One of the most magnificent, humbling and frankly, in this day and age, compelling things about God is that his power - a power that transforms this entire world - is realized in exactly the opposite way it is being exercised by so many world leaders, internet gurus, and business moguls right now. God comes into this cacophonous, frustrating, confusing and sometimes frightening world of ours - not lashing out, cutting down or destroying as humans are wont to do - but as an infant. He shows up just as was foretold through Abraham and all the prophets: as a lamb, an infant sheep, caught in the thicket that represents human sin, offering himself in our place.
But the profound thing for us is this: He doesn’t go to kings or emperors or actually to leaders of any kind - one look at kings, rulers, and leaders through Israel’s own history straight through to our present day should tell us why: they cannot see him for their own Prideful agendas of controlling others, including their attempts to co-opt God himself. Instead, God in the Person of Jesus Christ, shows up to those willing to humble themselves when confronted by God’s reality. To seek, to listen, to watch, and to risk turning from the things that keep them comfortable but blind and deaf to God’s reforming their hearts and how they think and act in this world.
And so it is, as the Scriptures tell us: the last, who humble themselves, shall be first. So it is that he comes first to a vulnerable woman, Mary, and then to a man, Joseph, who both could have been stoned for what appears to be a violation of civil law. And finally then, Jesus comes to lowly shepherds who can offer only their commitment to seek him.
Why does he come to them? Because they accept God on his own terms. They don’t imagine that God must fit their agenda or fulfill their will or grant them power and control. They don’t mock the idea that God would show up as an infant in a world where power and might are associated with having divine sanction. They don’t cling to their possessions, meager as these are. They simply attend to God’s word spoken through his prophets, reiterated and proclaimed by an angel.
Notice that these shepherds are not without fear when the angel appears to them to make its announcement. In that moment, they are suddenly aware of the profound reality-altering-Word being spoken to them. They’re terrified just like Moses, Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah were: they’re terrified because they have come face-to-face with the power of God.
In that moment they have the dawning realization that their lives will never be the same because they have seen the light of God’s creative, consuming grace that is the substance of everything that has and ever will exist. So they can no longer imagine in their hearts that the shadows of falsely projected ideals, powers, successes, possessions, or identities, are real. They must step out of that darkness and into the light.
We hear profound recognition and realization in their response: Here I am, I will seek and follow: “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 child lying in the manger.” And sure enough it is as the angel promised them. In offering themselves, “here I am Lord,” they can hear God’s calling and direction for their lives.
It is not their power or resources or intelligence, or even their strength. It is simply their willingness to follow God that creates the space in their hearts and thoughts for God’s power to manifest. Whatever strengths and weaknesses, whatever the state of their own stables, their capacities, their stumbling, their ages, their desires; God takes all of these unique particularities of their self offering and by joining himself to them, makes them a unique place of encounter with God in this world. And so they complete their prophetic calling: “When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.”
Two thousand years, and 1 billion and growing followers around the world later, God’s assumption of our humanity, has been heard and proclaimed over and over beginning with Mary’s yes, with the yes of shepherd messengers. In places of darkness where things like slavery, sickness, poverty, lack of education, abuse, destruction, war, and violence, have threatened to take the upper hand, God has spoken through prophetic voices of the humble who are willing to - whatever their circumstances - offer themselves and their gifts, to Jesus mission of gathering and redeeming.
He calls us to be one of these humble messengers - to be a place where God is encountered through our unique lives. So he presses us to turn from our fearful ways; to stop seeking security and power by controlling other people; to stop hiding in the shadows of our own insecurities and the ensuing protective ideals that we project onto others. God calls us to let go of these deadly possessions - these sins - that suffocate, drown and strangle us in our sinful responses.
He calls and challenges us today to face our fears, not on our own, but trusting in his power being present in us, to change us, if we let go and allow him in. Indeed, he calls us to step into the light of grace - to allow Christ to work in us, to transform us, so that we might become a catalyst for others to be reconciled to God and to one another. AMEN
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