Without looking it up, I’m not certain how many Christmas Eve sermons I’ve preached. When I go back over them, to spark some inspiration or at least avoid too much repetition, I don’t find myself especially moved. And that’s ok. It’s fine to make one point, set off some fireworks, and sit down before you overtax the faithful. But I clearly have a thing about the shepherds. I suppose they are, so to say, our proxy in the story in Luke’s Gospel. Waiting and drudgery and insignificance—their lives are humanity par excellence.
So for anyone who might find it useful, here are a few Christmas Eve sermons about the shepherds. Homiletic lines and ideas are always free to a good home, for any last-minute preachers reading this. And to everyone who celebrates, I wish you a very happy and blessed Christmas.
Make Haste (2014)
“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.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger.”
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a good working knowledge of sheep, their grazing habits, physical needs, and life-cycle.
willingness to work as a team under supervision and in varying circumstances
a passion for the outdoors
a strong tolerance for cold, heat, wind, and rain and long periods of total solitude
no compromising political commitments
no religious obligations
a desire for flexible compensation and lots of intangible benefits
a willingness to wait with the flock through any and all occurrences, up to and including the coming of the Messiah
No experience necessary; we will train the right person.
The stars are some comfort and some company, it must be said. The Judean countryside is pleasant. And sheep are not the worst animals to care for. But the waiting—that must have been hard. But then something happened—a voice, a vision, a song of glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace, good will on earth to those whom God favors. Then, all of a sudden, it is time to go.
I love these Judean shepherds. I love them because the story of the birth of Jesus finds them in the middle of things, in the middle of life. Which is where it finds us. All of us came from somewhere else today. Maybe we tore ourselves away from a roaring fire or a mildly diverting college bowl game or a table well-laden with food. Maybe we wrapped up a last little bit of work, a last email or spreadsheet for our colleagues before a night and a day off. Maybe we are trying, this day at least, to do without something our body demands every day.
Even if they had forgotten what it was like to want that fire, there it was for them, licking at them from the bottom of their feet to the hairs on their head.
Maybe we’re waiting. Maybe we’re fidgeting in our seats, trying politely not to check our phone, projecting the length of the rest of the service after the wild-card of the sermon. We all have our roles to play in this world, however small. The great machine of the world grinds on out there and each of us has a place in it.
But tonight we are not playing those roles; tonight we are not occupying those places. Tonight we have come here—to this manger, this mother, this meal, this child. Maybe we came with haste, maybe we came with hesitancy, but here we are all the same.
The shepherds went with haste to see the thing that the Lord made known to them. They left their animals on a hillside and met God in a stable. They left their little patch of earth and came inches away from the King of Heaven. They ran from their little role, their little gear in the great machine of the world and went to a place where they were embraced as humans. They ran because they were not made with all of God’s majestic artistry, they were not framed in a miraculous assembly of muscle and bone and blood and brain, in order to sit in their place and give their lives to their sheep. They were not gifted with the Law of God and the call of the Prophets and the tender love of their own mothers and the singing desires of their own hearts in order to tap out emails and update spreadsheets and run for a last-minute gift that has no hope of expressing the love it is meant to represent.
Their mighty, agile legs were not made to run in circles—to make haste in going nowhere. Their eyes were not meant to stare up at the stars in waiting, or to flutter while a screen refreshes. Their legs were made to run to their Savior, and their eyes were made to behold him.
Jesus draws them near. Without saying a word, without even being able to recognize his own creation, Jesus draws the shepherds near. He calls to them in their need, in their hope, in their waiting. He calls to them in their love that was homeless until this night.
He calls to them. He calls to you. He calls to me. He calls to the woman in the senior apartments who has forgotten virtually everything else about her life. He calls to the prisoner. He calls to the family he has left behind. He calls to the addict. He calls to the parents who pray for her. He calls to the person who can’t bear the thought of the long holiday flight and he calls to the person who can’t afford to travel and the one who has no time to visit family and the one who has no family left to visit anyway. He calls to them because the world wants to make them small—to make them as small as their job description and their credit card statement—but he wants to make them great. He calls to them because they know they are sinners but God is rich in mercy. He calls to them because the world wants to keep them right where they are but they know, deep in their bones, that they are not meant to stand still.
So they go with haste. They see the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and Mary and Joseph and the manger, and they go away rejoicing.
The stars don’t show themselves too clearly here, but the television is some comfort and some company. The forest preserves offer good jogging and biking. And the work is not so bad. It’s good to have work. But the waiting, that’s hard. The hurrying to nowhere in particular, that’s hard. But then something happens—a voice, a vision, a song of glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace, good will to those whom God favors. And it is still not too late to make haste, to bump our heads and scuff our knees as we approach the manger and smell the animals and the hay and see the mother and Joseph and the infant; it’s still not too late to let go of earth and take hold of heaven; to let go of our smallness and take hold of greatness; to let go of waiting and finally see, and embrace, and love, and be loved by the One we were waiting for.
Amen.
Wanting Fire (2016)
On Wednesday night a small group of us gathered for an Advent celebration here at church. We were joined by members from our Spanish-language sister church, Sagrado Corazon in Waukegan. The event is called Las Posadas, and it takes place over the nine nights leading up to Christmas Eve. It commemorates the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem and their struggle to find shelter for the birth of Jesus. We went from door to door inside the church, half of us singing the part of Joseph asking for shelter, and half of us singing the part of the homeowner saying, “No.”
The power of an event like this is that it makes the past feel present in some little way. It makes us feel like we are part of the story again. The complaints of the homeowner are reasonable. We hear them all the time when we are faced with the question of whether we will welcome needy or endangered outsiders into our community or our country. “I can’t open up, you might be a rogue,” the song goes. But eventually the door opens, with the voice of the ages: “Enter, pilgrims, I did not recognize you.”
The spiritual significance of the event was somewhat lost on my second child. He was concerned mostly with his candle, which was unlit. I did not want him lighting some unsuspecting pilgrim’s coat on fire as we journeyed through the building. But he did not understand this. All he knew was that everyone else had a lit candle and his was unlit. “I want fire,” he kept saying. So finally I had to promise him that I would light his candle for the last door. Which I did. And he was very good about keeping it upright and not burning himself or anyone else.
It’s a funny position to be in. I’ve lived with the Christmas story my whole life, more or less. And as an adult, as a Christian, I struggle to keep the candle of my own faith trimmed and burning sometimes. Meanwhile, a child tells me, “I want fire,” and I feel it’s my job to say, “no, not yet.”
This story of Joseph and Mary, the child and the manger, the shepherds and the angels was new to all of us at some point. It was the burning center of at least one night of our year, when the presents were wrapped and the dinner was behind us or ahead of us, and we gathered to hear it. Good news of great joy. Peace on earth and good will to men. God in a human body for us in a manger, born of a woman. And God in a human body for us at the altar, making the forgiveness of our sins real. Every year the promise of this holy night is made new for all the world. And once upon a time it was new for us, too. Perhaps some of us are here tonight because of that feeling—the lights, the candles, the songs.
It is the same world into which Jesus was born. It is the same sky above us, the same slowly shifting human genome within us, the same relentless timeline around us.
But time is hard on this feeling. We forget what it’s like to want fire. Maybe we get tired of it. Or we get wise to the whole thing. Or we just get distracted, carried off in a thousand other directions.
I think about those shepherds outside of Bethlehem. They were all taught about God’s promises. They were raised in the faith and hope of their people. But I could not blame them if that promise had become a faint memory. I could not blame them if that hope had been overwhelmed by the chores of daily life, if the fire of their faith had grown dim. I doubt that a journey to Bethlehem to see the savior was anything they expected, that night or any night.
Yet when the moment comes, when the heavens are torn open, they are ready. “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste. Suddenly that dim little spark of faith and hope inside them was whipped up to a roaring fire. Even if they had forgotten what it was like to want that fire, there it was for them, licking at them from the bottom of their feet to the hairs on their head. And in that moment, their faith and their hope and their love and all of the promises God made so long ago were new again, were as real as they were to Abraham and Sarah. As real as they were to us when this story first took hold of our imagination.
So they went with haste. They found Mary, and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes. They saw their salvation face to face.
God is always at work in the world and in us. But that doesn’t mean we see God. That doesn’t mean we recognize God in Mary and Jesus. It doesn’t mean we recognize him in the faces of a suffering humanity. We lose focus. We become dull of spirit. We shrink in our faith. We excuse ourselves. Our disappointments and grievances pile up. We look over our shoulder and that manger seems far, far away. But all along, we were the ones moving away from it.
Yet God is endlessly, miraculously patient—patient with the wavering Joseph, patient with the bored shepherds, patient with us. God has kept the path back to that manger open. God has come to the help of his people. And if you want fire—to warm your heart, urge your feet, stir your prayers—God bids you to come to this manger, this child, this mother; come to this altar; come to this faith; come to this gift, and be made incandescent again. Amen.
The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty (2020)
We are gathered today in the last embers of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty, two hundred and two decades (more or less) since the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a year we will struggle both to remember clearly and to forget cleanly. There has been so much death and so much suffering, beyond the death and suffering which is our lot as children of Adam and Eve in any year. There has been so much disruption and frustration, beyond the disruption and frustration we impose on ourselves in any year. If we are healthy, housed, and employed, we may count ourselves blessed even more than we might in any year. If we have kept our household or family together, done useful work, or made a contribution to the greater good, we might well take some comfort in that, beyond the comfort we might take in greater accomplishments in another year.
I have had to tell myself all of this, over and over again. Church kept going, thanks be to God. The preaching of the Gospel continued week in and week out, sermons and devotions and articles for the newspaper and newsletter pouring forth as fast as I could do it and surely that should count for something in the scheme of things. And it does not work. Rome was not yet at the peak of its power when Jesus was born in an insignificant town in a provincial backwater of its empire. And yet by the Year of Our Lord Four Hundred and Seventy-Six, it was in ruins. Despite everyone working hard and doing their best through plague and conflict and war and bad harvests.
It has never ended--plague and conflict and war and bad harvests, mass migration and desecrated environments and chaotic inequality--and we have never been equal to it. Perhaps you have felt this insufficiency in a year of lonely labor. Who among us has handled online school as well as we think we should? Who has seized the ambivalent opportunities of a crisis? Who kept family game night going more than three weeks? And would it have mattered if we had?
Each moment, each encounter is infinitely important. And what is a year but a parade of infinitely important moments, one after another through a decade and a century and a millennium and all the two-thousand and twenty Years of Our Lord from that night in the manger down until this day. It is the same world into which Jesus was born. It is the same sky above us, the same slowly shifting human genome within us, the same relentless timeline around us. We breathe his air. We walk his earth. We die his death.
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” I think a lot about those shepherds every year. What was their life like? Very hard, I imagine, by our standards. There was no retirement plan. There was no real career advancement. No vaccines. They weren’t citizens of any kingdom but God’s. Weather and viruses and the boots of the tramping warriors marched over them without a thought. On the other hand they probably didn’t have annual growth targets to meet. They could safely assume that their rulers, whoever they were, would be pretty bad. They never had to live through, let alone participate in, the most important election of their lifetimes every four years. They lived and died in a world that took no note of them. They were not the heroes of anyone’s story.
And the messenger from God comes to them. They were terrified. Of course they were terrified. On what grounds could they expect anything good from heaven or earth? But the messenger tells them not to fear. A Savior has been born to them this night in the city of David, the Messiah, the Lord. A child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. The sky opens and the whole heavenly host appears to them, the shepherds, proclaiming peace and good will on earth. The earth where they scraped out their little living year by year until they died.
So they go with haste to see their Messiah. They find him, wrapped up and lying in the manger, with his mother and Joseph. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. And yet it is a miracle. They rejoice and praise God.
The shepherds counted for little in the eyes of the world. Their names are not even preserved in the Gospel. But they were enough. They were enough for God to come to. The world was and is wracked with sin and death and violence and injustice. But the world is enough for God to come to, in all its fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains. You and I, for all our inadequacies and failures, all our griefs and sorrows and anger this year and every year, are enough for God to consecrate with his gracious appearance among us.
If you were the only human being ever born into sin and in need of redemption, all of this would have happened just for you. God would have done it all for each and every one of us. God would have sanctified this world with the light of his Incarnation for you. God would have bent down from the heavenly sanctuary to crush hell under his infant foot and call forth the joy of these shepherds for one solitary soul. And those shepherds would have gladly given their praise, and that mother would have borne her child, and that foster father would have protected them both, and that manger would have been filled with the quiet power of God for you because you, right now at the end of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty, are enough to save.
“Mild he lays his glory by,” the hymn says. “Born that we no more may die. Born to raise each child of earth. Born to give us second birth.” This is the gift of God for you this night: the Messiah, the Lord. Amen.