Be An Angel!

Luke 2:8-20

December 23/24, 2011 (Christmas Candlelight) • Portage First UMC

Cathy went into labor in the middle of the night. I hadn’t been asleep very long when she woke me up to tell me it was time. I knew what that meant! And so we hurried around, got to the hospital and got all settled in. I learned that night that labor is nothing like it is on television—you know, where the woman gives birth in just a few minutes. No, there are long hours of waiting, and there, at Ball Hospital in the middle of the night, we waited and waited and waited and watched as the hours ticked by. You see, I wanted to tell someone, but I was also smart enough not to make any calls at 2 a.m. So we waited—until about 6, and then I started calling. We called our parents first, then some friends and my senior pastor, and then anyone else we could think of who might want to know the news. Christopher wasn’t even born yet, and we couldn’t wait to tell someone.

But when the baby is the Son of God—who do you tell first? And who does the telling? Over the last few weeks, we’ve been journeying through the Christmas story, beginning in Nazareth, and traveling to such places as Bethlehem and Ein Karem. But tonight our journey brings us back to Bethlehem, back to Joseph’s hometown, back to his family’s home and to a stable tucked under his family’s house. Mary and Joseph have made the long, 10-day journey from Nazareth to respond to a Roman-ordered census, and now at some point after their arrival, the time has come for the baby to be born. I imagine Mary would have preferred to be back home in Nazareth for the birth, but babies don’t arrive on schedule; they care little for what else is going on in your life at the time. When Christopher was born, I was just five days away from being in charge of a major community-wide hunger relief fundraiser. When Rachel was born, it was Maundy Thursday, Holy Week, three days before Easter. Babies care little about our schedules; they come when they want to come, and the Son of God is no exception. He comes when they are in Bethlehem, far from Mary’s home and family, with no real way to let anyone know. No phones, no e-mail, no Facebook, no text messages. But God went one better than those methods of communication. And the first people he told were about the most unlikely.

In words that are famous to anyone who’s at least watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, Luke tells us that the first people to hear the good news were shepherds, living in the fields around Bethlehem, keeping watch over their flocks by night—because it was lambing season, the time of year when baby lambs were born, a time when they had to keep constant watch over the sheep in case any of them had trouble giving birth (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 48). Shepherds may not have been at the bottom of the social ladder, but they were close. Typically, they were uneducated and poor and considered religiously unclean. Rabbis had even gone so far as to ban them from testifying in court; their word was no good. They smelled of dirty sheep, and people disliked them because they often allowed their sheep to graze on private property, on their neighbors’ property (Card 48; Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 35; Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 113). You would not have wanted your sister or daughter marrying a shepherd (Kalas, The Christmas People, pg. 21). In the midst of a lowly and humble village, these were among the lowest of the low. So when the Son of God is born, God chooses to announce the birth first to people whom no one liked, no one listened to, and no one cared about.

And that’s interesting, because the Old Testament is full of positive references to shepherds. One of the most beautiful is one we often read at funerals to remind us of God’s comfort. You probably know it well: “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing” (Psalm 23:1). Somewhere along the way, people forgot that one of the ways God relates to his people is as a shepherd, and I wonder if that’s at least part of the reason why this birth was announced first to these low-class, forgotten laborers. God was, in some sense, reminding the people: what they do, the way they care for and nurture their sheep, that’s the way I care for you. God is a shepherd—and sometimes we still treat him like those Bethlehem villagers treated the ones out in the field. We don’t listen to what he says. We treat him as uneducated when we act as if we know better than him. And we resent his intrusion into our lives—we will call you when we want you, God. Otherwise, keep your distance. The Lord is a shepherd—and we often treat him that way.

To these Bethlehem shepherds, God sends angels—at first just one, but eventually a “host,” a whole bunch of angels. Throughout these Advent messages, we’ve been trying to peel back the layers of tradition and assumption to see the story the way it really happened, and one of those layers concerns the angels. We picture them (in fact, in our nativity sets, they’re always pictured) with wings, flying about in the night sky. But the word for “angel” simply means “messenger.” Angels are someone with a message, and in Scripture, they normally appear as ordinary people. In fact, in the letter to the Hebrews, we’re told we might even “entertain” an angel without being aware of it (13:2). I remember one icy night when we lived in Kentucky, and Cathy and I and a friend were driving back from Lexington to Wilmore when we hit an icy patch and slid off the road. We got the car well stuck in the ditch. So we put Cathy behind the wheel and Rob and I tried to push the car out, to no avail. All of a sudden, a man came up behind us and asked if we needed help. Of course, we said, and he joined his strength with ours and pretty soon the car was out of the ditch and headed the right way. “God bless you,” he said, and walked away. When we looked, he was gone. There were no cars nearby, no houses lit up. We had no idea where he came from, and to this day I believe he was angel, but he had no wings, no glowing presence. He appeared to us just as a man. In Luke’s story, there is some sort of the sense of God’s glory, God’s presence, enough to make the shepherds tremble a bit as the angel delivers God’s message to them: “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (2:10-12).

Now, the implication is that the shepherds were to go find the child, to visit him. Why else would the angels give such specific signs? But shepherds, you remember, weren’t welcome in town. They weren’t welcome in respectable homes. If they tried to visit this child who is the Savior, the Messiah, the royal figure they’ve been waiting on for centuries, there’s no way they’d be let in—at least that’s what they must have been thinking. How could they possibly go visit such a dignitary when they knew they wouldn’t be welcomed (Bailey 35)? But, the angel had said the baby would be wrapped in cloths—probably scraps of cloth, rags—and he would be lying in a manger. Not a bed, not a crib, not a cradle, a manger. Something cattle ate out of. Rags and a feeding trough—those are signs for shepherds. Not only a way for them to know they had the right baby, but also a way for them to know that the baby was just like them. He wasn’t born in a wealthy home; he had to have been in a peasant’s home, perhaps one like theirs. Maybe they wouldn’t be turned away. And so they work up their courage and say, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15). And in that simple statement, they show confidence that God has not forgotten them. This baby has come for them, for lowly shepherds, for forgotten people. He is their savior, too.

So what does it mean, then, that Jesus is savior, as the angel said, “for the people” (2:10)? For him to be savior, it means he’s saving “all the people”  (including us) from something. Those shepherds, and many others in the first century, expected the Messiah to be a military man, one to run off the Romans and set up a throne in Jerusalem. He would rule like the kings of old. But it became obvious, as this baby grew up, that Jesus didn’t come to do that, nor did he come to save people from something as small as the Roman Empire. So what does he save us from? Or, perhaps the better question, is what does he save us for? Jesus came to save us from all the destructive ways we try to live our lives—we call that “sin.” It’s all the things we do that rebel against God and God’s plan for our lives. Jesus saves us from guilt and shame, from hopelessness and despair, from fear and death. You see, what began in a manger in Bethlehem really wasn’t finished until Jesus gave his life on the cross in our place, taking the punishment we deserve for our sin. That’s when he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). And, ultimately, what began in a cave in Bethlehem reached a real climax when Jesus walked out of another cave on the first Easter, alive again (Hamilton 116-118). Jesus came to lead us away from the addictions and the selfishness and the anger and the bitterness and all the ways we break our relationships with each other and with God. He came as Emmanuel—God with us, God living among us. He came to lead us toward a life that’s better, life the way it was intended to be lived. Jesus came to save us from ourselves.

Pastor Jim Harnish tells a parable that might help us tonight, a story about his grandfather, who lost his son in World War II and his wife to a heart attack shortly thereafter. He was left with a teenage daughter and a younger son to raise. In the wake of that kind of grief, the grandfather began drinking, and by the time Harnish had been born, it wasn’t a casual activity. He had a real problem, and the local bartender would often call and ask the family to come get him and take him home. One night, the family was driving to church and they saw the grandfather’s car at the bar. Harnish’s father sadly said, “He’s at it again.” Then Louella entered the picture. “She was a simple country woman who worked as a waitress at a local diner.” When the grandfather began to show an interest in her, she made it clear she wasn’t going to put up with a drunk. If they were going to go out, he had to quit drinking. And he did, miraculously. Soon after that, they got married and he lived past ninety; she lived to be a hundred, but Harnish says his grandfather would not have lived that long or that well had it not been for Louella’s self-giving love and strict demands on how he was going to behave. He writes, “She saved my grandfather by the power of her love.” And that’s what Jesus does. “He comes in infinite love to save us and to lead us into a whole new way of living so that we become the agents of his saving love in the world” (Harnish, All I Want for Christmas, pgs. 43-44).

That’s what the shepherds did, at least that night. We don’t really know anything more about them beyond this Christmas night (Kalas, The Scriptures Sing of Christmas, pg. 23). Did they become followers of Jesus? Did they go back to the fields or did they take on a new job? We don’t know any of that, and it’s useless to speculate. What we do know is that those who saw angels on that holy night became angels themselves—not of the heavenly variety, but of the message-giving variety. Luke puts it this way: “When they had seen [Jesus], they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what they shepherds said to them” (2:17-18). Now, remember, they lived in a world where their testimony was not considered valid. If it came from a shepherd, you didn’t have to believe it. And yet, Luke says, the people who heard them were “amazed.” They marveled. They admired what the shepherds told them. It ought to remind us that there is something powerful in telling what you’ve experienced—your own personal experience with the baby of Bethlehem. Your story doesn’t have to be flashy or well-prepared. It just has to be yours. The shepherds just told what they knew. That’s what angels—messengers—do. They tell what they know.

So the first question for us this Christmas is this: have you experienced the baby of Bethlehem? Have you let him save you? It’s a gift, you know. You only have to receive it, to allow him to be part of your life and bring you to the life God intends you to live. And once you have experienced him, then, like the shepherds, we’re called to tell everyone what we have seen, what we know. We’re called to point others toward the savior, toward the manger so that they, too, can come to know this baby, this Jesus. We do that with our words. We do that with our lives. We do that with the ways we choose to use what we have. One way we’ll do that tonight is by sharing our offering. Everything we gave tonight will go toward two causes. Part of what we have given will go to build clean water wells in Togo, Africa, so that people there won’t have to die from preventable diseases. And another part will go to help feed children in our own community who live in “food insufficient households.” Kids will have food on the weekends because of your extravagant generosity. Near the end of this service, we will proclaim that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it (cf. John 1:5). Any time we have a chance to shine the light of Christ against the darkness of our world, we’re being angels, messengers of good news. So live a life that shows others the light of Jesus. Don’t just light a candle tonight as a ceremonial act. Let it remind you that you are the light of the world (cf. Matthew 5:14), called to shine his light in your words, in your deeds—in everything you are and everything you do. The light of the world is born, Jesus is here—thanks be to God!