Walking the Road to Bethlehem: Your Journey to Christmas

By Adam Hamilton

Based on Hamilton's, The Journey: Reflections for the Season, this new edition contains added content to create an experience of preparation of heart and mind for Christmas. Experience the Nativity story in new ways as you take your own journey to Christmas. Walking the Road to Bethlehem combines content from Adam’s travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, a summary of the historical and scriptural content from each chapter of The Journey, links to travel video and photographs online, Scripture, prayers and room for personal journaling.

Walking the Road to Bethlehem is excellent for individual devotion and reflection and can also be used as a small group experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781426781315

Adam Hamilton

Adam Hamilton is the founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. Started in 1990 with four people, the church has grown to become the largest United Methodist Church in the United States with over 18,000 members. The church is well known for connecting with agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers. In 2012, it was recognized as the most influential mainline church in America, and Hamilton was asked by the White House to deliver the sermon at the Obama inaugural prayer service. Hamilton, whose theological training includes an undergraduate degree from Oral Roberts University and a graduate degree from Southern Methodist University where he was honored for his work in social ethics, is the author of nineteen books. He has been married to his wife, LaVon, for thirty-one years and has two adult daughters.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Preparing for Christmas

On Thanksgiving evening, hundreds of thousands of Kansas Citians make their way to one of the city’s historic shopping districts, the Country Club Plaza. They come to watch as the switch is thrown on the 280,000 colored lights that adorn the buildings. This event has been a Kansas City tradition for over eighty years. When I was growing up, it marked the official beginning of the Christmas season.

Today, radio stations and shopping centers begin playing Christmas music weeks before Thanksgiving. Halloween now seems to be the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season! Yet somehow, though we’ve extended the season of Christmas, we have moved further and further from the meaning of Christmas.

Christmas today seems like an orgy of overindulgence. Many Americans go into debt to make sure their children have enough under the tree at Christmas and then watch as their kids become weary after opening so many presents. We find ourselves with a Christmas hangover when the credit card bills arrive. Somehow we miss out on the true message and joy of Christmas.

This is why now, more than ever, Advent matters. Advent is the way the church prepares for Christmas. Since sometime in the late fifth or early sixth century, this season has been a time to recall the meaning of Christmas. The word Advent is from the Latin adventus, and it means coming. Christians use this opportunity both to recall Jesus’ coming to the earth as a babe in Bethlehem and to prepare themselves for his promised return to earth. The Advent season begins four Sundays before Christmas Day, so it lasts from twenty-two to twenty-eight days, depending upon the day when Christmas falls.

In a world where so much focus at Christmas is placed on gift giving, card sending, and party attending, the season of Advent itself is a precious gift. Its purpose is to help us remember the story of a peasant girl who gave birth in a stable to a child whose life, death, and resurrection would change the world.

For two thousand years the story of Christmas has been told and retold, preached and sung about. It has been represented by the titans of art and by the purveyors of mass-produced lawn figures. We celebrate it every year with Christmas trees and lights, gifts and cards, carols and hymns.

Even if you did not go to church growing up, you’re probably familiar with the story. You know the locale—a manger in Bethlehem. You know the cast of characters— Mary and Joseph, the angels and shepherds, the wise men and King Herod. You may know plot details—the census, the long journey, the overcrowded inn.

And yet, as is often the case, the story’s very familiarity may keep us from fully grasping its riches. We think, Well, yes, I know that story, as its depth and nuance escape us.

There is much more to the Christmas story than meets the eye. There are details we may have missed entirely. And there are certainly a few places where the picture you have in your mind’s eye is actually wrong!

In this book I’ve written four weeks of daily devotions so that, during the longest Advent, you will have a reading for every day of the season. In a shorter Advent season you can double up on a couple of these readings or continue for a few days after Christmas. Each week of devotions begins with a brief introduction and a page for your own thoughts, and the week ends with a few travel notes describing landmarks along the way. I am confident that you will discover as I did that this true story never ceases to amaze.

I invite you to take this journey with me, walking the road to Bethlehem from the peasant village of Nazareth to the little town of Bethlehem. We’ll talk together about Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the shepherds, and the wise men, always trying to understand the significance of the child whose birth brought them all together. My hope and prayer is that you come to see this familiar story in a new way and that its message might change you, as it has changed countless others in the years since that holy night so long ago.

WEEK ONE

Nazareth

It’s been said that the Holy Land is the fifth Gospel—that in walking its streets and tracing its terrain you have a chance to see the biblical story with fresh eyes and hear it with fresh ears. During this Advent season, we will visit four locations in the Holy Land, one per week. Then we will reflect each day on the events that took place in that location and their meaning for our lives.

This week we will visit Nazareth, the hometown of Mary and later of Jesus. To get there, we’ll travel through the nearby town of Sepphoris, from which you can make out the tiny village of Nazareth to the south. Sepphoris had existed for hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. There were several main streets in Sepphoris with shops on either side.

Scholars believe that Nazareth was named after the Hebrew word netzer. The word can mean either the branch of a tree or a shoot that comes up from the stump of a tree. In the Book of Isaiah, the prophet said that God would raise up a leader, a shoot, a branch that would give new life to the people of Israel. Of course, Christians understand that leader to be Jesus. Little did the founders of Nazareth know that one of their own children would be the shoot that God would raise up!

The town of Nazareth was looked upon with some disdain. We hear that disdain in John 1:46, thirty years after the birth of Jesus, when Philip told Nathanael that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. Nathanael replied, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

The site that Christians visit as Mary’s childhood home in Nazareth—at least the lower level of it—is a cave. Seeing this modest dwelling reminds us that when choosing the mother of the Messiah, God went to a tiny village considered insignificant by most, likely named after the hope of a Messiah, and invited a young woman of very humble means to bear the Christ. It was in this cave, tradition says, that Gabriel came to Mary and announced that she was with child. It was here, in this place, that the Word became flesh in Mary’s womb.

Mary lived in a little, out-of-the-way town. She was uneducated and probably came from a poor family who may well have been servants in Sepphoris, a larger town near Nazareth. She was likely about thirteen years old. As she stood by the spring of Nazareth, listening to the sound of water bubbling forth from the rock, she was no better prepared for the visit of an angel than any of us might be. You can imagine that after hearing the words of Gabriel, she tried desperately to take it all in. Yet, with her head spinning, filled with questions, uncertain of what it all meant, Mary said yes. Her response to the angel was simple and profound. She said, Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word (Luke 1:38).

As we begin our journey through the story of Jesus’ birth, my hope and prayer for you is that each week you will come to learn more about who God is, who we’re called to be, and who the child was who would be born to Mary. This week especially, ponder the way God chooses unlikely characters to bring about great purposes.

Adapted from Chapter 1 of The Journey: Walking the Road to Bethlehem (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2011).

1. The Genealogy of Jesus

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,