“It’s a Shepherd
Thing”
I grew up in a family that loved story-telling. My grandfather with his bright red hair and twinkling blue eyes would tell we grandkids wonderful tales, sometimes accompanying himself on the fiddle or whistling a tune the characters were singing. My sister and brother and I told each other stories as we climbed trees that became the decks of pirate’s ships, or sailed among the stars with the astronauts. I studied drama in college to go on telling stories from the stage, and giving the story-telling a new twist for my family. I suppose my favorite period of story-telling was when my children were little. We’d read books together every night. Often I’d go to their schools and read in their classrooms, or tell tales in the library. Sometimes I’d just make up stories out of my head, or “child-size” a book I was reading. I still love a good yarn, and am content to listen, read, watch or just tell the tale!
Today
I’d like to tell you a simple, unadorned tale of some shaggy, unkempt, forsaken
shepherds in a rugged, desolate field outside of some God-forsaken little
village, in the furthest backwater branch of an undesirable corner of a great
empire.
The shepherds in our story are a sorry bunch. You could hardly find a scruffier, more
rag-tag, down in the mouth, dirty, desolate, disconsolate gang of ruffians in
the whole planet. These shepherds were
the lowest of the low, and they knew it very well. They had been run out of town for who knows
what, and they had found a living taking care of someone else’s sheep. In that place and at that time there was no
lower rung in their culture than to be a shepherd. For in their culture, it was understood that
these were poor men, abandoned by society, and left to their own defenses
against the world around them. No
soldiers protected them from strangers.
No watchman rang an alarm to guard against the wolf or the lion for
them. They were on their own. It was just the sheep and them - just a few
shepherds watching over a flock of wooly-headed sheep.
Our story opens in the darkness of a lonesome night. The bleating of the sheep is the harmony to
the shepherd’s haunting midnight song.
Maybe the ewes and lambs are keeping time to the off-key melody, nodding
their heads and swishing their tails.
It’s comforting for them to hear that voice, and those voices in the
darkness. The shepherds share the
song. Around the flock, the animals hear
the voices of the men and settle down to rest.
The men move slowly around, keeping an eye out for predators, dreading
the moment when they might meet snarling maws filled with tearing, slashing
teeth. Fear is ever with our shepherds
at night. For the night is when hungry
beasts prey on the helpless sheep.
And yet, into the dark stillness of that lonesome far away pasture there
came a vivid presence; blinding, shocking, and terrifying. It was a SUCH a light - brilliant, full of
brightness and holiness! God had sent an
angel to the most unimaginable of persons.
It was a holy, pure and glorious angel visiting the lowest of the low -
shepherds out in a field. Who could have
imagined such a thing? Certainly no king
in his palace, or priest in his temple would have guessed that an angel from
God would appear to a shepherd, and especially not to these shepherds. But there it was, and there they were, face
to face. Now I don’t know about you, but
the shepherds did what I think was a very sensible thing to do, they fell down
and covered their heads.
And then this angel did what angels always seem to do when confronting
human beings. And frankly I think it’s a
good idea as well. He said: “Don’t be afraid”. Well, that makes it all better, doesn’t
it…? Actually maybe it would, a
little. That the angel spoke, and that
they understood was comforting to a degree.
At least they could communicate.
Yet before they could actually gather their wits about them, the angel
continued talking. It said that it had
brought “good news of great joy to all people.”
What was this? This was the kind
of language announcing something that should be shouted in a palace courtyard
or a marketplace at the least, and surely not to a bunch of abandoned,
marginalized, back-woods shepherds!
“A
baby is born. A baby who is a Savior, he
is the Messiah, and he is the Lord! And
not just born, but born right here in our village, the home of our great
ancestral king, David, who started out as a shepherd just like us!” “You’ll know it’s him, because you’ll find
him wrapped in cloth strips, and lying asleep in a manger.” Oh I hope you hear a song like this some
time. No emperor’s new-born heir was
ever greeted with a greater or more joyous praise anthem than that song which
erupted from the throats of thousands of shining, singing angels who suddenly
appeared and joined in joyful anthem.
“Oh glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth let there be peace
among all humankind, with whom God is pleased.”
Just as suddenly as it had begun, the angelic visit ended. The darkness enveloped our shepherds again,
deep, warm, soft and embracing. The
shepherds, to a man, had never felt like this before. Nothing as enticing and lovely as the angel’s
song had ever touched their ears or hearts before. There had never been anything so terrifying
and bewildering and exciting as the message of joyous news that had just been
entrusted to them.
Nothing would do for any of them but that they should leave the sheep
and go into the town to see for themselves this beautiful thing. The poor sheep would have to take care of
themselves for a little while, because our shepherds HAD to go to town in a
hurry. They ran all the way. They searched in every spare room, stable and
cave in the neighborhood until they found the baby. And there he was with his mother and
father. It was just as the angel had
said it would be. There was a manger and
wrapping cloths! And they whispered and
stared and finally knelt.
You and I wouldn’t have recognized them
after their visit with the baby. Their
faces shone, they had wings on their feet, and their voices soared in
praise. To be honest if they had only
known it, they looked an awful lot like the angel choir. They told everyone they met what they had seen. They knocked on doors, they sang in the
street, they praised God, they shouted His praise. People shouted back at them to quiet down,
but nothing, NOTHING could stop them.
Their voices rang out with praise for what God had done and what they
had been told about this child. And the
people in the town were amazed. What
could have truly happened to stir up these lowlife hooligans like this?
I’ll tell you a little behind the scenes thing though, the mother, who’d
had an angel visit herself nine months or so ago, listened to the shepherd’s
shouts, and thought about it quietly.
And she smiled a little to herself.
The shepherds were never the same.
They might be the lowest of the low, but they had seen a new thing. They had been visited by angels, and they had
seen a baby born whom the angels had declared to be the new Messiah. Oh glory!
Oh joy! Oh hallelujah!
I
love that story. We’ve all likely heard
it many times, in maybe many ways. It’s
a simple little story, unadorned and plain.
Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth to a humble young couple, forced,
with no privacy into a spare room, or a cave or a stable because of
overcrowding. The baby is wrapped with
strips of cloth, like any other baby of the day born to the poor would have
been, to keep his body straight and to ensure proper growth. A feeding trough served the young mother as a
crib for her baby. It’s all so bare. No kingly entourage to support what she had
been told was to be the birth of David’s heir.
No fanfare of trumpets to announce a Messiah had been born for her. She had to be told by others that angels had
sung. She was busy having a baby by
herself in a stable, with perhaps just her husband and the barnyard livestock
for help and company. How odd that the
mother of the Messiah didn’t hear the angel’s glorious song of praise! How strange that the ones who heard the song,
and who attended her and her baby were the lowliest of all, these outcasts, the
shepherds! How bewildering that the sign
to the shepherds of such a great and glorious thing is a baby born to the poor,
and cradled in a feeding trough.
I
wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t get it.
I know we’re all busy. Yet here
we are in church in this holy, yet cluttered and flustered season. We have jobs and deadlines. We have children to get to school, payrolls
to meet, bills to pay, houses to clean, bosses to please, food to prepare and
eat. We are professors and students,
management and labor. We run businesses
and homes. We are bartenders and
stockbrokers, waitresses and board members.
We are customer service representatives, and we are lawyers. We are doctors and bus drivers. We are all things to all people, and nothing
to anyone. We are busy and busted,
lonely and full of things to do, homeless and surrounded by our “stuff”. We are who we are. We do what we do. We don’t have time for mangers and shepherds
and angel songs.
Yet I would like to suggest that perhaps we ARE those shepherds who
heard an angel singing in the midst of their long dark night. Out on that star-studded night time landscape
of Judea, we too stand with our sheep, lonely and alone in our day to day life,
seeking joyous news to keep us afloat in an unforgiving and frightening world
of stock market crashes, and terrorist attacks.
There are real pirates out there, and drugs, and tickets for
speeding. Government fails us time and
again, and our houses aren’t worth what they used to be worth. Our money doesn’t buy what it used to
buy. And our kids are asking questions
we would NEVER have asked out loud of our parents. The wolves seem ever closer to our lives and
our doors.
But the angels sing. The song is
one of hope for us out there in that pasture.
WE are the ones to whom the angels sing.
NOT the emperor over in Rome, although he sure could have used it too,
but US. We shepherds, we outcasts, we
lowly, we plain old folks in our everyday lives have had an angel’s song, SUNG
TO US too.
The message of course is that the King has come. He’s come for all of us right where we are in
the midst of our “us-ness.” The angel
said that God is glorified in the birth of that small child in the stable who
is to be our Savior and Lord. The angel
announced that God is also pleased with humankind, and that there will be
peace.
So
I offer that to you today. Peace in the
midst of turmoil. Peace in our lives, in
our hearts and in our fellowship. I urge
you to seek that peace in your relationships, at home, in your extended family,
in your place of work or school. Receive
that joyful peace that the angel’s good news brought to those lonely shepherds
that night so long ago. And in the
knowledge of the great joy of that good news, I invite you to find rest! Amen.