In our previous two services we’ve thought about the way in
which Jesus was a message of love to Mary and to Elizabeth. Tonight we heard
about a group of people who are, in a sense, no more than bystanders, bit part
players. They have no names, and as far as we know, no further involvement in
the story of Jesus after this point. Mary and Elizabeth continued to be tied up
in this story for the rest of their lives, bringing up their special children,
and in Mary’s case at least, watching them die. But the shepherds have just this one night of
amazement, of wonder, of glory, before returning to their normal lives. We’re
told that all who heard it were amazed, but how long for, I wonder. How long
did it take for people to dismiss it as old news, the ramblings of a group of
men who had maybe had too much to drink? They might never have forgotten it –
you wouldn’t, would you? But I wonder whether their families rolled their eyes when
they started in on the tale again. “Yes,
Grandad – we know – you saw angels once!”
We don’t know the answers to any of those questions, of
course, but Luke tells us this story about these people very deliberately, as
if it mattered that it was a group of anonymous shepherds who first heard the
news of Jesus birth. Shepherds were seen as ordinary working people, often
disregarded and rough. They lived out in the fields with the flocks for long
periods of time. That made it hard for them to keep the complex purity laws of
Judaism. They were the last people who anyone would expect – or who would
expect themselves – to be called and used by God. No one else noticed them. Why
should God? And yet, shepherds were significant figures in the Bible. Moses was
a shepherd when he heard God call to him out of a burning bush. King David was
a shepherd, long before he was a king, in these very same hills around
Bethlehem. The fact that God chooses to announce Jesus’ birth to shepherds sets
us up to wonder what will happen next.
But the thing I like about this story is that, in a sense,
nothing happens next, not to the shepherds, not as far as we know. Unlike Moses
and David, they don’t go on to be kings or leaders. Moses and David look
as if they are ordinary, but we discover that they are singled out for
greatness. These shepherds really are ordinary, and they stay
ordinary, and yet they hear that God loves them, that God has come to them, and
for them.
I like the idea that they go back to their anonymous lives.
That was the experience of most of those who met Jesus, after all, those who
were healed by him, those who heard his preaching. They didn’t all become
superstar apostles, and yet God had touched their lives for good, and I am
quite sure that they never forgot it. And let’s face it, that’s what happens to
most of us too. We are drawn to Jesus, we are enriched by his message,
challenged, loved, supported by it as we do the stuff that we need to do,
ordinary stuff for the most part. But we’re not superstar apostles either and we
don’t have to be in order to be the people God wants us to be. Just as we are,
we are precious, and worth the birth and death and resurrection of his son.
I decided to pair this Gospel story with Psalm 8, because I
have always imagined this Psalm being composed by someone sitting on a dark
hillside in the middle of the night, looking up at the heavens, with the moon
and stars shining in them, wondering about their own littleness in the face of
that vast night sky, and realising that, in their ordinariness, not
despite it, God has loved and honoured them, entrusting them with the care of
the rest of his creation. “A
little lower than the angels”, and yet, in God’s eyes “crowned with glory”, just as they were.
The God who delights in ordinariness, who calls most of us
not to do great things, but to do small things with great love, was good news
for those Bethlehem shepherds, and he’s good news for us too. We don’t have to
be something we’re not; all God wants is for us to be who we are,
and know that we are loved for it.
As we come to the end of these three Breathing Space services, I pray that , just
like those shepherds, the message of God’s love will have lodged somewhere in
our hearts, in the place where we need it right now, tonight, and will sing to
us the song of the angels. “Peace, peace,
peace.”
Amen
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