December 11, 2005
"Angels, Animals, and Shepherds"
By The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
Angels, Animals, and Shepherds
3rd Sunday of Advent
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
December 11, 2005
Angels, Animals, and Shepherds
3rd Sunday of Advent
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
December 11, 2005
It is Christmas on ER, the long-running television drama that offers up a weekly dose of cardiac arrest, cracked chest cavities, and very complicated relationships. On Thursday night, the world of ER was its usual messy self. A department store Santa had gotten into an altercation with three blind Christmas carolers, a little girl had been shot in gang violence crossfire, and a man about my age pretended to have three or four different kinds of maladies, trying to do anything to keep from being discharged and having to return to a life in which nobody cared whether he lived or died.
Lives on ER are always messy and sinful and laced with compassion and hope that break out in surprising ways. The highlight of Thursday night’s episode for me came when members of the hospital staff auditioned for singing parts at the staff Christmas party. Earnestly, hopelessly off key, they tried their hand at various verses of Silent Night. None could sing his or her way out of a paper bag. Mercifully, Abby, my favorite character, did not make the cut. But she and all the rest of the flawed, deluded, gloriously human characters who make up the cast of ER gave me a Christmas gift. They reminded me that the dawn of redeeming grace will burst forth on all of us exactly as we are. No one has to be perfect. No one has to get the melody right. This is not about our getting it right, this Advent of God into the human condition. It is about God’s coming to make us right. When the heavenly hosts sing Alleluia, it will not be just the saints who hear them. When the baby sleeps that heavenly peace of his, he will be sleeping the peace we all dream of: The love-lorn, the lonely, the victims of violence, those who inflict violence on others.
There is not a human being alive who does not long for the peace that only the Prince of Peace can bring.
Don’t you just love the baby Jesus? I love how indiscriminately, how tenderly he welcomes absolutely anyone who needs to come close to his manger. These special Sundays before Christmas, we are thankful that, unlike Abby and her cohorts on ER, our choir can carry a tune, by golly. We are even more thankful that there is a place for every one of us in Bethlehem. Today, we continue our Advent series on the faces at the manger. We continue to believe and hope that, after Christmas is done, we will understand better the role we are to play in the still unfolding story of God’s salvation of the world.
In Luke’s gospel, the shepherds, of all people are given the most prominent role to play in the story. Lowly, unglamorous, unsophisticated shepherds are to be the first to hear the glad tidings of the angel of the Lord. They are the first to go to Bethlehem, the first to tell the glad tidings, the first to have the great privilege of returning to their lives with the new vocational assignment of glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard in all that they say and do, which is, by the way, the best definition of Christian discipleship I know.
Why the shepherds? Why did they receive such unprecedented privilege, these country folks who watched their flocks and slept under the stars? Everybody who was anybody lived in the city, in Jerusalem. They were nobody that anybody who was anybody had ever heard of: that’s who the shepherds were. And yet, they are the ones to whom the angel speaks. They are the ones who receive the magnificent message that the savior is born.
I went to a Christmas party one day this week. The party was at a house high at the top of a hill. A van drove the guests up and down the hill. I rode in the van with a woman I had never met before. During the course of our climb, she told the driver and me that she had just been to an
important luncheon with some very important people. She told us how busy she was and how her left foot hurt. She looked in a compact mirror that she had taken out of her pocketbook to make sure that her hair was alright and her lipstick on. I guess she was a nice lady. I hate to judge people on first impressions, but my heart went out to her because I thought: If an angel had a glad message for her, she would never, ever have been able to hear it, so preoccupied with herself she was. Our one-way conversation in the van that day was like a shepherd’s crook, pulling me back from the precipice of my own excessive self-concern. Are you in danger of being so worried about yourself and how you’re doing and whether you’re going to be able to do all that you’re going to have to do that you won’t be able to hear a word of hope if it hit you in the face this hectic Christmas season?
You can wrap your gifts so beautifully that Martha Stewart would eat her heart out. You can decorate your house just so. You can go to the parties wearing the perfect outfit, but if you forget to open your heart to the people around you who are messengers from God. If you are so distracted that you cannot hear the glad message of God’s everlasting love come to earth, then you will miss the entire meaning of the birth of Jesus Christ.
The shepherds are at the manger to remind us to wake up, to pay attention, to remember that it is not always to those who are sitting in the VIP section that the glad-tidings are told. The word from on high can come to any of us as we go about our daily routines. The question is whether we will have the sense to listen.
I think of words of Ann Weems’ beautiful little poem from Kneeling in Bethlehem:
Is it all sewn up – my life?
Is it at this point so predictable,
So orderly,
So neat,
So arranged,
So right,
That I don’t have time or space for listening for the
Rustle of angels’ wings or running to stables to see a baby?
Could this be what he meant when he said
Listen, those who have ears to hear…
Look, those who have eyes to see?
O God, give me the humbleness of those shepherds who saw
In the cold December darkness
The Coming of Light
The Advent of Love!
What did the shepherds see and whom did they hear in the cold December darkness? They heard the angel of the Lord who was soon joined by the heavenly host of angels. Let me warn you. Watch out! If you hear a chorus of angels, that means they’ve got your number, and you need to be prepared to change your plans. Witness Mary, for example. The word “ange” comes from the Greek word angleos, which means “messenger.” Angels in the Bible are those who are go-betweens, bringing the word of God into the human realm. Don’t get hung up this morning on whether or not you actually believe in angles and whether they sit on your shoulder or on the head of a pin, or whether they are hanging around heaven playing harps all morning. What matters about angels is what they represent, and what they represent is the promise that there is a communication link between time and eternity. God is not silent. God speaks a message of hope and redemption. It is a message that will never contradict the core message of Christmas, the one that the angels shared with the shepherds: “I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people for unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord”
That is the message that is meant to change your life. That is the message that is meant to change the world. Whatever mess the world is in, with melting icecaps and nuclear weapons, hunger, illiteracy, and poverty running amuck, this is the life-giving, alternative message that can change the course of history. God intends to be involved. God is doing a new thing. The dawn of redeeming grace is real.
The great African-American philosopher and preacher, Howard Thurman, wrote,
There must be always remaining in every person’s life some place for the singing of angels – some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful…throwing all the rest of life into a new and created relatedness…. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels. (The Mood of Christmas)
And finally, after the shepherds and the angels, come the animals. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans of how “the whole creation is waiting in eager longing to be set free from its bondage to decay.” I believe that Jesus was born in a “straw-filled box where animals feed,” animals like sheep and oxen and cattle, because he came to redeem them, too, in the sense of the redemption of the whole created order. Imagine not just the human creature but galaxies upon galaxies: Christ is the savior of it all, from the sea coral to the farthest star, from the stray puppy to roaring lion, there is a freedom and a wholeness that comes from God.
One day in November, I was coming out of the florist shop in the little shopping center across from Ansley Mall. I saw a couple of dozen skinny, anxious cats wandering around. As I watched them, I realized they were gathering around the front wheels of an old Jeep-like vehicle. A woman was standing there, doing something with little dishes on the hood of the car. I watched her as she bent over and began setting these dishes of food all along the side of the parking lot-food for the cats who, I realized, lived in the vines and ditches behind our bright midtown buildings and homes. It was a strange sight. I walked over and said, “Are these your kitties?”
“No,” she said. “I guess you would say that I’m their person.”
“How often you feed them?” I asked.
“Every day,” she answered.
“How long has that been going on?” I said.
“Fourteen years,” she answered.
I’m just guessing, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to see her face again, her face at the manger in Bethlehem, and the animals, too. Weren’t they there that cold December night long ago?
Poet Barrie Shepherd Davies writes:
Of all the witnesses
Around that holy manger
Perhaps it was the animals who
Saw best what lay ahead
They were the ones who had paced the aching roads
Slept in the wet and hungry fields
Known the sharp sting of sticks
And thorns and curses
Endured the constant bruise
Of burdens not their own.
In the shadows of that stable,
Might it be that Christ’s warmest welcome
Lay within quiet comprehending gaze? (Faces at the Manger) Jesus Christ, the savior, was born on Christmas Day, revealing God’s capacity to end all that is hurtful and to repair everything that is broken in the entire created order. We will know that the day of salvation has arrived when “The wolf lies down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid…they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11)
Until then, let us try to be kind and at peace with one another. Let the shepherds show us how to live. Let the angels lift our heart. Let the animals cause us to pray for “release from bondage and the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Deo Gracias. Amen.
Angels, Animals, and Shepherds 3rd Sunday of Advent The Reverend Joanna Adams Morningside Presbyterian Church Atlanta, Georgia December 11, 2005
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Angels, Animals, and Shepherds
3rd Sunday of Advent
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
December 11, 2005
It is Christmas on ER, the long-running television drama that offers up a weekly dose of cardiac arrest, cracked chest cavities, and very complicated relationships. On Thursday night, the world of ER was its usual messy self. A department store Santa had gotten into an altercation with three blind Christmas carolers, a little girl had been shot in gang violence crossfire, and a man about my age pretended to have three or four different kinds of maladies, trying to do anything to keep from being discharged and having to return to a life in which nobody cared whether he lived or died.
Lives on ER are always messy and sinful and laced with compassion and hope that break out in surprising ways. The highlight of Thursday night’s episode for me came when members of the hospital staff auditioned for singing parts at the staff Christmas party. Earnestly, hopelessly off key, they tried their hand at various verses of Silent Night. None could sing his or her way out of a paper bag. Mercifully, Abby, my favorite character, did not make the cut. But she and all the rest of the flawed, deluded, gloriously human characters who make up the cast of ER gave me a Christmas gift. They reminded me that the dawn of redeeming grace will burst forth on all of us exactly as we are. No one has to be perfect. No one has to get the melody right. This is not about our getting it right, this Advent of God into the human condition. It is about God’s coming to make us right. When the heavenly hosts sing Alleluia, it will not be just the saints who hear them. When the baby sleeps that heavenly peace of his, he will be sleeping the peace we all dream of: The love-lorn, the lonely, the victims of violence, those who inflict violence on others.
There is not a human being alive who does not long for the peace that only the Prince of Peace can bring.
Don’t you just love the baby Jesus? I love how indiscriminately, how tenderly he welcomes absolutely anyone who needs to come close to his manger. These special Sundays before Christmas, we are thankful that, unlike Abby and her cohorts on ER, our choir can carry a tune, by golly. We are even more thankful that there is a place for every one of us in Bethlehem. Today, we continue our Advent series on the faces at the manger. We continue to believe and hope that, after Christmas is done, we will understand better the role we are to play in the still unfolding story of God’s salvation of the world.
In Luke’s gospel, the shepherds, of all people are given the most prominent role to play in the story. Lowly, unglamorous, unsophisticated shepherds are to be the first to hear the glad tidings of the angel of the Lord. They are the first to go to Bethlehem, the first to tell the glad tidings, the first to have the great privilege of returning to their lives with the new vocational assignment of glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard in all that they say and do, which is, by the way, the best definition of Christian discipleship I know.
Why the shepherds? Why did they receive such unprecedented privilege, these country folks who watched their flocks and slept under the stars? Everybody who was anybody lived in the city, in Jerusalem. They were nobody that anybody who was anybody had ever heard of: that’s who the shepherds were. And yet, they are the ones to whom the angel speaks. They are the ones who receive the magnificent message that the savior is born.
I went to a Christmas party one day this week. The party was at a house high at the top of a hill. A van drove the guests up and down the hill. I rode in the van with a woman I had never met before. During the course of our climb, she told the driver and me that she had just been to an
important luncheon with some very important people. She told us how busy she was and how her left foot hurt. She looked in a compact mirror that she had taken out of her pocketbook to make sure that her hair was alright and her lipstick on. I guess she was a nice lady. I hate to judge people on first impressions, but my heart went out to her because I thought: If an angel had a glad message for her, she would never, ever have been able to hear it, so preoccupied with herself she was. Our one-way conversation in the van that day was like a shepherd’s crook, pulling me back from the precipice of my own excessive self-concern. Are you in danger of being so worried about yourself and how you’re doing and whether you’re going to be able to do all that you’re going to have to do that you won’t be able to hear a word of hope if it hit you in the face this hectic Christmas season?
You can wrap your gifts so beautifully that Martha Stewart would eat her heart out. You can decorate your house just so. You can go to the parties wearing the perfect outfit, but if you forget to open your heart to the people around you who are messengers from God. If you are so distracted that you cannot hear the glad message of God’s everlasting love come to earth, then you will miss the entire meaning of the birth of Jesus Christ.
The shepherds are at the manger to remind us to wake up, to pay attention, to remember that it is not always to those who are sitting in the VIP section that the glad-tidings are told. The word from on high can come to any of us as we go about our daily routines. The question is whether we will have the sense to listen.
I think of words of Ann Weems’ beautiful little poem from Kneeling in Bethlehem:
Is it all sewn up – my life?
Is it at this point so predictable,
So orderly,
So neat,
So arranged,
So right,
That I don’t have time or space for listening for the
Rustle of angels’ wings or running to stables to see a baby?
Could this be what he meant when he said
Listen, those who have ears to hear…
Look, those who have eyes to see?
O God, give me the humbleness of those shepherds who saw
In the cold December darkness
The Coming of Light
The Advent of Love!
What did the shepherds see and whom did they hear in the cold December darkness? They heard the angel of the Lord who was soon joined by the heavenly host of angels. Let me warn you. Watch out! If you hear a chorus of angels, that means they’ve got your number, and you need to be prepared to change your plans. Witness Mary, for example. The word “ange” comes from the Greek word angleos, which means “messenger.” Angels in the Bible are those who are go-betweens, bringing the word of God into the human realm. Don’t get hung up this morning on whether or not you actually believe in angles and whether they sit on your shoulder or on the head of a pin, or whether they are hanging around heaven playing harps all morning. What matters about angels is what they represent, and what they represent is the promise that there is a communication link between time and eternity. God is not silent. God speaks a message of hope and redemption. It is a message that will never contradict the core message of Christmas, the one that the angels shared with the shepherds: “I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people for unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord”
That is the message that is meant to change your life. That is the message that is meant to change the world. Whatever mess the world is in, with melting icecaps and nuclear weapons, hunger, illiteracy, and poverty running amuck, this is the life-giving, alternative message that can change the course of history. God intends to be involved. God is doing a new thing. The dawn of redeeming grace is real.
The great African-American philosopher and preacher, Howard Thurman, wrote,
There must be always remaining in every person’s life some place for the singing of angels – some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful…throwing all the rest of life into a new and created relatedness…. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels. (The Mood of Christmas)
And finally, after the shepherds and the angels, come the animals. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans of how “the whole creation is waiting in eager longing to be set free from its bondage to decay.” I believe that Jesus was born in a “straw-filled box where animals feed,” animals like sheep and oxen and cattle, because he came to redeem them, too, in the sense of the redemption of the whole created order. Imagine not just the human creature but galaxies upon galaxies: Christ is the savior of it all, from the sea coral to the farthest star, from the stray puppy to roaring lion, there is a freedom and a wholeness that comes from God.
One day in November, I was coming out of the florist shop in the little shopping center across from Ansley Mall. I saw a couple of dozen skinny, anxious cats wandering around. As I watched them, I realized they were gathering around the front wheels of an old Jeep-like vehicle. A woman was standing there, doing something with little dishes on the hood of the car. I watched her as she bent over and began setting these dishes of food all along the side of the parking lot-food for the cats who, I realized, lived in the vines and ditches behind our bright midtown buildings and homes. It was a strange sight. I walked over and said, “Are these your kitties?”
“No,” she said. “I guess you would say that I’m their person.”
“How often you feed them?” I asked.
“Every day,” she answered.
“How long has that been going on?” I said.
“Fourteen years,” she answered.
I’m just guessing, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to see her face again, her face at the manger in Bethlehem, and the animals, too. Weren’t they there that cold December night long ago?
Poet Barrie Shepherd Davies writes:
Of all the witnesses
Around that holy manger
Perhaps it was the animals who
Saw best what lay ahead
They were the ones who had paced the aching roads
Slept in the wet and hungry fields
Known the sharp sting of sticks
And thorns and curses
Endured the constant bruise
Of burdens not their own.
In the shadows of that stable,
Might it be that Christ’s warmest welcome
Lay within quiet comprehending gaze? (Faces at the Manger) Jesus Christ, the savior, was born on Christmas Day, revealing God’s capacity to end all that is hurtful and to repair everything that is broken in the entire created order. We will know that the day of salvation has arrived when “The wolf lies down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid…they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11)
Until then, let us try to be kind and at peace with one another. Let the shepherds show us how to live. Let the angels lift our heart. Let the animals cause us to pray for “release from bondage and the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Deo Gracias. Amen.
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