Everywhere Be Bethlehem
The world comes into the Lord’s natal day this year still bleeding and still striving. Once upon a time when Jesus said tearfully, “Ye shall not see me henceforth until ye shall say, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” hew as uttering a principal not to the Jews only, but to all nations.
Christmas is typical of “good will” and “Peace on earth,” but that will never obtain until men shall see the King of peace. Bethlehem is in Jerusalem really. The event of Bethlehem can be enacted in every place. Actually the whole world can be made Bethlehem to those who have discovered the personal gift of the Christ child.
May He come anew into our city, our homes, our hearts on His natal day.
Christmas will be a day of reality in the midst of sorrow and suffering to countless thousands who make Christmas a practice, and Christmas joys their own.
But alas! For those who leave but the real Christmas gift, choke the day with selfish sating of themselves and their friends. Many will give presents the days before and get up Xmas morning, unwrap their presents and spend moments of selfish glee. Then after the morning meal will turn to the next engagement of the day. Fowl and fruits, nuts and sweet meats, friends, feathers and fussy music and rides, and rollicking, and their Christmas spent. But still something will be missing that will leave an aching void when the day is gone.
No gift made to the two-thirds of the world’s people facing starvation in Russia, Germany, Asia and Africa, no little children without home or without parents, or without food and gifts have shared their gifts, no alms to the poor at our gates. No church door darkened, no prayer prayed, no thoughtful word spoken to the soul in darkness. Hamlet was played with Hamlet left out. Christ did not get into their calculations and therefore was not born into their Christmas day.
But may he who reads these lines bethink himself upon these things. May your day have Jesus in it, your world be a Bethlehem, your visits, to those in cheerless gloom or blighting error, your gifts the offerings of your share to Christ’s needy ones. “In as much as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
In this way only will the Christ child be in our Christmas day.
It is said that Scarborough, the great English resort, was once a fishing station. It had a spring of crystal waters where travelers were refreshed. A man afflicted with rheumatism conceived that the spring would heal him. He accordingly drank the water for a time and was restored to health. He told others and they in turn told others until it became the haunt of many. A house was built to provide for the visitors and then a hotel, a store, a play house and on it grew until now from fifty to one hundred thousand go there each season. But it is discovered that one out of a hundred visitors know that there is a spring there. So will tens of millions observe Christmas day in sordid sensual ways, with Christ left out.
Oh! let us see the face of our Lord and his brethren on His natal day and it will be Bethlehem everywhere.
From the front page of The Star of Zion, Charlotte, N.C., Dec. 20, 1923. The Star of Zion is the official organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
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