Thanks to Kyla and Brooke and Rae, and to the ensemble and the Advent choir and the sanctuary decorators and the artists…my goodness. We are overwhelmed by aesthetic riches! “Come, thou long expected Jesus…Raise us to thy glorious throne.” Beautiful. Sacred. A hope-filled season.

Behold, I have in my hand, the antithesis of the season! I didn’t go hunting for it- it found me. I wasn’t searching- it arrived in my mailbox. In my ever-diligent listening to hear the voices of our culture during the Christmas season, a representative voice showed up, in visual form, with perfect timing.

It’s just a direct mail piece from one of the mobile phone companies, with three simple words on the outside in large letters: “GIVE. GET. REJOICE.” Some of the words of the season, aren’t they? Almost sacred words, a couple of them. But the key is, when you open this flap, they receive a little more definition:

GIVE means “give the gift of a certain brand phone from a certain store.”

GET means “get great values for everyone.”

REJOICE means “rejoice in your own genius.”

This is how our culture distorts the vocabulary of faith- “Rejoice in your own genius.” That’s a different voice. We’re surrounded by these.

And this is why in these weeks we’ve tried to listen to just a handful of voices from scripture, to see if they might actually lead us away from our own genius, and help us hear God’s voice in a holy time of year.

We’ve listened to the old prophet Isaiah, pointing ahead from his day long ago to the coming of the Messiah.

We’ve heard the strong voice of the Baptist, urging us to prepare.

Last week, we eavesdropped on a conversation between an angel and a 14-year old girl willing to embrace what God was doing.

This morning, our last Sunday before Christmas, we listen for the voices of some shepherds. Again, the story is familiar. I actually encourage you to simply listen well. Please stand if you are able.

Reading from Eugene Peterson’s The Message: Luke 2:8-20.

Before we can get to the shepherds…we have to get the setting. Really, it’s just one word, one beautiful, splendid word: GLORY. GLORY comes before any shepherd voice in THIS story. GLORY. Doesn’t that have a great ring to it? We haven’t ruined THAT word. Say it one time:

Glory. Say it again. GLORY. It almost FEELS special.

These guys (guys, as far as we know) are minding their own business, living in the fields, probably living off the land, working the late shift, a few miles outside Bethlehem, the City of David. “In the beginning,” a friend of mine paraphrased this, “there were shepherds and there were sheep.” It was night. It was that simple. And then? GLORY. “The glory of the Lord shone around them.”

Glory. The Old Testament Hebrew word is “kabod,” which means weighty, or important. Or rather, something that gives importance. It’s what made God impressive to people. The visible manifestation of God to humans- often it happened in cloud, more often in bright fire like the “shekinah glory,” the pillar of fire that guided the Israelites, or the bright splendor that enveloped Moses, a radiant aura of fire.

Glory. The New Testament Greek word is “doxa,” where we get the word “doxology” from- “GLORY be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.” Doxa, glory is God’s perceptible manifestation. It made people afraid. It was the Glory that miraculously made Peter momentarily hold his tongue on the Mount of Transfiguration. It was the Glory that knocked Paul off his horse as he went to hunt down Christians, and turned his life into the Apostle Paul. Glory.

“The glory of the Lord shown around them.” Lit up the sky, dropped them to their knees, these sheepherders. Ordinary night. Wonder. Took their breath right out of their chest.

In October Anne and I took a couple days, and flew over to Missoula, Montana, rented a car and drove an hour or so north on Hwy 93 towards Flathead Lake. You’re driving through the beauty of the open plains area, mountains around the edges of the horizon. You drive up a hill that will then drop you down towards Polson, on the south end of the lake.

There’s beauty everywhere, but suddenly you come over the top of the rise and Flathead Lake stretches out sparkling in front of you, Salish Mountains on the East, Mission Mountains on the West, and the evergreens go down and kiss the water of the lake and you draw your breath with a sharp intake. Glory.

I can remember the birth of our children. How do you explain it? There’s something going on in those times, some mist in the air, some light. I remember, I think with Dana, me sitting with Anne in the middle of the night, a soft light, her working hard, me reading Isaiah, life breaking through, a baby, splendor everywhere. Glory.

I read about Harriet Tubman, the slave woman who kept the Underground Railroad busy 160 years ago, smuggling slaves out of the South. In 1849 she made her first trip to freedom across the state line into Pennsylvania. She said “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a GLORY over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven” GLORY.

The glory of the Lord shone around the sheepherders. It shone on the hills, it lit up the night, it brightened the scraggly bushes, startled the sheep, it was everywhere, not a flashlight beam but a 360 degree floodlight that left no room for any darkness. The early African American painter Henry O.Tanner captured this beautifully in a painting from 1910.

Unlike many classical artists who focused on the angel or on the shepherds, in Tanner’s painting the shepherds and the sheep are small and unobtrusive, the angel so radiant as to barely be seen, but the vast majority of the painting is the Judean hillside, the hills, the bushes, the trails lit up, covered in a misty aura as though the glory of God was everywhere at one time, spilling out on everything, human or not. Glory.

And the first response of the shepherds to the GLORY of God? Quiet. To simply be quiet. There is the light, there is the voice of an angel, there is a chorus praising God and saying (what else), “GLORY to God in the highest heaven!” We are 7 verses into the story and we have yet to hear the voice of the shepherds. They are quiet.

And to be honest, maybe we should quit here. Maybe we should just stop. If there is one thing that I would wish for you, and for me, in these next days, it is the chance to simply be quiet before God. To let the glory of God roll over us, to let God’s voice have the day, to set aside everything else and be quiet. Take a walk. Find a quiet place. Bundle up and sit outside for a half hour. I beg you, find a way to be quiet and let God find you.

We can hardly read this story without wishing that we were these sheepherders. That it would happen again. That it would happen to us. Which simply begs the question- why them? What was it about them that the GLORY of God would shine around them? Was there something particularly noble and gentle about them we might emulate?

I hate to disappoint you. The scholars and historians aren’t much help here. They all agree that shepherds were pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Uneducated, subsistence living, seasonal, transient. There’s even some evidence that, as a category, they had a reputation for being dishonest and outside the law.

Rough. Sinners, in other words. Unlikely folks. Which of course, in the upside down world of the kingdom of God makes them ideal receivers of God’s favor. It’s the same kind of people Jesus ended up hanging around with, the same kind his stories said were to be invited into the banquet. These are the ones who received this “good news,” that God’s presence had arrived in a personal, earthy, direct way that brought salvation, that finally made sense of everything. “Good news of great joy.”

It’s a verb, you know. “I am bringing you good news” is just one word…it’s not far from being “I am good-newsing you.” The unlikely get good-newsed.

Maybe a better way to understand this is to think about who God bypassed in bringing the good news to the shepherds. It wasn’t strategically sent to the rich or powerful. It wasn’t given to the religious leaders. It was not whispered to the politicians or the diplomats or the ambassadors. It was not delivered to people who had influence or position or the qualifications to really DO something with it.

In short, it wasn’t given to anybody that WE would think about giving important news to…which makes me wonder why the church can get so sidetracked in focusing its kingdom efforts on the people of influence. There’s entire mission strategies that operate this way, and we are easily caught up in them. We say “if we are going to bring about the kingdom of God, we need to do it strategically and efficiently. Start with the best, brightest and most influential.”

The problem is, WE are not bringing about the kingdom of God. God has already started that. He invites us to simply participate. Like the sheepherders. The good news didn’t come first to people like most of us. It came to the sheepherders. Why? Maybe they were the only ones who really know what to do with it. Glory.

So what DID they do with this glory, and this best of all possible news? Three answers, I guess: They responded. They worshiped. And we just don’t know.What did the shepherds do? They responded by going to see the thing the angel had told them about- the birth of a child. They responded by telling people what had happened. I doubt they interpreted it a whole lot. God acted, God met them, they told others about it. People were amazed at how God had shown up.

What did the shepherds do? They worshiped- praising God and, interestingly GLORIFYING God. That doesn’t mean that they gave glory to God as though he didn’t already have it. It simply means they recognized, they acknowledged the glory that God had displayed, that was already part of God. It’s what we are supposed to do when we worship to- not impress God or each other, but to notice, to acknowledge what God is like and is doing.

What did the shepherds do? We just don’t know. I mean, we don’t know what they did…over the long haul. We don’t know because the shepherds absolutely fall out of the rest of the biblical story, never to appear again. Sometimes I wonder what happened next.

I’ve thought it would be interesting to write a story sometime, speculating. If it was going to be a realistic story, there would have to be a few different responses from different shepherds. We know they “returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”

Then what? I’m sure that some of them probably went back to what they had been doing, full of the goings on of one night, moved and bewildered. And the next morning woke up and there were sheep to watch, hills to climb, food to find. A day, a week, a month and life was back to a good, safe routine. And gradually it faded from memory until it was there in the distant past.

Perhaps others were convinced that they had a lifechanging experience, and continued to talk about it. But as they did, they ran into resistance- “that couldn’t have happened.” “Were you drunk again?” “Who are you to have God showered all over you?” “You should get yourself checked, you’re talking crazy, religious fanatic talk.” And though they started with wonder and excitement, it was quickly subdued.

But I wonder sometimes, if there were others who were a little more like Mary, Jesus’ mother. Who internalized all that had happened. Ruminated on it, thought about it, prayed over it, and little by little were changed by it.

I wonder if they perhaps continued to tell the story, and in words and changed lives told it to their families, to their children, and impacted generations of their family.

I wonder if over time their lives began to look like this: caring for those around them, sharing food with the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick…so that many, many people could see that God had done something remarkable- That a Savior, Messiah, the Lord had shown up and everything was different.

It’s all speculation of course. But it begs the question. If you have heard the story, lived the story, if Christ has touched you, if the Glory has fallen on you…what will you do? Hide it? You might as well try to stick a burning bush under a basket. If you’ve been goodnews-ed, the only possible thing to do is to live it, and speak it and watch for more of it.

Glory.