Though you are small, I will bring forth great things from you (5:2).  This is what God is saying.  Encouragement for Bethlehem.  Encouragement for Bethel.  Words of encouragement for every disciple of Jesus Christ.  God is speaking words of great encouragement, great power for Kolt Kincannon, who will be baptized today.  Though you are small, I will bring forth great things from you.  Never underestimate what God can do with you.

These words come to us in a season of great, special comfort: this Advent, with Christmas Eve so close, and Christmas Day, blessed day.  When God speaks comfort to His people, it is almost always because His people are in great need: they are suffering, hurting, feeling helpless, abandoned, even maybe a bit hopeless.  In a world where sin runs rampant, such feelings are no surprise.  But I’m being too negative, I suppose.  Rampant?  Rampant sin?  Surely not!  No, of course not.  Beloved, there aren’t many people not hurting in some part of their lives, not suffering, in some corner of their hearts.  They feel a little helpless; even a little hopeless.  Don’t you know anyone like that?

We are not forced to sin.  Probably more often than we realize, God shields us from sin.  As people, as you and I, insist upon sinning, God releases His hand: He gives them up to the way they are dead set on going.  He no longer restrains.  He lets them walk in the darkness they have desired, that they have chosen.  People speak of free will.  From a Reformed perspective this is a strange way of looking at reality.  The will is conditioned: ordinarily by sin, which is just all around us and becomes natural and normal—the baseline of our lives.  Then, God claims us, and our wills begin to become conditioned by grace and by righteousness.  We are either choosing sin or we are choosing righteousness.  God is the one who permits the “choosing,” for one or the other, for His own eternal purposes.

God’s Word tells us all about both choices, acquaints us with them thoroughly.  When we run after sin, God at times allows us to pursue our sins and to reap the woes thereof: “all we like sheep have gone astray, every one to its own way” (Is 53:6).  Faced with a choice, a timely word of caution, the truth spoken in love, we respond something like, “I don’t care.  It’s what I want to do.  It’s what I need to do.  I can’t help myself: I don’t want to help myself.”  This sounds like the talk of addicts.  We are all addicts: sin addicts.  Oh, there’s that negativity again!  Addicts? Sin addicts?  Surely not!  No, of course not.

When God comes to us, we do not cease to be sin addicts.  When grace and Christ and God’s Yes in the Holy Spirit come to us, He redeems us, purchases us, washes us, and shows us, clearly, the way to life.  When God’s Word speaks to us, so often and so carefully, yes, even sternly, about keeping to the way of life, these are God’s words to people who still get that addict’s itch, that junkie’s twitch.  As we keep our eyes upon Jesus, we do so not by some supposedly “free” will, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.  We walk by the Spirit; we walk by faith and not by sight.  Our eyes see many tempting things, many things that would extinguish faith.  Our faith sees Jesus, beckoning to us in light and blessing.

God told Micah that He would allow His people to run astray, to ruin themselves, until the time of birth, “when she who is in labor has brought forth” (5:3).   These mysterious words speak to us of Mary.  You don’t have to be Catholic to perceive that Mary is a beautiful example of faith: real insight into a life pleasing to God.  We can plumb these mysterious words deeper.  Jesus came.  Many believed.  Many did not.  God allows His people to go their own sin-addled ways until the birth of Jesus, who comes to bring change.  God allows this sin-chasing until the time of birth in us: the birth of faith.

With this time, this event, this birth of faith, the time for giving people over to the sins that were ruining them comes to an end.  The birth of Christ into this world, and the birth of Christ in us—the birth of faith—begins the time of reclaiming.  It’s time to wake up!

Today we are blessed to be present for a baptism.  Faith isn’t born in the moment of baptism.  Faith is born at the time, in the circumstances appointed by God: faith is born at a youth summer camp; faith is born beside a road; faith is born after the death of the one you didn’t know how to live without; faith is born reading the Bible by a window.  It’s no longer time for letting people run after destruction.  Now is the time for hope.  Now is the time of salvation.

It is this birth that begins the return, the return to God.  What Kyle and Jennifer are proclaiming, publicly, among us this morning, is that they want their son with them, with us, on our walk back to God.  They want Christ to be born in Kolt; they want faith to enter his life, to light the way through this world that can be so dark.

Micah is told that, with this birth foretold, this birth of grace and faith into our world, our lives, “the rest of his kindred shall return” (5:3).  Whose kindred?  Christ’s kindred.  In Christ, we receive adoption; God adopts us in Christ.  We truly become part of the family of God.  Baptism is a call to return.  This Sacrament reminds us that now is the time for returning.  Now.  Today, we witness an embodied reminder that God has opened the way.  Love.  Grace.  Hope.

Micah tells us that this one, whose birth is foretold, “shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of The LORD” (5:4).  He will be established; he won’t be toppled.  The one who stands in faith, who stands in Christ, will stumble many times in this life, but the disciple’s foundation will stand firm.  The knowledge that our foundation shall never be shaken is grace and blessing for us.  We have salvation.  This is a word we can understand through its alternative: when we consider the alternative to salvation, we better comprehend who we have in Jesus.

Christ feeds us with the truth of salvation, the grace of hope; he feeds us in the strength of the Lord.  You can be strong because Christ is in you, with you.  This strength is not like earthly strength—we get so easily confused about that!  This strength is power.  We get so confused about power.  I think Spanish gets it a little better than English: poder is a noun that means power, and it is a verb that means to be able to.  We say “can”: power is ability, to be able to.  Can you do this?  We think and say, “Yes I can,” or “No, I can’t.”  Sometimes we say “Yes I can” when we know we can’t.  Sometimes we say “No, I can’t” when we know we can.  I might say that God has poder—He is able to.  It’s closer to the truth to say that God is poder: God is Can; He is able.  Able to do what?  Able to save you, to save you from the sin gnawing out your soul.  He is able to save anyone and everyone.  He has chosen to save you, to bless and to keep you.

Micah says that, in the wake of this birth that will make it possible for us to return to our kindred, to be fed in the strength of the Lord—the grace, mercy, blessing, promise, and love of God—Micah says that we will live secure (5:4).  Secure.  That’s no small thing, in this world, life as we know it here.  I will mention many times the wisdom of the philosopher, architect, engineer, and mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein, who thought long and carefully about Christianity.  He summed up some of what he gleaned this way: what Christians know is that we are safe, no matter what happens.  Safe.  No matter what happens.  We know—o! we know—that a lot happens.  We get touched by evil we hadn’t imagined existed.  We confront death.  We experience grief.  We face our failures: the many ways we have stumbled in our faithful walk.  Through it all, despite all that, we keep our eyes on the one who comes to us, who lifts us, who brushes off the dust, who cleans and bandages our wounds, who smiles at us with love and encouragement, who speaks just the right Word at just the right time, who is the birth of salvation into this world, who is the birth of salvation in us.

No wonder Micah says of him that “he shall be the one of peace” (5:5).  This peace is not the absence of conflict.  That has nothing to do with peace—another crucial term about which we are sadly confused in this world.  The peace Micah speaks of is shalom: that peace that passes all earthly understanding (Philippians 4:7), that conviction that we are safe in Christ, no matter what happens, that sense of blessed, of holy well-being: it is well with my soul.  The fourteenth-century English nun and mystic, Julian of Norwich, wrote “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  Our earthly experiences scream at us, “No!  It isn’t!  It’s not!”  It’s not difficult to believe the world rather than God—we’ve been proving that for thousands of years.  God births this All’s Well within us, God’s shalom: this word that means peace to the very depths, the foundation itself.  It’s the peace of “I Shall Not Be Moved.”  It’s the peace of “It Is Well with My Soul.”  It’s the peace of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”: “Let nothing you dismay, Remember Christ our Saviour Was born on Christmas Day; To save us all from Satan’s power When we were gone astray.  Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, Comfort and joy; O, tidings of comfort and joy.”

Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!