Scripture:  Luke 2:1-20

I want to begin by sharing with you what I imagine a lot of people are wondering about you this morning.  What on earth are you doing here?  It’s Christmas Day!  For heaven sakes, you could be home in your pajamas, your bathrobe and slippers… You could be opening presents under the tree, trying on that new sweater, or playing with those new toys… And you could be home where it’s (hopefully!) toasty warm.  But instead you braved the winter morning, got the car started, and made you way to church.  Why are you at church on Christmas Day?  [1]

 I even know of a few churches that aren’t holding services today on account of the fact that it’s Christmas and folks should be spending it at home with their families.  This, of course, is an interesting allowance given some folks’ preoccupation with the supposed “War on Christmas.” 

But we’re here, and we are with family.  Today is the last Sunday of 2011, and so we gather once more to sing, to worship, and today—to tell the story of our Savior’s birth—to revisit the manger, the angels, the shepherds out in the fields.

Did you know that of the four gospels, only Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth?  Just those two, and actually they tell the story quite differently.  Sure, we like to smush them together every Christmas—make it so the wise men arrive just five or ten minutes after the shepherds.  Matthew’s gospel gives us the wise men:  rich foreign kings who come from a far-off land to worship the Christ child and present him with gifts.  But Luke doesn’t seem interested in wise men.  Instead he gives us shepherds. 

In Luke we read that “there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”  Why is that, do you think?  In so many ways Luke and Matthew are parallel gospels, but not here.  Why would Luke leave out the wise men and opt for shepherds instead?

Could it be that the life of a shepherd was romanticized?  That everyone wanted to be a shepherd in those days?  That shepherds were the obvious choice to be the first to hear news of the Savior’s birth?  Not likely.  Shepherds were rough, dirty, and poor and they lived in the wilderness with their flocks. 

Here’s something to consider.  Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem because Emperor Augustus commanded “all the world” to be registered for the census.  What about the shepherds?  Why were they still out in the field?  Why weren’t they in Bethlehem or in some other town getting registered? 

Well, more than likely they were still out in the fields because they didn’t count.  Shepherds were always on the move, driving their sheep from one pasture to the next.  They didn’t really have a place they could call home.  Plus they probably smelled more like sheep than anything else.  Who would want them to come into town?  No one!  This is why, on the night when “all the world” had to come home and be counted, the shepherds had to stay out in the field.  They had no home and they didn’t count.

But in Luke’s gospel, the shepherds come to town.  And not only that, in Luke’s gospel, the shepherds get a whole angel chorus out there in the field.  Looking through the entire Bible, I would challenge you to find a bigger assembly of angels.  It doesn’t exist!  Sure, here and there someone bumps into an angel or two.  But the angels fill the skies and deliver a private concert only for the shepherds—the dirty, smelly, homeless shepherds who don’t count.  Except now they do count.  And while everyone else is travelling to their hometowns to fill out paperwork, the shepherds sprint into the city of David to worship the Messiah.

The shepherds, of all people, are the ones who worship Jesus first.  They deliver the news of what they saw, and Mary, who’s just delivered her first child, somehow has the wherewithal to receive their presence as a gift and to treasure their words in her heart. 

This, friends, is the gospel—where a young teenage girls bears the Christ and where smelly homeless men bear the good news.

The more we read the gospels, the more we know that we should expect nothing less.  And so we begin our Christmas Day with the reminder that God loves and sings to shepherds—that God loves and sings to even that shepherd part of you—that part of you that feels faraway, lost, rejected, and not worthy of good company.  God loves and sings to even that part of you and calls you home to worship and adore the Christ child.  Friends, welcome home and Merry Christmas.

1.  My friend and colleague San Williams preached a sermon on Christmas Day in 2005, at University Presbyterian Church in Austin Texas, and he began in similar fashion.