On Love

Sunday, December 24th, 2006
Advent 4C
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Romans 8:38, 39

38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

How often have we actually stopped and thought about exactly what it was that took place – on an eternal scale – one night in a tiny hamlet in the Judean countryside somewhere around two thousand years ago?

On the face of it, it was a non-event. A young, anonymous woman had a baby boy accompanied by her fiancée – a man who was not yet her husband, who had initially planned on releasing her from their engagement quietly when he found out she was expecting, but who, somewhat mysteriously, changed his mind a short while later.

It might have been only slightly unusual that the delivery took place in a stable, but realistically speaking, the conditions in general – even for a well-prepared-for birth, were probably only marginally better, in terms of hygiene and exposure of the newborn to potentially fatal diseases and parasites.

The most notable aspect of the event was that it took place in the middle of a census. There’s a pretty good chance that, with all the other people who had been forced to report to their hometown in order to be counted, this may not have been the only birth that night.

What was one more baby boy?

It is, as we have said over these last few weeks of advent, one of the most important stories of our faith – this coming of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, this search for a room in a town overflowing with people. The image of the young couple, resting on the hay, with Jesus lying in a manger, surrounded by a bunch of farm animals is indelibly imprinted on our mind’s eyes. Then we have the shepherds, out in the fields, watching their flocks.

One of the true blessings of living away from large metropolitan areas is the night sky. Several nights this week have afforded us the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what the night sky might have looked like to the shepherds that night. There was no ‘light noise’ drowning out the glitter and glimmer and twinkling of the thousands and millions of stars in the sky that night. I read an apt phrase earlier this week, where the Milky Way was described as a dusting of stars across the sky. If you look at it … well, you can tell why it was called the milky way, because it DOES resemble a river of milk across the sky – but in the absence of drops falling on our faces, a drier analogy might be appropriate – to see a trail of dust across the sky – to not be able to distinguish anything more than the fact that there are literally millions of points of light that seem more like dust than enormous balls of burning gas billions of miles away … I find it PERFECTLY understandable to picture the shepherds laying on their backs on the hillside above Bethlehem, gazing at those same stars in wonder AND wondering about how the universe came together.

The 136th Psalm says it well. Just a part:

1O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,*
2O give thanks to the God of gods,*
3O give thanks to the Lord of lords,*;
4who alone does great wonders,*;
5who by understanding made the heavens,*;
6who spread out the earth on the waters,*;
7who made the great lights,*;
8the sun to rule over the day,*;
9the moon and stars to rule over the night,*;

Those were just a part of the first nine verses. What is beautiful about the 136th Psalm is that it is a hymn. There is a recurring refrain after each of the phrases I just read. You might recognize the first line of the Psalm as the beginning of one of the choruses we sing sometimes in our non-traditional services. The refrain is:

For his steadfast love endures forever.

The song is “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love endures forever” … what does it say that in this Psalm, the recurring theme – the recurring refrain—what the song always comes back to – is God’s steadfast love? Think of it, everything that God has done – from creation through redemption, through salvation, has been motivated by God’s love.

The other notable event that night was one that the shepherds got to tell about. There were angels and a heavenly chorus and a wall of sound that Phil Specter could only DREAM about when THIS choir belted out

“Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

The problem was shepherds weren’t exactly considered to be pillars of the community in first century Palestine.

It’s interesting that some pretty important characters in the Bible were shepherds: Abraham, Moses, David.

And here we have more shepherds. The Christmas story talks about shepherds "abiding" in the fields. That means they lived there. They didn't lie around in fields all day and then go home and get cleaned up for bed. They lived outdoors, day and night, with the sheep. And they were required to protect that sheep at all costs...even at the cost of their own lives. The shepherd was expected to confront any wild animal that tried to attack a sheep and fight it off. If a bear or a wolf, or a mountain lion of some kind, got away with a sheep, the shepherd was expected to chase after the animal and try to rescue the sheep. Hmmm … I’m beginning to like the image of the shepherd more and more. And it’s beginning to shed new light on the reason we call Jesus “The Good Shepherd.”

All that, and Shepherds were not allowed to serve as witnesses in a trial. Shepherds and women. Their word was no good. They were at the bottom of the social register, more accurately, they weren’t even ON the social register. And yet, they are precisely whom God chose to be the ones to bring the first news of God’s coming to earth.

You see, even in the coming, in the incarnation, in God’s initial coming to earth to live among us, the Gospel message was already not JUST the words, but the FORM in which it was delivered. God was already showing us that God’s kingdom is not of this world. It would not and does not and WILL not conform to the expectations and rules and presuppositions on which this world builds itself up.

In this world, the more powerful the person, the more it is incumbent on the one who seeks THAT person to do what THEY must in order to gain an audience. In God’s upside-down kingdom, where the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, GOD came to US, WE didn’t go to GOD.

In this world, the more powerful you are, the more beautiful people gather around you.

In God’s world, the lowliest of the low, the weakest, the most marginalized, despised, rejected, unrecognized people are the ones God SPECIFICALLY calls to God’s self.

In our world, it is what we can do for the one in power. In God’s world, it is what God did for US.

In this world, WE are to show OUR love for God first. In God’s world, God showed GOD’S love for US first.

So what Paul wrote to the church in Rome was as true then as it was nearly 60 years earlier. The Shepherd’s message that God had decided, in love, to come to earth and dwell among us, and that there was nothing that was going to get in the way of that, was still true.

The marital status of Mary and Joseph was not going to get in the way. The lack of adequate shelter was not going to get in the way.

The fact that most of the people of Bethlehem, from the innkeepers who turned them away to the regular, run-of-the-mill people who weren’t even aware of what was happening didn’t get in the way.

The fact that later, Herod ordered all boys under the age of two to be killed didn’t get in the way.

Nothing was going to separate us from the love of God, come to earth in the form of that little baby boy named Jesus.

Nothing.

Let’s pray.