shepherds, who really noticed?
It's interesting all the attention we can pay to great people who came from where we are from. Maybe it's this living vicariously thing. It's almost like the same thing that made these people great makes us great as well. Living in Colorado now I don't make much fuss about famous people from Nebraska, because people here will remind me that that just means Nebraska is a great place to be FROM.
But the truth is, I'm not a great politician because William Jennings Bryant was from Lincoln (or even because I went to the same high school as Senator Bob Kerrey). Fortunately I didn't fall to the mass murderer influence of Starkweather. I didn't get all the football skills that are supposed to come naturally to Nebraskans, and living in Norfolk for 5 years didn't give me the comedic genius of Johnny Carson. This living vicariously thing isn't all it's cracked up to be.
And yet, if Bethlehem missed out on this whole living vicariously thing, that's really too bad. While people from our home towns don't make us great, and not even our kids' successes make us great, here we have the one person in history through whom living vicariously is possible. When the time comes that we stand before God, our greatness means nothing. It doesn't matter if we were the most dominant baseball player of our era, the greatest comedian, the greatest politician or even the greatest star ship captain. It doesn't even matter if we were the greatest humanitarian having the most tremendous positive effect on society. If we're trying to make it on our own greatness, we're in for a pretty huge disappointment.
The only hope we've got is vicariously, taking on the perfection that only belonged to the one who was so humbly born in that little town that may never have recognized him. It's only through His greatness that we have a chance.
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