Read Luke 2:1-20 here.
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How many of you love Christmas carols?
I want to share with you my favorite carol:
I want to know what love is. I
want you to show me.
Poignant words from the ‘80s from the band Foreigner.
What is love? How do I
show you?
Love is our Advent theme today. Love is the major theme of the Bible. God is
love (1 John 4:8). Which is easy to
talk about, but how do we show what love is?
This time of year the most obvious answer is to give you
something, a gift for Christmas. Many of
us have spent a lot of time and money over the past few weeks making sure we
have gifts for everybody on our list.
Even if we haven’t been hanging around church much, we’ve also
probably heard the Christmas story from Luke that Gordon just read for us. If you watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas”
you heard it there from Linus. Joseph
and Mary go to Bethlehem and while they’re there, Mary gives birth. Angels appear to some shepherds. The shepherds go to see the baby.
It’s really easy for the shopping and wrapping and
gift-giving to feel totally disconnected from that 2000-year-old story.
The most obvious connection is that God showed us his love
for us by sending us his son. That baby
born in Bethlehem - God’s greatest gift to us, and so we give gifts to one
another. Sometimes I think we get caught
up in trying to match God’s gift. We try
to be the greatest gift givers.
If we can’t do quality, we try to make up for it with
quantity. The more there is to open, the
more people will know we love them, right? …which if we’re doing it to show our
love is wonderful, but we have to make sure we don’t have other motivations,
because without love our actions fall flat (1 Cor 13).
The thing is, we can’t
out give God. No gift is ever going
to be as big as the one God gave us.
There are other gifts of love being given in Luke’s
story. It’s a story that covers a lot of
ground. Throughout Advent we focus on different parts of it. We talk about Joseph’s willingness to
disregard Jewish law and tradition to take Mary as his wife, even though she
was pregnant, even though he hadn’t played a part in the pregnancy. We talk about Mary’s willingness to be the
mother of God. This week, though, I’m
fascinated by those shepherds.
Maybe we can all relate to them. They’re just average workers, out-standing in
their field, minding their own business, or rather, minding their sheep.
Really, although we tend to treat the shepherds as bit players
in this story, Luke gives them more space in the birth story than Mary or Joseph. Maybe that’s because throughout the Bible,
shepherds are the main characters.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were shepherds. Moses was a shepherd, and King
David, the most revered of all the kings and the ancestor of Jesus, was a
shepherd. In the psalms, we are reminded
that God himself is our shepherd. In
Ezekiel, God gets angry with those who are supposed to be shepherding the
people of Israel, but instead are only looking out for themselves, and says
that he will be our good shepherd.
So here in Luke we see that shepherds again play an important
part in the story. They are the first to
receive the good news. They immediately
respond and go and see. And they don’t
keep the good news to themselves. They
go and tell. They share. They are good shepherds.
We sometimes think of shepherds as being somewhat similar to
today’s homeless people. In reality,
shepherds were highly regarded. The
Jewish philosopher Philo who lived in Jesus’ time wrote:
Indeed so good a thing is shepherding that it is justly ascribed not to
kings only and wise men and perfectly cleansed souls, but also to God the All
Sovereign. The authority for this ascription is not any ordinary one but a
prophet, whom we do well to trust. This is the way in which the Psalmist
speaks: ‘The Lord shepherds me and nothing shall be lacking to me’ (Ps 23.1).[1]
The Lord IS our
good shepherd. And the presence of
shepherds in the Christmas story reminds us that this baby that the shepherds
are telling about would grow up to one day tell us, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11,14).
We live in a world that needs to know love. The words of the Foreigner song could be the
words of anyone. “I want to know what
love is. I want you to show me.”
The shepherds in this story help us see how to show love.
1.
Love shares
the good news.
The angels tell the shepherds about the baby, the messiah,
born in Bethlehem. And then they go back
to tending their sheep. NO! They go running off to see for
themselves. And then they go back to
tending their sheep. NO! They DON’T!
They go tell more people about it.
They don’t keep it to themselves.
They share this amazing news.
THAT is showing love.
They saw and then told.
This news was too good to keep to themselves. The savior of the world was born that night. Why wouldn’t they tell everyone they could
find about the one who’d come to save us all.
Jesus said in John 14:15 “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” And before he ascended to heaven, Jesus told us to go and
make disciples. Love tells the story of
the one who came to save us all. The
shepherds show us that love shares the good news.
Shepherds are kind of passé for us in the church….sort of a
that-was-then-but-what-about-now kind of thing, but I follow a shepherd on
twitter. He’s quite popular,
actually. He has something like 15,000
followers. One of his recent tweets
pointed out to me that it’s still important to go out and tell. The Herdwick shepherd posted a picture of
sheep that he was shipping to Belgium.
Notice what he says about why he is shipping them there. “Important for the breed to have wider
geography.” These sheep were a breed
that was brought to England by the Vikings.
They are herdwicks. To keep the
breed going they have to share them.
Just like we have to share the good news about Jesus to keep our faith
going. God showed his love to us and we
show love by sharing it. Love tells the
story.
The shepherds show us how to love in another way.
2.
Love
pursues us.
Good shepherds go after their lost sheep. Psalm 23 spells it out for us.
Goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life.
Psalm 23:6 CEB
In fact, God’s pursuit of us is shown by the birth of Jesus:
God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes
in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
Love pursues us.
3.
Love
sacrifices for us
Again the shepherds are the example. Jesus tells us in John 10:11
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
Jesus laid down his life for us, just as a shepherd would to
protect the sheep.
Giving your life for someone is huge. It’s an amazing way to show what love
is. Really, though, we can do this every
day even in small ways by the ways we put others before ourselves.
One Christmas there was a mother who did this. Her daughter was eleven and the daughter was
obsessed with getting presents at Christmas.
When she thought no one was looking, she checked the tags on every
single present under the tree to see which ones were for her. When it came time to open presents, the
mother said apologetically, “We’ve had a tough year. There aren’t as many presents this
year.” Her daughter already knew that
from checking the tags and counting. So
she knew when her mother handed her a present that wasn’t hers. She hadn’t seen her mother that morning
taking the tag off and quickly putting on a new tag with the daughter’s
name. The daughter looked to the mother
quizzically. Her mother nodded. “Go on.
Open it.” Inside the package was
a blow dryer. It wasn’t a big present to
most people, but the daughter knew her mother needed one, and the daughter knew
that her mother was giving this one up for her….a seemingly small sacrifice,
but to an 11-year-old who was entirely focused on receiving, it was incredible
that someone would give up their only gift for her. Years later as an adult looking back, this
was the gift she most remembered. Her mom’s simple act meant the world to her.[2]
Kids learn how to show love from watching how we show love to
them. And kids can surprise us with
their ability to learn to show sacrificial love.
There was a dad who had been trying to teach his kids about
love in action. One day he took his
8-year-old daughter Helen and 5-year-old son Brandon to the mall. When they first arrived, the kids saw the
petting zoo that had been set up especially for the holidays and got excited.
“Can we go in, daddy? Can we?” So the dad gave them each a quarter, and
seeing the opportunity for some quick shopping alone, went into the store
nearest the petting zoo. Not long after
he got inside, he turned around to find Helen following him. “Why aren’t you at the petting zoo?” he
asked.
She looked up at him with big, clear brown eyes and said
sadly, "Well, daddy, it cost fifty cents. So, I gave Brandon my
quarter." No one loves cuddly,
furry animals more than Helen, but she had given that up so her brother could
go in.
The man finished his shopping, and then he and Helen went
back to the petting zoo. They stood by the fence and watched Brandon go crazy
petting and feeding the animals. Helen stood with her hands and chin resting on
the fence and just watched Brandon. The dad had fifty cents burning a hole in
his pocket; but he never offered it to Helen, and she never asked for it. Helen
gave her quarter to Brandon and wanted to follow through with her lesson,
seeing her love in action.[3]
How do we know what love is?
We see it in all the big and small ways that people are willing to
sacrifice for others. This ability to
sacrifice comes from God’s love that has been poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit.
How do we know what love is?
As I was pondering this question, a picture came to mind of a
beat up old van sitting in the middle of an empty church parking lot just as
the sun was coming up in the morning.
This is the picture that greeted my husband Rob and I on many Sunday
mornings as we arrived at church. Inside
the van was a man who earned a meager living playing drums at night at clubs in
downtown Los Angeles. He also played
drums for our worship services. He would
finish playing at the clubs sometimes as late as three or four in the morning,
and then drive to our church and sleep in our parking lot so that he wouldn’t
miss being there to play for worship.
This is love…
…not only that God loves us so much that he sent us his son
Jesus,
…not only that Jesus loves us so much he gave his life for
us,
…but also that we would return that love to him,
sharing the love
that he put in our hearts through our willingness to sacrifice
… for him.
[1] Harris,
Sarah. 2012. "Why are there shepherds in the Lukan birth
narrative?." Colloquium 44, no. 1:
17-30. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed December 23, 2017)
[2]
Adapted from Jennifer Yardley Barney, ‘Tis
Better to Give https://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/christmas-stories-wonder-love/
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