"God's Gifts: Joy for the Shepherds"

My family is overjoyed because it finally snowed!  I dunno if it’s actually going to be a white Christmas (I can’t bring myself to look up the forecast and find out -- I’d rather be surprised), but it’s at least a beautiful snowy day as I write this Update, and that’s a joy for me in and of itself.

Actually, Sherri Sansom and Melinda Merz lit our third Advent Candle this week, focused on joy.  They reminded us that there are so many things that can give us joy each and every day, but that true joy itself comes not from the external situations we find ourselves in, but from know that we have a healthy, solid, and growing relationship with the God who loves us.

In our Sunday School class this week, we finished up our semester of studying various “Cults and Other Gospels,” looking at religious groups that have spun off of Christianity so far that they should arguably -- often by their own estimation -- no longer be seen as part of orthodox, Biblical Christianity (so we looked at the Peoples Temple, the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Scientology, the Unification Church, and Freemasonry).  Amazingly, even with a small church like ours, apparently our podcasts regularly reach 2,500-3,000 subscribers each week, from around the world!  It’s amazing whose lives our lives can touch in significant ways, even when we don’t realize it -- and all but impossible to gauge how many lives their lives then touch in significant ways as a result, and so on.  One candle can light the world, even if all it does is light one other candle... which lights one other candle... which lights one other candle... and so on...

We talked about that a bit in our sermon this week, as we continued our Advent series looking at how God’s gifts can come from the strangest places.  For instance, think of the elderly couple of Zechariah and Elizabeth, whose blessing of a miracle baby blessed not only them, but also Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary (who had to have had very few people she could trust to believe her own “miracle baby” story), and ultimately -- once he grew to become John the Baptist -- he blessed countless others. 

Or think of the shepherds, sitting out in the hills above Bethlehem like they did every other night, singing songs like Psalm 23 to one another to keep themselves awake so that they could protect their sheep.  Think of these men who were welcomed nostalgically by Israel, but not personally -- whose profession was appreciated by people who liked to eat their lamb chops and who thought fondly of shepherds like Moses or Jacob or David, but whose dirty, smelly presence was rarely appreciated for long by people who wore nice clothes and who preferred to keep their homes clean.  It’s telling that God Himself was described as a shepherd of Israel in sections of the Bible such as Genesis 49, Psalm 23, Psalm 80, Isaiah 40, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 34, etc.

It’s to these “chimney sweeps” and “pizza delivery men” of the first century that the angels proclaimed the birth of the Messiah, Himself called a shepherd in Micah 5.  To men with dirt under their nails who knew what it meant to be a shepherd -- appreciated for what he does, but  often unappreciated when he doesn’t match up with people’s preferred niceties.  To men who weren’t too proud to go banging on doors and looking for newborns.  Their lives touched other lives, whose lives touched other lives, and so on, because they were willing to share what they had come to know and to believe.  They had that much boldness and that much excitement.

You and I should probably be that bold and excited today as well...