We Shepherds

A Christmas Meditation

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

Shepherds? Lord, such a strange, yet comforting choice to announce the birth of Your son to... Shepherds? Not the learned teachers of the law in town, not the holy priests that serve in your temple? Simple shepherds...third shift workers in the feedlot/textile industry of the day. Except these third shift workers are first and second shift workers as well. Exhausted and cold on their hillside, but faithful to their task. Faithful to the tedious work of caring for, protecting, looking after the the poor dumb creatures that, left to their own devices, would get into no end of trouble. Faithful shepherds, doing their jobs, unnoticed except by each other and maybe the sheep. Sound familiar? Sounds like us...

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.

Fear? Lord, has anyone told you lately how scary You can be? Your angel is about to make the greatest announcement in the history of time, and Your glory surrounds and overwhelms, and we have no choice but to tremble at who You are. But wait...even as You make us fear You, You hold out promise that the fear will not consume...

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Good news...of great joy...for all the people...even shepherds? Even us? Unto us, born this day, a Savior. Talk about good news! The gospel in a nutshell! O.K., maybe we can start to let go of our fear. The angel does say “Fear not...” But there is still more the angel has to say...

And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

Our hillside is cold and dark, Lord, but it is our hillside, our comfort zone. We know exactly where we are at at the moment, yet You nudge us toward another place tonight. You know we are a skeptical, practical people. We weren't born yesterday. Seeing is believing. A sign is good...

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

As if the angel of the Lord wasn't enough for us. Now the sky is filled with the heavenly host. “Glory to God in the highest...” We get that...we know about praising God. We are good religious people, even if our sheep don't allow us to get down to town to worship. But “on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased”? Us? Are You pleased with us? And peace? We see strife all around us; in the natural world...the wild animals threaten our sheep; in the political world...what have the Romans done to the nation of Israel?; in the spiritual world...the Pharisees, the Sadducees - no peace there! What kind of peace is this You promise, Lord? A different peace, a new peace, a peace that only the Savior you spoke about can supply?

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.

O.K. You've got our attention. You've quieted our shaking. You've lured us off our familiar hillside with the promise of this new peace. You've told us what to look for. Time to see if what You say is true. Time to check out the sign...and it's exactly how You said it would be!...a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger! The strangest Savior ever...!

And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

What do we say? We have to say something...this is too good to keep to ourselves. What a story we have to tell! And so we tell it to all we meet. And all who hear our story wonder at it...yes, some wonder at our sanity, saying we have been too long alone with our sheep on the barren hillsides...but many catch our joy and amazement, and we suspect that they will check out this sign for themselves, that we will not be the only visitors to that manger tonight. The young mother of that Savior child – oh, what stories she will have to tell of the night of his birth – the stable, the manger, the scruffy shepherds that came because on that dark night, the heavens exploded with the glory of God and the heavenly host. We return to our hillside, glorifying and praising God for all that we have seen and heard. We hardly recognize it as the place we have left. We hardly recognize ourselves. This night, we have gone from fear and trembling to receiving a new and different peace from a Savior child. There we were, one moment half asleep, minding our own business, and next we are hearing this good news. We listened, we checked it out, we believed, we told all we discovered, and we will never be the same...

(Scripture references from Luke 2:8-20, English Standard Version)

(Originally written for the Trinity Community Church's

Women's Christmas Breakfast 2011)

 

'Tis the Season(ing)...

I recently made a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. I bought the fresh mozzarella at the grocery store. The fresh basil was picked from pots growing in our family room, sitting in the sun coming through the south-facing sliding glass door. The tomatoes were the last of my summer crop of small grape tomatoes.

Yes...garden grown tomatoes, the first week of December...

Notice I didn't use the word “fresh” to describe the tomatoes, though perhaps I accurately could have. I had picked all my garden-grown tomatoes the second week of October in anticipation of a heavy frost. The large ripe red tomatoes I washed, cored and froze, to be used over the coming months in sauces, soups and stews. But what to do with the gadzillion green grape tomatoes that were still on the large vining plants? I picked them all, put them in paper towel-lined baking pans and left them on the kitchen counter to slowly ripen over the next few weeks. As they turned red, I washed them, threw them into salads or just popped them in my mouth for a snack. By the time early December rolled around, a good month and a half after picking them in the garden, there were still enough edible red tomatoes left to make a post-Thanksgiving tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. They did not have the rich vine-ripened sun-kissed tomatoey taste of the same tomato picked in August, but they still tasted of summer - in December.

The Genovese basil plants had been started from seed indoors in the spring, put in large pots on the deck in June where they grew huge tasty leaves. I cut them back in September, moved the pots to a sunny place inside where they will continue to produce new leaves until I start new plants this coming spring and declare the old ones officially dead. Like the counter-ripened tomatoes, the indoor basil is not as lush and flavorful as it was sitting out on the deck in the summer, but it, too, still tastes of summer in December, as it will taste of summer in January's pesto and February's Margherita pizza.

There are pots of rosemary, parsley, marjoram and lemon verbena in the sunny bay window, tender perennial herbs that spend the summer in pots on the deck but are always glad to come in the house to survive the winter. These taste the same indoors in December as they did outdoors in July. But it's those summer tastes of tomato and of basil that provide a surprising and even disconcerting flavor in the midst of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday eating season. As the darkest days of winter approach, it's kind of nice to have the taste of the memories of the previous summer as well as the foreshadowing taste of the growing season to come...

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

                                                                            - Miles Kington