Merry Christmas!

I hope each one of you had as merry a christmas as we had. Hope you got to visit family and friends, spread and enjoy some christmas cheer, ate some good food, and got just what you wished for. But more than all that I hope that you found something this Christmas to remind you of God’s love, the gift of His Son to all men, and the promise of His return.

I was thinking of the shepherds and the angels in the story this week. I wonder what the angels thought of the whole thing. Had I been there, one of the angels, I might have scoffed a bit when God sent us down to tell the shepherds about the most amazing thing ever to happen on earth. “Shepherds? Are you joking? Shouldn’t we be talking to somebody important?”, I might have said.

But then I got to thinking about shepherds. So if you are a shepherd you spend most of your life standing, sitting, or walking through fields, watching one of the stupiest animals on the planet mow the grass, get fat and grow fuzzy. You hope to make your livelihood off of the fatest the the best fuzz so you try to protect them from wolves, make sure they get food and water, and keep them from jumping off cliffs. You don’t need much education or talent, no suma cum laude types here folks. But what you do get to do alot of is standing around looking at nature. The sky, the trees, the fields. The splendor of nature is so easily forgotten sitting in heated, electrically light buildings all day. And when every surface I have around me is man made I can easily forgot what a creative master artist God is. It is hard when outside watching the sky to forget that God is all powerful and everywhere.

And then as a shepherd the other thing you do all day is care for sheep. Probably plenty of shepherds hated sheep over the years. Sheep have no doubt been cursed by their caretakers a time or two for wandering or for bleeting in the middle of the night because they rolled over in their sleep and woke up lost. But because sheep are the livelihood of the shepherd they have to care for the sheep on some level. And because their are some human beings out there (I’ve met a few) who do have a streak of tenderness, there must be some shepherds who genuinely care for their sheep.

This is what Jesus meant about the good shepherd. A shepherd who cares about His sheep, He takes care of them, He loves them. Along this train of thought I came to a slightly suprising idea: what if God wanted to tell the shepherds first because they are really important in the kingdom of heaven? On earth shepherds may be only a step above slaves but Jesus gives us enough clues about how backward we’ve got it to make me wonder. Moses was a shepherd when God called him, Abel was a shepherd and God was pleased with him, Joseph was a shepherd until his brothers sold him into slavery, David was shepherd until Samuel came to annoint him as king. There are just a conspicuous number of sheep-fuzz growers in the bible.

What is it about shepherds that made Jesus use them as an analogy? It’s not just that an amusing derogatory similarity can be drawn between us and our fuzzy friends of questionable judgment, it’s that a shepherd takes care of the sheep. He serves them. He loves them. He lays down His life for them. (John 10) The shepherds love (and his greatness in the eyes of God) begins with simple day to day care and possibly ends at the jaws of the wolf…

…or at the cross.

In between there are a million, bajillion, ways to give, serve, and love. The greatest Christmas present I can give you is to encourage you(and me!) to think of one and do it. You don’t have to be a shepherd, and oddly enough you can’t do it to get God’s favor, He gave it to you already. (the angels said so) But still, it’s the only really satisfying thing on earth. 🙂

Thanks to everyone this weekend who made it special for me and Rae. We were loved and blessed so much by all of you! May the God of all love and joy bless you greatly.

Merry Christmas!