Twas the Fright before Christmas: Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve
In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone
throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. 2 This
first enrollment occurred when Quirinius governed Syria. 3 Everyone
went to their own cities to be enrolled. 4 Since
Joseph belonged to David’s house and family line, he went up from the city of
Nazareth in Galilee to David’s city, called Bethlehem, in Judea. 5 He
went to be enrolled together with Mary, who was promised to him in marriage and
who was pregnant. 6 While they were there, the time
came for Mary to have her baby. 7 She gave birth to
her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger,
because there was no place for them in the guestroom.
8 Nearby shepherds were
living in the fields, guarding their sheep at night. 9 The Lord’s angel stood before them, the Lord’s glory shone
around them, and they were terrified.
10 The angel said,
“Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you—wonderful, joyous news for all
people. 11 Your savior is born today in David’s
city. He is Christ the Lord. 12 This is a sign for
you: you will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger.” 13 Suddenly
a great assembly of the heavenly forces was with the angel praising God. They
said, 14 “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth
peace among those whom he favors.”
15 When the angels
returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s
go right now to Bethlehem and see what’s happened. Let’s confirm what the Lord
has revealed to us.” 16 They went quickly and
found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. 17 When
they saw this, they reported what they had been told about this child. 18 Everyone
who heard it was amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 Mary
committed these things to memory and considered them carefully. 20 The
shepherds returned home, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and
seen. Everything happened just as they had been told. (CEB)
My father is an amateur astronomer—one of note, actually, who’s
held various offices with astronomy organizations in several places in the
eastern U.S. He tried his best to get me
interested, but unfortunately astronomy is best done at night and I have never
been much of a night owl. I have many
memories of him waking me at three in the morning to bundle up—there were never
enough layers for the kind of cold that happens at three in the morning, no
matter the time of year—and drive out to the middle of some field where it was
dark enough that he could set up his telescope and tell me the map of the sky
that I, still sleepily wishing he had let me be, would never remember with any
clarity.
One thing I do
remember, though, is just how dark those dark spots would be. True dark is a hard thing to find in our electric
world, such that we have dedicated dark sky parks that are protected from light
pollution. After spending an hour or two
out in that kind of dark, the light of even the overhead car bulb was
startling. Noises other than my father’s
voice were almost overwhelming after that kind of silence. Reintegrating into the world was a process, especially
since I would almost always fall asleep again on the car ride back.
We come again tonight
to the Christmas story of improbable travels and a human God and a messy birth
that smashed right through everyone’s expectations, and here in Luke’s account
we leave the holy family for a moment to detour into a scene with some
shepherds “guarding their sheep at night.”
They’re chilling with the night watch in a dark truer than any we who
live after the Industrial Revolution will ever know in the not-quite-silence of
the outdoors with the wind and the soft snuffles of any sheep nearby, and suddenly
“The Lord’s angel stood before them, the Lord’s glory shone around them, and
they were terrified.”
Rightly
so! Biblical angels aren’t usually
chiseled blond German men but multi-limbed unearthly creatures with too many
eyes, so it’s a bit unsurprising that the shepherds weren't calm when one
popped up right in front of them; the Greek here is phobos, from which
we get “phobia,” so this is an incapacitating fear. In fact, most angelic appearances in Scripture—including
this one—start with “do not be afraid” because the person being visited is very
much afraid. When the holy crashes into
our lives, it is often something that causes at least a bit of panic.
As if one wasn’t
enough, suddenly the whole sky was filled with gryphon-like creatures singing
glory over this previously-quiet patch of grass. It’s decidedly more unnerving than my father
waking me out of a deep sleep; this is a shift to a Mannheim Steamroller
concert without any warning at all.
I can only
imagine how loud the sheep got about it, let alone the shepherds.
However, after
this impromptu nightmare, the shepherds do not run into the hills
screaming. They look at each other, shrug,
and say, “Let’s go check this out.” Or,
as the Common English Bible says, “Let’s go right now to Bethlehem and see
what’s happened. Let’s confirm what the Lord has revealed to us.”
We don’t get
an explanation for what decided them, although I have to admit I would also be
curious about seeing a kid who merited an invitation by the heavenly host. What we do get is their faith to pack up
their sheep and head off to Bethlehem and see this child—and then tell others
about Him, this savior born in David’s city Who is Christ the Lord. The shepherds get it because they got scared,
got the news, got past the fear, and got to the place where they were called to
be.
We who have
been around the Church for a minute get so used to this story, which is an unfortunate
reality about anything we hear over and over.
We may think of the shepherds as the adorably soft Linus from Peanuts
with his blue blankie over his head, hearing the word of the angels and saying
yes, this makes sense, let’s go to Bethlehem.
In fact,
everything about the inclusion of the shepherds in this yearly-told story is off. Even beyond the fact that this visitation was
anything but soft, Bishop Craig Satterlee reminds us that, “By the time of
Jesus, shepherding had become a profession most likely to be filled from the
bottom rung of the social ladder, by persons who could not find what was
regarded as decent work. Society stereotyped shepherds as liars, degenerates,
and thieves. The testimony of shepherds was not admissible in court, and many
towns had ordinances barring shepherds from their city limits. The religious
establishment took a particularly dim view of shepherds since the regular
exercise of shepherds’ duties kept them from observing the Sabbath and rendered
them ritually unclean. The Pharisees classed shepherds with tax collectors and
prostitutes, persons who were ‘sinners’ by virtue of their vocation.”[1]
Having been
born into the human world, God doesn’t show up at the king’s court or the Temple
to announce Himself. God doesn’t even go
to some nice and respectable shopkeeper who is president of the PTA and
volunteers once a month. God goes to the
people who don’t fit, who live on the margins literally and figuratively, and says
“you are the ones who need to know that the world just changed.” This scene of angels and shepherds is
literally the spectrum of opposites in terms of messengers, of evangelists,
speaking the good news into reality. The
holiest and the lowest meet on a hillside and God says yes, this is how things
should be.
We gather, virtually
and physically, on yet another weird Christmas Eve. Hopefully you haven’t had any celestial
creatures show up and deliver a frightening, impromptu concert for you, but still,
this service isn’t like the services we’re used to having—I know full well how
much people wish we could be singing all the Christmas hymns and hugging each
other in greeting and getting too warm in an overly-full sanctuary. I wish that, too, more than I can express to
you. But we are mindful yet again of
protecting each other, of being cautious now so that we can be with our
families tomorrow and next week, of recognizing that this new pattern of living
is uncertain and scary and not going away. This kind of care is what we are called to do,
we who are told to love our neighbor as ourselves, we who are shown by this
story that God respects those we consider lowly even more than the ones we
consider worth protecting.
And as we gather and find a new way
to worship, we hear again this story of a God Who does not wait for
permission or ritual to show up. God
doesn’t need our hymns to be God. God
doesn’t need our hugs to be God. God doesn’t
need our sanctuaries, full or empty, to be God.
We need those, for sure, we who are relational people with
patterns and habits. But God will work
with any willing heart in any way available—and some that aren’t available
yet. God will be born in a human body in
a nowhere town and announce it to people nobody wants to hear on a night so
dark, caring not at all for how much it scares the sheep.
We have a lot
going on right now, we who are not shepherds here in the 21st
century. Perhaps, as we end the season
of Advent and begin the season of Christmas, God is asking you to start
something new, or to look at something in a new light, or simply to adjust to
that startlingly bright car light after staring at the night sky for a few
hours. Whatever it is, it is okay if it’s
scary. This Scripture doesn’t try to erase
the fact that fear is part of this life of faith; we, like the shepherds, will
get scared.
But will we,
like the shepherds, acknowledge the fear and then follow God through it? Will we take this Christmas story to heart
and go to the people who may not be respectable and say “these are God’s beloved,
too”? We are called to this strange life
of healing the broken, of feeding the hungry, of releasing the captive, of working
for peace, of loving in the way we are loved: on a bone-deep level that says
you, child of God, are of worth enough that angels will come and sing
terrifyingly loudly to you.
The holy is
not always soft, or cuddly, and it is most certainly not tame. But neither is this call to faith dangerous in
a way that decreases us; rather, it is an invitation to a life that increases
us, that pulls us into life abundant and everlasting, that says you, just as
you are, are welcome.
May we have the courage to step out
after the fear, going to Bethlehem and then to the world to say look, here is
the savior, the One Who is Christ the Lord.
Glory to God. Amen.
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