aka The Shepherd Had
S#!t on His Hands
Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve Year B
First Presbyterian
Church Clarksville
Candlelight Service
of Word and Sacrament
December 24, 2014
5:30 pm
The Reverend Dr.
Robert Wm Lowry
When
you close your eyes and really concentrate, what do you see when you hear the
story of the nativity of Christ? What
are the pictures that go with the words in your mind’s eye?
Perhaps
you see visions of the works of the great Renaissance masters with angels,
shepherds and the holy family painted with elegant and graceful strokes of the
brush.
Perhaps
you see the carved wood nativity that comes out each year to help decorate your
home for the holiday; each piece wrapped in paper until the time for it to make
its appearance in that special place of honor.
Perhaps
you see church Christmas pageants with angels fidgeting in their homemade
gossamer wings, shepherds trying to walk without tripping over the hem of the
bathrobe passing as a shepherd’s cloak, and everyone praying that the new born
playing Jesus doesn’t get hungry and start to scream in the middle of the show.
Whatever
your picture of the nativity, whatever images come to mind, my guess is that
yours is a lot like mine; it is pretty sterile- pretty tame.
In
truth, that starry-starry night so long ago was anything but sterile or tame in
that stable in Bethlehem.
That
place was uncomfortable.
It
was inhospitable;
it
was dirty;
it
was smelly;
it
was pretty much the worst possible moment in the worst possible place for the
events of that night to unfold.
There
were no elegant strokes of the painter’s brush or cute stumbling cherub faced
children to take away the reality of that place that night when a young woman
and her fiancé became parents for the very first time.
When
my niece was born, my sister and her husband were that perfect combination of
terrified and elated. Like all
first-time parents, they were terrified that there was this little helpless
person who was theirs to care for and they had no idea what they were
doing. They, like all other parents, had
moments when they became the stuff of hospital legend, panicking at the first
sneeze and becoming almost unraveled at the first need of a clean up on aisle
4!
And,
like most parents, they were happy to let the family hold that precious little
girl as long as they held her with freshly washed hands. We used to kid my sister that at first washed
hands were not sufficient, she wanted us to have the full Karen Silkwood
treatment and be decontaminated from head to toe! It didn’t take long though until soap and
water or a healthy dose of hand sanitizer was enough to earn a little baby time.
Mary
and Joseph were those first time parents.
Whatever kind of heavenly insight the heavenly host gave to them, there
is absolutely no evidence that how to put on a diaper or what to do about that
first bout of the sniffles was part of the divine instruction manual. On some level, Mary and Joseph were like all
other new first time parents; they were making it up as they went panicking
about the little things, worrying over the mundane, and wrapped up in the
anxiety of being responsible for this tiny human. Of course in their case, that tiny human was
also God so my guess is that their anxiety was increased by a factor!
Like
so many maternity waiting rooms today, there were surely some hangers on at the
stable that day waiting for Joseph to run out and shout “it’s a boy!” Waiting for
a glimpse of the baby in the manger.
The
scriptures are silent on the question, but I bet there were at least a few
family or friends who made it in time.
One
group we know for sure that made it were those shepherds of song and lore. The ones who were keeping their flock by
night and who, at the angel’s invitation, went to Bethlehem to see.
Despite
how they appear in the cute and funny church Christmas pageants on Youtube, the
shepherds who showed up that night probably matched their surroundings pretty
well. They were dirty, smelly, pretty
much the worst possible candidates to be getting close to a newborn baby.
At
some point, after the baby was wrapped in swaddling cloth, after mother and
father began to settle into their new reality, after the chaos of birth gave
way to the miracle of new life, the inevitable almost certainly happened. One of the shepherds asked Mary, “may I hold
him?”
I
can only imagine Mary’s face when the dirty shepherd- the one who slept on the
ground with the sheep- reached out his arms to hold the newborn baby. This unwashed, unclean, unsanitary shepherd
wanted to hold the Son of God in his unwashed, unclean, unsanitary arms?
Nothing
in the story itself tells us if this really happened or, if it did, what Mary
would have done. This is one of those
places where we read a very human moment between the lines of a holy story.
My
guess is that in the end, Mary did let the shepherd hold the baby. Dirty as he was, because lets face it there
was no soapy water much less any hand sanitizer sitting around, that shepherd
got his turn to hold the newborn baby; the newborn king; the newborn prince of
peace. He got his turn because, with
this baby, everyone gets a turn.
Everyone
gets a turn to hold this baby because this baby was born for everyone; for all
of us. This baby was born not only for
the cute second grade shepherd walking down the aisle of the church tripping
over dad’s bathrobe, but for the unwashed, unclean, unsanitary shepherd
straight in from the fields.
If
we really want to follow the advice of the bloviating pundits who fight the
phony war on Christmas year after year, let’s really put the Christ back in
Christmas and think about what the world would be like if we treated Jesus the
way Mary and Joseph did; not as a weapon to be used against the people we don’t
like or approve of or care for but as the one who came for us all; the one entrusted to us so that we
might share him with the world; the one we all
get to hold.
What,
I wonder, would the world look like if we really lived like each and every
person we meet deserves the dignity and respect of one who holds the prince of
peace in their arms? What if we lived
like we really believed that Jesus came, not for merely the popular, powerful,
or even the well-washed, but for all?
What if we lived knowing that each and every pair of hands that reaches
out to hold the infant in the manger are hands deserving of that dignity?
What
would it be like to live in a world where…
Rich
hands and poor hands;
Powerful hands and
powerless hands;
Republican
hands and democrat hands;
Protestant
hands and Catholic hands;
Gay
hands and straight hands;
Joyful
hands and sorrowful hands;
Documented
hands and undocumented hands;
Clean
hands and unclean hands all…ALL…get to hold the baby?!
What
kind of world would we create if each and every hand that reached out in
wonder, love, hope, or awe got to hold the baby- got to hold the child of God-
just for a moment?
When
the angel came to Mary to tell her what was to come to pass, one thing was
abundantly clear; her child would not be hers alone. Mary bore God into the world and God in the
world cannot and should not be contained in any one life. God in the world is God with US- all of US-
saint and sinner alike, God came into the world to be known and to know and
when we hold the prince of peace in our arms we cradle hope and we know grace.
This
holy night, friends, my we reach out our hands and hold the baby. May we stand shoulder to shoulder with the
holy family and the filthy shepherds and every one of God’s children who reach
out to hold the child. And may we find,
in this night and the miracle it ushers in with the dawn of Christ, the courage
to see the world like a scared young mother; as a world worthy of sharing the Son
of God.
Thanks
be to God that hands even as dirty as ours may hold the baby and know the
closeness of God.
Amen.
