YARROW REVISITED1 Let us now go even unto Bethlehem.-S. LUKE ii. 15. THE text is suitable to the season we are come to. The time draws night the Birth of Christ.' A Christian's thoughts cannot at this season but fly, first of all, to His coming, 'Which to the cottage and the crown Brought tidings of salvation down,' which hallowed motherhood and hallowed childhood, which ennobled poverty, which breathed of peace, by which was manifested the infinite love of God to men, and men were taught to love one another, and to hope for heaven. 'O poor humble human race With the Majesty of God Fast united now!' Our first note, as we reassemble in this renovated house of God, must be the note of thankfulness for Christ and Christianity: to God, Who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see that Thing which hath come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. Bethlehem has no rival among the birthplaces of earth. Out of her hath come the Governor that shall rule God's people Israel: Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. 1 Preached at Yarrow Church on December 14, 1906, for the Commemoration Service. But, my brethren, while Bethlehem shines in this incomparable lustre, it has some minor glories also, prelusive of, and, in a sense, preparatory to, its crowning honour, and fitting it (so far) to be the scene of the birth of the Son of God as the Son of Man: as truly Man henceforward as He had, from all eternity, been God. The Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. It is as heretical, it is as fatal to the power of the Christian Gospel, to deny or to forget the fulness and completeness of our Saviour's Manhood as it is to minimise the glory of His eternal Deity. He took not upon Him the nature of Angels, but He took upon Him the seed of Abraham. He was made Man. He is Man now, 'God and Man in two entire distinct natures, and one Person for ever.' Man in all things, sin only excepted. There is nothing in us that is truly human which is not in Him-the heart of man, the mind of man, the flesh of man-every tender feeling, every holy affection, every heroic thought. He shared in all human sorrow. He glows with all human sympathy. It is there above, in Him, our Lord and our God. He was laid a human babe in His mother's arms. He appears our Human Intercessor at the right hand of the Majesty on High. There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus. The spot, accordingly, which He selected for His birthplace was one which, though in itself of small account, had been touched and sanctified, and had a marvellous wealth of human associations-associations alike with homely toil and lofty courage, with joy and sorrow, with love and death, which had been garlanded, moreover, with undying poesy. In the great association of all, Bethlehem has no peer, and cannot have one. There is no son of earth or heaven to be named in comparison with the Lord Jesus. He is the Only Begotten of the Father, the Only Saviour of But in those other and far lower things of which I have spoken which made Bethlehem so suitable a place men. for the Lord's Nativity, I do think we may say, with all humility, that Yarrow, in its way, is the one of all the parishes in Scotland that comes nearest Bethlehem. Let me call your attention for a little to some points of this resemblance; and then perhaps I may be able at the close to shew you yet another point-and that of the greatest consequence-in which not Yarrow only but every church in Christendom, is now, by God's grace, a Bethlehem, where He may be found who was laid within Bethlehem's crib. I First, then, Bethlehem and Yarrow meet together in their simplicity and lowliness. Bethlehem was always small-its chief inhabitant in the early days of the Hebrew conquest a prosperous farmer; its most famous native (in the times before Christ) in his early days a shepherd lad, keeping those few sheep in the wilderness. And even after that shepherd boy had been exalted to be king, and had proved the founder of a long and sacred dynasty, Bethlehem was still, in Micah's day, small and unimportant-little among the thousands of Judah. And so is Yarrow. This parish, with all its fame, has never been the home of what the world calls wealth or grandeur. It is not for the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eye, or the pride of life, that people come to see it. Let these things enter it, and its charm would be gone. It is well in these days, when so many are seeking great things for themselves, and the old contentedness with little is in so many quarters disappearing, to be reminded that, after all, those outward things are not the things which matter; that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth; that it is not what we have that signifies, but what we are. II A second point of contact between Bethlehem and Yarrow is the extraordinary richness of both of them in the associations of human love and human sorrow, of the heroic and the mournful. Take Bethlehem. Its first mention in Scripture is as the scene of sorrow, the death of Rachel, Jacob's wife, so beautiful, so brave, so loving and so much beloved. They journeyed, we read, from Bethel, and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour. And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also. And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing for she died) that she called his name Ben-oni (son of my sorrow) but his father called him Benjamin (son of my right hand). And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave-the first tombstone in the Church's history -that is the pillar of Rachel's grave unto this day. It was a noble death. She passed away the victim of her high desire to build up the house of Israel; and it never was forgotten. Years afterwards, when her husband was on his own death-bed, far away in Egypt, every detail of the scene comes back to him. As for me, he says, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was but a little way to come to Ephrath, and I buried her there in the way of Ephrath, the same is Bethlehem. Centuries after, Jeremiah figures her weeping for her children cut off by the oppressor, and in the New Testament S. Matthew takes up the strain in his history of the massacre of the Holy Innocents by Herod Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. So is it here at Yarrow. Your earliest local memorial is a pillar too—a tombstone, the venerable monument to the two sons of Nude the Generous, that valiant British king, the friend and protector of that great missionary who founded Glasgow. Nude, the King of Cambria, and Aidan, the King of the Scots, fought side by side at Arthuret in Cumberland, and smote the pagans. In the same great conflict Nude's two sons fought and fell: But, fighting and falling, they yet preserved their land— their father's kingdom of Strathclyde from passing into the hands of the heathen Angles; and thus they forged with their blood one link in the chain which kept Glasgow Christian, and made Glasgow Scottish, and helped, though less directly, to determine that the Merse and Lothians, with the Rock of Edwin, should also fall to the Kings of Scotland. There is the pillar of their grave unto this day. The historian of that long line of heroes, who built up our independence and our freedom, must keep a niche for these gallant youths. III The next historic passage of which Bethlehem became the scene is that recorded in the most exquisite of pastorals, the Book of Ruth. Ruth was a Moabitess of a race regarding whom it was written in the Law, an Ammonite and a Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. But no law can keep out faith and love. All things are possible to him—or to her-that believeth. Entreat me not to leave thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried. Ruth came in; and a full reward was given her of the Lord God of Israel under whose wings she had come to trust. She became the ancestress of David and (after the flesh) of Christ: and her name is mentioned by S. Matthew in the Book of His generation: Boaz begat Obed, of Ruth. Long, I trust, may fidelity and generous hospitality and simple-hearted piety and godliness flourish in the harvest-fields of this fair valley! Our trade in the larger centres is rapidly becoming heartless. The widow and the stranger are pushed to the wall. There is nothing left for them to glean. The relation of master and servant has become in a large measure soulless― of companies on the one side and mere hands upon the other. Let it not be so among you. From your fields |