Journey's Weekly Homilies

24 December 2001, Christmas Eve Cycle A
Homily by Joe

Isaiah 9:1-6
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

I don’t know about you, but this year I am so ready for it to be Christmas again. I may not have been at Wal-Mart at 5 am on the day after Thanksgiving, but I have put aside my angry young liturgist persona and I’ve given myself over to the rhythms, rhymes and rituals of the season. And I’m guessing that the Noels – news – you want to hear are not the latest developments in Biblical hermeneutics or archaeology. If you’re like me you’re longing for those tidings of comfort and joy that have been so hard to come by lately. So let’s go back to the beginning.

“The first Noel the angels did say was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay.” Strictly speaking the shepherds were the only people for whom the angelic tidings have ever been “news.” And “poor shepherds” is a redundancy of the highest order. Shepherds were the poorest of the poor, scratching out a living from their animals and the earth. The wandering, outdoor, twenty-four-hours-a-day nature of their work meant they had very little social standing; they were morally suspect because they couldn’t protect their families at night. In a Jewish society they were further discredited because they couldn’t observe the purity codes. The shepherds seem an odd choice to receive the angelic tidings because they could be expected to have little interest in whether King Herod or a descendant of David sat on the throne. When you’re a peasant, your concerns are more immediate.

But this is Luke’s story to tell and so the angels are sent to the shepherds. One of my favorite Christmas cards is a cartoon drawn from a perspective above two angels who are themselves hovering over some unsuspecting shepherds. One angel is holding a trumpet and saying to the other “watch this.” The classic angelic encounter follows: we have the awestruck witnesses, the belated admonition “fear not” and the proclamation of the good news. And the good news even includes a confirmation code, if you will: “if you don’t believe me, go and see for yourself.”

And the shepherds do go, somehow find the baby, and are astonished by what they see. “Shepherds, why this jubilee?” Luke tells us only that when the saw the baby they rejoiced with “exceeding great joy,” told everyone around about it (and so became the first evangelists), and returned “glorifying and praising God for all that they had seen and heard.” The French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote a piece depicting the shepherds on their way back from the manger. He gives them an odd little tune to pipe, full of irregular rhythms as if they are half stumbling and half dancing, transported by their experience.

So what was this amazing thing the shepherds saw? I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but social historians tell us that a swaddled baby in a manger wasn’t all that uncommon a sight. Swaddling was a widely practiced procedure, believed to help the baby’s growth. Houses for the poorer classes were often just one large room; the people at one end and their animals at the other. A baby in a manger would be like a child in our time sleeping in a dresser drawer. It happens.

In Luke’s gospel Jesus is sent to, and recognized by, persons who cut across the grain of conventional expectations. And so in his telling these lowly shepherds have eyes to see and ears to hear what others cannot. They are able to grasp the concept of a new relationship between God and humankind, to feel the presence of a God no longer remote and isolated but able to identify with human suffering and longing. “And the word was made flesh,” as John’s gospel puts it. The incarnation, as we call it, sounds like such a lofty concept, but try translating the latin root, carne, as we do in “carnival” and you get “and the word was made meat.” I don’t find this the most attractive image, but it has a certain visceral quality that fits Luke’s storytelling purpose. Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit to be sure, but still comes into the world through the birth canal, among all the bodily fluids, into a place with no running water, born to a woman away from her home without her kinswomen to assist with the birth (I can’t imagine Joseph was much help), in the bleakness of poverty and under the shadow of tyranny. This is God among not apart from us, sharing to the full the human experience, knowing hunger and cold, enjoying touch and taste, crying out for love; the “hopes and fears of all the years.”

It is this sensuous quality that makes Christmas such an ideal winter festival. The long nights, dream time, are relieved by appeals to all the senses: we experience the bright lights, the smell of fir, the sound of the carols, the taste of eggnog, and of course the nostalgia built up from every Christmas we’ve celebrated. The engagement of emotions and senses is right in keeping with the theme of the god who shares all those hopes and fears.

Was this what the shepherds recognized when they stumbled into just the right house, stable or whatever? Perhaps, but we can only speculate; there are too many intangibles and we can’t see through their eyes. But consider that all across our city tonight Christians are gathering together just like we are; to an unchurched observer all the gatherings must look pretty much the same. But to our ears and eyes and hands and hearts this gathering is special, even if we’re the only ones who see that, and there’s nowhere we’d rather be. This, of all the churches in Portland, is our home. So when we circle around the table to sing The Winter Name of God, when our eyes meet as we pass the plate and the cup, when we share hospitality and good will, we too, though we may half dance and half stumble, send back the song which now the angels sing.