It is as though the cold and barrenness of this time of year ignites a yearning within to reconnect with humanity, with family, with those who brought us into the world and those who nurtured our growth. This time of year is the time of holiday, of custom and ritual whereby we connect to deeper things of the spirit.

Thus, we light these candles to remember the spiritual traditions out of which we came, which brought us into the world and nurtured our growth.

It may be that of all the churches and synagogues in this town we are the only one that recognizes this spiritual heritage in this way.

For we are spiritual children of both Jewish and Christian lineage.

From our spiritual ancestors the Jews we were bequeathed the revelation that God’s activity in this world is freedom, and all who seek that liberating spirit through a covenant with others, seek to walk towards truth and towards God.

And from our spiritual ancestors the Christians we were bequeathed the revelation that each human being bears a divine likeness, and like Jesus, all souls are to be loved for that divine kinship; for God is love and they who love dwell in God and God in them.

Every moment of our living is a preparation for the next.

Every moment of our living is a leaning forward towards the future.

Every moment of our living is a hope for the peace that tomorrow might bring:

A time when those of the human family would seek reconciliation with one another.

Every moment of our living is a chance for each of us once again to heal a world bruised with misunderstanding and enmity.

Every moment is a preparation and a fulfillment of the hope and promise of creation.

We light these candles not only to remember from whence we came, but in the faith that even in the midst of darkness there appears a light that heals our lives and connects us to the promise in every child brought into this world.

 ^{8And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.}

 9And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

 10And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

 11For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

 12And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

 13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

 14Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.  

This beginning to Luke’s birth story of Jesus is so simple and beautiful that it is the favorite of children wherever it is known, and has been captured by our culture in the delightful television holiday special from the pen of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts character of Linus. I call him, “Linus the Unrecognized Apostle”!

The New Testament Gospel of Mark, written about 70 ACE, contains no birth story, and neither does the New Testament Gospel of John, written about 100-110 ACE. Only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, both dated around 90 ACE, contain birth stories. Apparently concern about Jesus’ birth was not of importance until 60 years after his death. Jesus was born a peasant, and there could have only been oral stories about his birth if any at all. But since his origins weren’t a concern until Matthew and Luke, these two Gospel writers used themes prevalent in their Hebraic and Greek cultures of their times and different places, to construct out of both history and legend these marvelous and wondrous stories that have outlasted the centuries of suffering humanity.

The birth story in Matthew is more a political narrative and political statement. The Jewish Matthew writing to his Jewish audience advocating that they accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, has the Jewish Jesus’ birth attended by foreign wise men Kings. These Kings bow before the baby and bring him royal gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is as if the author is announcing to his Jewish brethren of his time that Jesus was the Messiah who had come to rescue the Jews from the oppression of Roman occupation and culture. In his birth story Matthew is telling his Jewish brethren to persevere, for in the birth of Jesus the day will come when the Roman Caesar himself will, as other wise men kings had, bow down to Jesus and give Jesus royal gifts, recognizing in him a power more forceful than monarchical might. It is a message that political leaders then and now try to reinterpret to their own ends, because the thought of something more powerful than political might is abhorrent to politicians. Matthew announces an unmistakable truth that kings, Caesars, presidents, politicians of all kinds then and now shun and ignore: human political power is arrogant over against the power of God appearing as a human infant, and through love and forgiveness. When God appears as a infant all political power is judged in its arrogance!

But the Jewish Luke is an advocate of a different view of Jesus, for a different audience, different ears and concerns, and a different imagination. The difference is lost on our culture because we have collapsed the two stories of Matthew and Luke into one. Luke was not writing for a Jewish audience and culture, but for a gentile, Greek culture, and so his story is different. His understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ birth offers a different view of what it might mean to say that God appears in the world of human affairs.

In Luke the story of Jesus’ birth starts in the fields near Bethlehem. Bethlehem is the town of the birth of the most famous Jewish king, David. But Jesus is known to history as Jesus of Nazareth because that’s where he was from, not Bethlehem. So the author of Luke is using symbolize communication to say something about Jesus by having Bethlehem as his birthplace: that he has a lineage of sorts with the Jewish King David. But the story starts in the fields near Bethlehem, not even in Bethlehem itself, a strange place to start a birth story about someone whose lineage is tied to the most famous Jewish King. And it begins with shepherds, the very antithesis of royal attendants.

Shepherds do not accompany kings. They’re nomads, homeless, smelly, dirty, and the poorest of the poor. They work in the squalor of sheep herds, as anyone knows who has been on a farm amongst sheep, especially after a rainfall. Shepherds have no stable family or home life, or any home at all. They carry on a rather lonesome and loathsome existence. They battle the elements and protect their passive sheep from attacks by hungry lions and packs of wolves, using only a crook to fend them off. The tense disquiet that surely occupied their nighttime isolation would have born a fertile and fearful imagination. Remember, Luke’s time was before Edison, before our world which does not really know complete darkness. Then, at night, especially cloudy nights, it was pitch dark. No light whatsoever!

The storyteller Luke has angels appear to them in a kind of nocturnal hallucination. In the Hebrew tradition when angels appear they elicit fear from human beings because they are not humans with wings, but unearthly kinds of creatures. You do not want to be “touched” by these un-Romantic angels! So “angel talk” always begins with the angels declaring to their frightened human witnesses, “Fear not. Do not be afraid.” This, these angels do, because, as they tell these shepherds, there is good news. The good news is about a birth. The shepherds, no doubt, initially think good news about a birth means they will have a goodly number of foals in the spring! But, no, this birth concerns a human baby. Hardly good news to a shepherd!

To shepherds of the first century ACE there would be a lot of things to be afraid of at night. Wild animals, the Romans, marauding bands of thieves and gangs, the surrounding culture’s invasion, the Roman army routing vagabonds, or their own Jewish religious officials rooting out heresies. Many things could appear that would frighten shepherds, which was why the shepherds had turned their backs on civilization of even the most humble kind. They knew a truth: there is much to be frightened of in the world of human culture and human affairs. But the angels tell them not be afraid, that a baby is going to be born and they should go to Bethlehem to see this newborn child.

Shepherds, the poorest of the poor, on the fringe of their culture and their civilization, who had turned their back on having families, and whom the culture itself had discarded and despised, these were the ones that Luke has as the first to hear the good news of Jesus’ birth. Not city dwellers, not suburbanites, not sophisticates, not the intelligent, the rich, the powerful, not the religious, not leaders, not those blessed by family and fortune, but these whom the culture had discarded and despised, who lived near culture but not quite inside the culture. The good news was first delivered to those who existed “nearby” civilization.

And the birth itself was in a place “nearby.” Bethlehem, the symbolic birthplace of Jesus, was a small village near Jerusalem, about five miles away. Jerusalem, the acknowledged capital of the Hebrew faith, and international city of culture, THE religious city of the ancient and modern world. What was the author of Luke trying to suggest by not having Jesus, this religious mystic, this God-filled man, whom Luke himself was advocating as the supreme religious leader; what was Luke suggesting by not having Jesus born in the center of Jerusalem, the city at the center of what human beings of the time thought, the most important place of civilization, culture, and history? You would think that if Luke wanted to tell in his narrative of the power of God as lived into our world through Jesus himself, Luke would have had Jesus’ born in the center of Jerusalem, the city at the center of the Jewish world; that somehow that would be symbolically appropriate to a man so filled with God as Luke thought Jesus was. But no. Jesus is born “nearby.” He isn’t born where the culturally elite of Luke’s day resided. He isn’t born where the wealthy reside, where the sophisticated reside, nor where the Roman government has its local affiliate! Instead, Jesus is born nearby. It’s almost as if Luke is telling readers for generations something true about the appearance of the divine in human existence.

That God, the spirit that infuses life with meaning, breaks into our world not in the places that are obvious to us nor the places we would have it be, but, instead, “nearby.” We give credence to wealth, authority to religions and religious leaders, allegiance to governments and their rulers, attention to those who have beauty and good luck; then as now, human beings seek a divine wisdom from the mind and mouths of mortals, inspiration from pottery then and Starbuck coffee cups now, and look at those who have what we seek as though they are blessed and we are not; these are as gods to us and so we would think and seek God to be born there. And then as now, darkness creeps into human lives in the form of suffering, trial, failure, burden, shame, guilt, and we would never think God to be born in these. We want God to be and to be born where we think God should be or be born, in Jerusalem. Yet, the divine has its own ways. It is always, always nearby. Right alongside of us in our need, and often unseen or unrecognized by us.

The divine spirit is made flesh in the lives of the shepherds of then and now. The ones thought of then and now as the least, the last, and the lost. It is declared first and foremost there. Good news for us, then? Yes, yes, and still, yes. For if the Good News is near to them, it is near to us all. It is ever present to us all, in our need, our isolation, when civilization or culture or community disregards and disowns us, when life is lonesome and loathsome, it is nearby. It really is much easier to discern then we can ever imagine, but so hard for us to discern when we look at it as the gods we are certain are gods, in the places we are certain it must be. Because, implausible as it may be to understand, God is in the most fragile, vulnerable, easily broken, exposed, defenseless, and unguarded of all of us, a baby. Instead of looking where we think God must be, look into a baby’s eyes and see what the shepherds saw when they came in from the fields and what the angels proclaimed is good news. Look in a baby’s eyes and you will see the image of God in which all souls are made.

AMEN.