Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.

”Sometimes God does his best work with some of the humblest and smallest things. Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is a comfort for people like you and me.

What constitutes a small town isn’t the same for everyone. My family moved to Norman, OK from Dallas, TX, which has over a million people. Norman’s population around 120,000 seems small by comparison. But it is surrounded by smaller towns less than one tenth the size. If you are coming from one of them, Norman may feel more like the big city.

Today, Bethlehem, Israel, isn’t so much the “Little Town of Bethlehem” we sing about in the Christmas carol. It’s a thriving bedroom community for Jerusalem with about 30,000 people. As recently as the late 1960’s, however, it was half that size. In Jesus’ day there were at most 2000 people who lived there. When Micah wrote, the population may have been in the hundreds.

There sat this little town. In over a thousand years of history, it had produced one famous person: King David. And, of course, David didn’t hang around Bethlehem once he reached his late teens. It was off to the capital city where big things happened. The town he left behind remained a quiet place whose chief industry seemed to be sheep.

This is where The Lord chose to make his grand entry when he came to earth. This was the unlikely birthplace of our unlikely King. Of course, it had those ancient connections to King David, but then, so did Jerusalem, the city David made his capital. Bethlehem had little more going for it than the fact that it was a geographical location on planet earth, in Israel, and that’s where our King came to live and serve.

“Where are you from?” is one of the first questions we ask a person when getting to know them. It is one of the first phrases you learn when you are learning another language. “De donde esta?” “Var kommer du ifran?” “Wo kommst du her?” As a matter of information there is nothing wrong with this.

But we are tempted to put entirely too much stock in a person’s origin. You know that some who live in the big cities on the East and West Coasts refer to the middle of the country as “flyover territory.” It is not a compliment. It implies that there is nothing and no one of value or importance where people like me live.

We do the same thing. We try to build our sense of personal worth by finding something unique and noteworthy about the place we come from, and by finding some other place to ridicule. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to feed our pride and give ourselves value based on something for which we had no choice in the process: the place in which we were born? I was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic. But there is nothing about that place or institution for which I can take any credit.

The Lord isn’t impressed with this, or any of the other factoids I might be tempted to put on my spiritual resume: the family tree into which I was born, where I went to school, what my GPA was, how many degrees I have earned, what I do for a living, titles I have held at work or in the community. The only thing that concerns him is how I have loved him and treated my neighbor. And this is just the problem, if we are honest. That part of our resumes associates us far too closely with that place where it is far too hot and miserable all the time. Hell may not be the place where we were born, but it could easily become the place to which we retire.

Our Lord did not come to save anyone because they were famous, or smart, or had good family connections, or came from a city you could be proud of. He came to save ordinary sinners, including people practically no one else knows exist, from places you may never have heard of and might find difficult to pronounce. Our King was born in Nowheresville, Israel, because he didn’t need to impress anyone with shallow credentials like a prestigious address. His love and his sacrifice would be impressive enough to save us all. He comes out of the little town of Bethlehem, the unlikely birthplace of our King.