Sometimes we can look around and see ourselves, as a church, small. Diminished. We have a much smaller number of people attending regularly now. Our Sunday Schools have gotten much smaller. How do we look up and out from this vantage point, this time and this place?

John Calvin taught that Christians should use Scripture as a lens with which to see the world. What might we see in our small size if we look through the lens of Scripture. Well, for one thing, the lens of Scripture we are looking through in the next several Sundays—that lens features the small, the little, the apparently insignificant. I’m speaking of the first few chapters of the Gospel of Luke.

An old couple, having been unable to have children for decades, receive a promise. A young unmarried peasant woman, still a virgin, hears from an angel that the Spirit of God will make her the mother of the Son of God. Young Mary and old Elizabeth get together and converse in hushed tones of wonder about their pregnancies. Who are we that this should be happening to us, they are thinking. And then the birth of Jesus takes place, such a small insignificant delivery in the eyes of the world, proceeding in the feeding area for livestock there in a small looked-over town called Bethlehem. The great big public event is everybody traveling to be counted by the Roman power structure—the census upon which the taxes funding the entire empire will be based. That’s the real event, not this little family drama going forward quietly in someone’s stable.

And after Jesus is born, when he is taken to the temple—a couple of older godly people that everyone else looks over—these two people single out baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph and they pray praise to God. But think of all the priests and dignitaries who are missing it. Mary and Joseph and their newborn are
hardly a significant visit from their point of view.

And yet, on that night ̧ yes on that so holy night, this tiny insignificant birth on the world’s scale of values is the occasion for all the heavens opening up in a great choir from on high singing praises to the Almighty! And angels declare that the little peasant baby will end up being the Savior of the world.

God came this way. God often comes this way. To Elijah, not in the earthquake, but in a still small voice. The lineage of Jesus far before he was born seemed about to be cut off, several times. Sarah’s barrenness, then just one child in the line, and Abraham was even asked to give him up. One of Jesus’s great
grandmothers was Rahab, a prostitute from another country. God used a young man David to kill a mighty giant, Goliath. God once said to the entire people of Israel, that “it was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you...” (Deut. 7:7-8). And God also said to the Apostle Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness” (2 Cor. 12: 9).

So let us have faith, even small faith if it is genuine, even if it’s only the size of a tiny mustard seed. Let us have faith in the Almighty God who chose to become part of our world’s smallness, in the person of the infant Jesus “in whom all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). Glory to the newborn
King!