Sermon: The Song of the Shepherds

People travel a lot at Christmas.  At yesterday's services I met visitors from the far east, Africa, the USA, continental Europe and the further reaches of these islands.  One of them asked, a trifle impatiently, why we hadn't thought to open the great west doors and let the congregation out more quickly that way.  I replied that they haven't been in use as an exit since the 1170s.  The Christmas stories of the New Testament are full of journeys.  Mary and Joseph came from another province; the magi from a far country; the shepherds from their fields, the angels out of heaven.  And we who have heard the call Adeste fideles and come to worship the new-born King, who are we most like, I wonder, on this Christmas Day made sombre by the bleak economic midwinter with its uncertainties about jobs and livelihoods, pensions and homes?  Yet we know that all most of us are still amazingly affluent compared to billions of our fellow human beings.  Add to that the privilege of being literate and educated, we have to be more like magi than shepherds with so much wealth and wisdom to offer, if only we knew what they knew: where to bring it and at whose feet to lay it. 

Shepherds, by contrast, were the neglected and poor of the ancient world.  They were everything that the magi were not.  And yet these dishonourable ones are those whom the angels choose to break the news of Jesus' birth.  How typical of God to do things this way! - to begin with the despised and rejected, for this is precisely what Jesus himself will be one day.  And because of their lowly state, I dare say their songs glorifying and praising God for all that they have heard and seen were more fervent and joyous even than the angels' Gloria in excelsis.  The 17^th century poet Richard Crashaw crafted his great Christmas poem around this theme.  A young exile in Europe fleeing the English puritans, he perhaps knew what it was to be ignored and despised like shepherds in the time of Jesus, nobodies like the infant in the manger himself, in a strange country, far from home.  His poem on the nativity imagines what the shepherds might have sung as they went back to their flocks at the end of that unforgettable night.  

Poor world (said I), what wilt thou do /    To entertain this starry Stranger?
Is this the best thou canst bestow? /   A cold, and not too cleanly, manger?
Contend, ye powers of heaven and earth / To fit a bed for this huge birth.

The paradox of Christmas is that ‘this huge birth' heralded by angelic trumpets turns out to be not in some royal hall but in a lowly cave - for this king comes not as a prince but as a slave, to abase himself for us.  His end is already foreshadowed, as Luke goes on to say later when he speaks of the sword that will pierce his mother's heart.  So the birth is ‘huge' not in the way the birth of heroes of classical antiquity was presaged by miracles and wonders, but in that it speaks of God abasing himself as he stole among us.  The ‘huge birth' of the ‘starry Stranger' is also the humblest of entrances into history by which our humanity is taken into God.  His little limbs will take our weakness and our pain and our sin.  ‘Made-flesh' indeed, in-carnation.  Only Christianity dares to affirm the riskiness of love, that God could be so humble as not to be served but to serve.

This is the truth beyond compare that the shepherds ponder: 

Welcome, all Wonders in one sight! /   Eternity shut in a span.
Summer to winter, day in night, /   Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little One! Whose all-embracing birth / Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

That word ‘wonder' is really the theme of their song - how to put into words what cannot be uttered or expressed?  The danger of a Christmas sermon in prose is that it does precisely that - try to capture in human language the depths of the incarnation of the eternal Word of God.  Poetry and art stand a better chance, because they are content not to say it all, but to be open to the mystery, and point to it tell by nudges and hints.  ‘Eternity shut in a span', ‘summer in winter', ‘day in night', ‘heaven in earth' - the words won't stay in place because they are carrying an immense, infinite, burden of an inexpressible truth.  But what human lips cannot describe they can embrace and welcome in an attitude of wonder and awe.  The shepherds, says Luke, ‘go and see' - not so much investigation as pilgrimage and act of worship.  They came, they saw, they were conquered by the overwhelming truth of the ‘Great Little One' whose nativity reconciles, indeed marries, earth and heaven, and begins the story of our redemption.   

To Thee, meek Majesty! soft King /    Of simple graces and sweet loves.
Each of us his lamb will bring, /    Each his pair of silver doves;
Till burnt at last in fire of Thy fair eyes, / Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.

Or as Christina Rosetti put it: ‘What can I give him, poor as I am?  If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.'  Crashaw's poem understands what is taking place in our hearts on this glad day of days.  We come, we see, we are overcome, we wonder - and make no mistake, we cannot celebrate Christmas unless we do all of these things.  But still this is not enough.  We must bring our wonder and our worship to this lowly King.  And that is to bring more than simply the praise of our lips.  It's the offering of our lives that counts - our lamb, our silver doves as the poet calls them, whatever symbol we can find to express all that we have and are.  What can I give him?  Give my heart, says the carol.  How can anything less than that do justice to this ‘huge birth' - huge for God, huge for the world, huge for how it robes our entire destinies as men and women.

This is what brings us to the Cathedral on Christmas morning.  We are here, like the shepherds, because we have heard a summons that makes it impossible not to come and see this thing that has come to pass.  And when we stand, like them, at the manger, we know in a way we could not know before, that love is his meaning - the great and wonderful love with which, as St John says, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  It is true that our society faces grave threats as the old year turns to the new.  Add to this the burdens our world always carries, not to mention the griefs and pains many of us will bring to this service today, and it would be tempting to lose hope.  Yet the holy Child of Bethlehem calls out to us to revive our faith.  He re-awakens in us our belief in God's purposes of goodness, and our resolve to live by the hope set before us in the incarnation.  As we look on ‘the fire of his fair eyes', our gaze is met by his that searches us out and knows us and burns out of us whatever holds us back from him.  The ‘huge birth' that speaks of love so fiercely felt and freely poured out gives us back our lives.  It draws out of us the only gift he covets, which is the offering of all that we are.  This is why we sing with the shepherds our Gloria in excelsis, not only this day but all our days. 

(Luke 2.8-20)