Psalm 80:1-7
“Shepherd Song”
December 23, 2018 – Fourth Sunday in Advent
[We apologize for the difficulty in hearing the responsive reading at any level at the beginning of the sound recording.]
Two weeks ago a little shepherd pulled up his hood and tried to coax a reluctant lamb losing her ears to follow him up front here to the Manger. We had the joy of seeing our children once again reenact for us the drama of the day we are about to celebrate. Not just a shepherd and sheep, but Mary and Joseph, white robed angels with glittering halos and a sword, and a cow were all part of the show. Not to mention our excellent choir.
It’s a delight to watch our children, share in their wonder, and rejoice in the blessing of hearing and seeing the Christmas story told again. Yet I wonder how seriously we take it all. If we thought much about it, we would have to admit the whole Christmas pageant thing is not very realistic, not very much like what really happened.
You might think it’s done better in something like “The Nativity” film from a dozen years ago, which tried very hard to be as historically and biblically faithful. You might properly insist that actors portraying shepherds and Mary and Joseph have brown skins and sound Middle Eastern. You might suppose the best way to get an accurate handle on Christmas is to create a serious, careful, detailed historical play so we will know what actually occurred.
For instance, I recently skimmed an article that insisted Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus weren’t all alone in some stable or cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem. They were in a crowded house where there were so many people and so little room that the only place to lay the infant was in a cattle trough mounted on the outer wall of the structure. Maybe the author is right and that’s how it was. But how does that change anything for us?
Don’t get me wrong. It matters very much that the Christmas story is true, that Mary was a virgin and the baby was born in Bethlehem and that shepherds heard angels invite them to go and see Him. It can’t be just a fairy tale like “The Night Before Christmas” or “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” or other stories we tell this time of year. But do we have to get our mangers and angels and shepherds absolutely correct for it to mean something for us? I hope not.
Look at our Psalm for today and read:
Hear us, O Shepherd of Israel,
leading Joseph like a flock.
What does that image has to do with you and me? We are not literal sheep, not a flock of stupid animals who need constant care to keep from wandering off, starving or getting eaten by predators. An authentic portrayal of ancient shepherds doesn’t help us much. An historically accurate shepherd near Bethlehem would be a scruffy Middle Eastern person who might frighten us if we saw him boarding our plane.
What to make, then, of Bible shepherds, particularly of the Shepherd of Israel, the Great Shepherd, the Good Shepherd, who we believe is Jesus Christ? If we’re not to picture them, picture Him, as authentically costumed agrarian figures of the first century, then how do we see the shepherds, or the Shepherd, in 2018 in Eugene, Oregon?
I borrow a page from G. K. Chesterton. In his marvelous book The Everlasting Man, in his chapter on Christmas, he argues that the shepherds of the Christmas story represent one great, true pagan insight into the Nativity story. For Chesterton, the shepherds show us the great mass of the human race passing along folk stories, legends, and myths about the gods. These stories are all about the divine dressed in the trappings of ordinary life, a vegetable god that speaks from a tree or a sun god who is hidden in a box every night.
About all these folk stories, all these myths about the gods, Chesterton has this to say: “The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.”[1] In other words, even if mythology is all wrong, representing a god in human form, walking about the world with the rest of us, is no mistake.
With regard to Bethlehem’s shepherd, Chesterton talks about Nativity plays of his own time. They did appear as first century rural Jews, but as pastoral figures of the English countryside. In pageants Chesterton knew, shepherds on their way to the manger might speak in a Somerset dialect or talk of driving their sheep from Conway toward Clyde. Of this inaccurate depiction of the story he says, “Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian… is that anachronism.”[2]
What Chesterton and I am trying to say is that a sweet little boy in terrycloth with a rag tied round his head is in fact more true and helps us better understand Christmas than all the archaeological and historical accuracy scholars or Hollywood can muster. What children tripping over their costumes represent is that the Shepherd of Israel, whom the shepherds of Israel came to see in a stable, is right here and now, is among us, is with us.
That’s what we have such a hard time really believing. It’s pretty easy to accept that an unsophisticated young woman had a Baby a couple thousand years ago with no other resources than to plop Him in a feed bin. That doesn’t really strain the imagination much at all. But it’s much, much more difficult to believe that same holy Child is present now, as we hear about a government shutdown, worry about a leaky roof, get children to school, get up each morning for work, and hope we can pay our bills next month. In these circumstances, the real presence of the Great Shepherd here and now dims and fades.
That feeling of the current absence of the Shepherd was exactly what the person who wrote this psalm felt back then. Listen to him in verse 2,
Stir up your strength,
and come to help us.”
in verse 3,
Restore us, O God;
let your face shine,
that we may be saved.
and in verse 4,
O Lord God of hosts,
how long will you be angered,
despite the prayers of your people?
The historical occasion for those words is the Babylonian exile. In a foreign land, in a pagan culture, the people of Israel could not find God. It felt like He was asleep, like He had turned the light of His face away from them, like He was angry and just ignoring their prayers. Sometimes it may not be hard at all to put yourself in their place.
You have schoolwork that seems overwhelming. Friends have turned against you. It seems impossible to find a job. Physical pain is your everyday companion. Your marriage is disintegrating. And “Where is God?” you wonder. How does He even fit into this world of Internet shopping and cell phones and global warming? Is He sleeping or angry or just uncaring? How are we to believe He’s really here?
To all such questions, God gives the same answer. The shepherds that night may have looked for God in the stars, in the hills around them, perhaps even in their sheep. The angels told them to look for God in an absurdly simple and ordinary place they knew all too well, a wooden box from which animals like their sheep ate. God had arrived unexpectedly right in the middle of ordinary life.
Telling that story by dressing up little kids in absurd but darling costumes from plastic boxes in our church storeroom and from the backs of our closets tells us the same. Our God is here, right here. The Shepherd of Israel is with us.
Our feeling that He is not here is not a problem with Him. The Lord has not turned away from us. The Psalm writer clearly understands this himself. Twice, in verse 3 and in verse 7 (and one more time at the very end of the Psalm in verse 19), he says, “Restore us, O God.” As sometimes happens, the King James Version is more literal. Verse 3 in the KJV begins, “Turn us again, O God.” The first word literally means, “Turn us back.”
Now if this Psalm is in fact from the time of exile, then all the modern translations are probably right to render it with “Restore us,” or something like that. The idea is that the Jews wanted to be brought back, returned from exile, restored to their own country. But there is something in the idea of God turning us that addresses our question and concern for where the Shepherd is in our lives.
We’ve been enjoying Lynn and Bryan’s wonderful and expert teaching on the scriptures and music of Handel’s “Messiah” during Advent. One of the chorales that belongs more to the Lent and Easter portion of “Messiah” expresses brilliantly our human situation both then and now. It’s Handel’s setting of Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way.” Beth’s friend Laura first called it to my attention years ago: Handel’s music dances brightly along in a fugue of several parts, musically bouncing around in different directions. It almost demands you to picture little sheep prancing about this way and that, each blithely skipping off along its own path.
The beginning of finding the Shepherd with us is to acknowledge that we are those happy, foolish, dancing sheep, each headed off along our own merry little path. To see the shining face of our God, it’s not that He needs to turn around and shine on us, it’s that you and I need to be picked up and turned around again so that we can see His face. His face is always shining. But for all kinds of reasons, we may have our backs to Him.
Turning back to God begins with the admission that we have turned away. That’s what Christians call confession of sin. It’s something we all need to do. Jesus Christ has come to save us from our sins, to forgive us for them and change us into people who don’t do them anymore. But it won’t happen if we turn away and hide our sins from His light.
Backpacking in the mountains here in Oregon in the summer, the crisp air and sunlight always amaze me by how fast things dry. Put a wet pair of socks or a dew soaked tent in the sun and it will be bone dry in minutes. Yet our plastic ground cover, the sheet under our tent, is always damp on the bottom when we pick it up. The underside, shielded from air, turned away from the sun, always comes up damp and dirty. It has to be turned over and spread out before the sunlight can have its effect. It’s just like our souls.
You and I need to be picked up and turned over for the sun to dry out all the dank and dark bits of sin that cling to us. When we get too busy for that, when we each turn to our own ways and neglect those moments when we allow God to turn us and shine on us, then it just gets worse. We become like my ground cover when I fold it up wet and dirty, bring it home like that and then forget about it. Mildew grows, rot sets in, the whole thing starts to stink. It cries out to be unfolded, turned and spread out in the shining sun. That’s us when we forget to let God turn us toward His light.
John 1:14 tells the Christmas story in a nutshell by saying, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” Literally, once again, John is saying that Jesus became a human being and “pitched his tent” with us. Christ came to live here. His glory shines from His tent into ours, brightening our lives and melting away our sin.
A Christmas program is not just for kids, not even just for parents to have the guilty pleasure of pride watching their beloved little ones appear as cute as they can be. No, those moments, and moments like our candlelight service tomorrow night, are the blessed opportunity for you and I to be turned once again, turned to the face of our Savior, to let His light burn away all our darkness and sin and leave us fresh and whole and restored.
The physical trappings of modern Christmas, green and red decorations, lights and bows, stockings and a tree can distract us. Even interactions with family and friends, even those precious pageant costumes, can distract us. If we get too caught up making all that stuff happen in some precise way, trying to meet our own expectations or those of others, it can turn us away from the truth. The apparatus of Christmas can turn us away into all our own sins of greed, perfectionism, gluttony and sometimes despair.
Yet all that stuff, if we let God turn us, if we let Him help us see it right, can also remind us of the amazing reality of our Lord whose birthday it is. All those all-too physical decorations and gifts we struggle to obtain and those much-too human people we struggle to put up with sing out the truth that God became physical, that God became human.
Our Gospel lesson this morning was Mary’s beautiful words that turn everything around. The proud and powerful are put down and humble people lifted. The hungry are fed while the rich go hungry. When our Lord comes He turns everything upside down so that His face can shine on it. But it’s all sung, all announced in the midst of simple, human, physical reality. Two pregnant relatives got together to chat and admire each other’s bellies. It’s a scene as old as humanity and as fresh as what’s happening in dozens of homes right now. Jesus Christ our Lord came into the world just like that, in and through the ordinary process by which everyone of us was born. Now nothing and no one is ordinary anymore.
The great ancient hymn known as the Te Deum, has the phrase, “When thou tookest upon thee to deliver us, thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb.” That’s exactly it. Coming into the world, our God did not abhor our humanity, our life as it really is. He came all the way in. Jesus is one of us. He is completely, fully and forever with us, as human as you or I. That’s how He can be our Shepherd, that’s how He can save us so completely.
I invite you now, as Christmas unfolds this week, to let your own self be unfolded to the grace and light of Jesus Christ, the Great Shepherd. Confess your sins, acknowledge all the ways you have turned from Him, gone your own way, in the past year. Then in the sights, sounds, smells, sensations and tastes of Christmas, let God turn you back to the great truth that Jesus is here, as real and tangible as everything else you experience. His face is shining on you. His love for you never changes, never fades. Let yourself be turned to the brightness of that love, and He will save you.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Everlasting Man (New York: Image Books, 1955), p. 177.
[2] Ibid.