This Changing World: Luke 2:8-16
Christmas Eve
Now in that
same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their
flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of
the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to
them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for
all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is
the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child
wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with
the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to
God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to
one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken
place, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they went with haste and
found Mary and Joseph and the child lying in the manger. (NRSVue)
I had three
different beginnings to this, I think, that I scrapped one after the other—the
Christmas story is a bit worn, after all, and it’s hard to add anything beyond
“it’s cool that Jesus was born” or “God is with you” or “please don’t actually
think the holy family was tossed out of every inn in Bethlehem.” These things have been said, and they’re
important but, as our Advent series said, this is a weary world; what does this
have to do with rejoicing?
And then I
woke up with John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” stuck in my head,
which is interesting considering I haven’t listened to John Mayer music in
probably ten years. The song is a bit of
a bop, in contrast to the arc of the lyrics that the singer and his friends
feel powerless in the world. Even though
they want things to change, they don’t actually do anything about it. “Now if we had the power / To bring our
neighbors home from war / They would've never missed a Christmas / No more
ribbons on their door,” says one verse, but “It's not that we don't care / We
just know that the fight ain't fair” he insists.[1]
The song came
out in 2006 but holds up well, not least because we come to this Christmas with
an awful lot of things happening in the world that everybody has some opinion
about changing. But the fight still
ain’t fair, we want to bring our neighbors home from war, and we’re still
waiting on the world to change. So we come to Christmas Eve, after four
weeks of waiting, and we talk about this world-changing event of a birth...yet the
fight still ain’t fair, and our neighbors are still off at war, and we care so
much but maybe the best a preacher can do is say that God is with you and the
hymns are lovely.
“Now in that same region there were
shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” As adorable as the shepherds and sheep are in
kids’ Christmas pageants, shepherds in Jesus’ time were not considered adorable
at all. They were the farmhands, the
blue-collar field workers who stank like their animals and wandered all over
the fields outside the city. They were
uncouth, unwelcome, unimportant in the social scheme of things, ritually and
physically unclean, eyed with suspicion at the best of times.[2]
And then “an angel of the Lord
stood before them.”
Picture this:
a night darker than pitch because electricity hasn’t been invented yet, only
the stars and the moon to light the brown-green hills rolling beneath you. The sheep are mostly asleep, snuffling to
themselves as you and your coworkers wait vigil in the quiet of the night. The city looms off in the distance, stone
walls reminding you of how outside you really are.
And a person-shaped
thing who shines from within shows up out of nowhere, a floodlight in a world
where fires were sometimes too bright, the sky bending around the glory they
carried. “And they were terrified” is
pretty mild, really. Rev. John Petty
writes, “Whenever the word ‘angel’ appears in scripture, I think: ‘window into heaven.’ Angels tell what is happening from the
perspective of God. The shepherds are
bathed in light (perilampo)—the glory (doxa) of the Lord! The shepherds were absolutely terrified—the
word phobos is used twice. What’s
more, it's mega.”[3] There’s a meme about angels appearing that says,
“when they say ‘be not afraid,’ they probably mean ‘please stop screaming.’”
Which is why
it’s all the more remarkable that, once the angel delivers the glad news of
great joy and this whole angelic choir shows up to sing glory—a whole other
level of frightening, really—the shepherds look at each other and say, “Let’s
go and see.”
These
nobodies who understand exactly how little the city wants them, who are still
feeling their hearts pound with the adrenaline of fear, who have a whole flock
of sheep to consider say let’s go.
They were not waiting for the world to change, to accept them where they
were; the angel said go, so they went.
Despite their fear, despite their awareness of what kind of welcome
they’d receive, despite everything that said “stay,” they went. And they were the bearers of the message to
Mary and Joseph that God was at work in way more places than just their little
manger scene.
The Christmas
story has been told so often that it is domesticated, quaint, cute. That has its merits, not least because a
five-year-old dressed like a sheep really is adorable—but the Christmas story
is brave, radical, incredible, strange. The
courage of these shepherds to participate when God invited them to something
amazing and socially, possibly physically dangerous forces us to consider how
we, ourselves, may be waiting for the world to change instead of stepping out
to change it, to change with it.
The writer
and theologian C.S. Lewis writes of how, as a child, he prayed for a miracle
when his mother was dying but nothing happened.
“I think the truth,” he
says, “is that the belief in to which I had hypnotized myself was itself too
irreligious for its failure to cause any religious revolution. I had approached God, or my idea of God,
without love, without awe, even without fear.
He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as
Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when he had done what was
required of Him I supposed He would simply—well, go away. It never crossed my mind that the tremendous
contact which I solicited should have any consequences beyond restoring the status
quo. I imagine that a ‘faith’ of
this kind is often generated in children and that its disappointment is of no
religious importance, just as the things believed in, if they could happen and
be only as the child pictures them, would be of no religious importance
either.”[4]
The
God of the Christmas story isn’t a patient on-call magician we can call in to
change things for us and none of the characters God invites get to be that
passive, either. From Mary to the
shepherds to Herod himself, everyone has to choose involvement and recognize
that the God Who invites them isn’t cuddly, or cute, or a magician who only
appears when it’s convenient. Jesus was
born in all the ways people of power thought were useless and foolish, and the
angels invited everyone who didn’t seem to matter to witness the story. And everyone had to choose to say yes, even
when it was so overwhelming that they were terrified.
So
we, too, come to the comforting familiarity of lit trees and centuries-old
carols and we, too, have to decide who we are going to be in this story,
whether we are going to hold our fears and our courage together and go
anyway. Like the shepherds, our world has
regimented social rules and emperors demanding allegiance and a million moments
of violence and manipulation and authority—and God appears to us in ways that
may be terrifically frightening to say stop waiting for the world to change;
I am changing it. Come with Me.
As
we celebrate this birth yet again, the world around us waits to see what kind
of people we are. Will we be scared but
willing to go and see? Will we hear that
God has a tale of great joy and glad tidings and go and tell others about
it? Will we be willing to take our
adrenaline-beating hearts and be God’s changemakers in the world?
May
we have that kind of faith, be that kind of brave, and follow the God Who calls
us to hold fear with courage and hope, standing here as the world changes us,
changes with us. Amen.
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