The Stars of the Christmas Pageant

Christmas Eve and Day: Luke 2:1-20

Merry Christmas!
I want you to think back, now, to Christmases past. And especially to Christmas pageants past….Do any of you have a favorite role in the Christmas pageant? A role you loved or longed to play?
Who wanted to be Mary? What about wise men? (they generally had good costumes) Shepherds? Angels? Joseph?

My favorite role was the Angel Gabriel. The costume wasn’t that exciting - a plain white bedsheet, although I did rather like the idea of wings - but I wanted to be the Angel Of The Lord because in the pageants of my childhood, it was the only speaking part.
As far as I was concerned, that made it the starring role.
Let the other girls be Mary, beautiful and mild. I wanted the lines.

And so, the year I got to play the Angel, I walked around the house for weeks, imagining myself in the candlelit church, muttering to the cat and proclaiming to the walls:
Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy!
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord!
I just loved it.

It’s still a pretty good set of lines: Good news. Joy. For all people.

The angels’ words still ring with glory tonight, as they should, in fact, every year, every time we read or hear or remember this story. Because it’s the same news for you and me, in 2011, that those shepherds heard on an ordinary day, two thousand or so years ago.
“Christ the Savior is born!”

But what if that’s where the story stopped?

What if the shepherds heard the news, passed around the basket of bread, and rolled up in their robes to sleep, figuring that the good news was meant for someone more important, or more holy, to receive and tell?
What if the shepherds had thought it was just a bad batch of mushrooms in the evening stew?

If the story had peaked where I sort of thought it did as a Christmas pageant angel, you and I wouldn’t be here tonight. We wouldn’t remember the story of the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. We might know later parts of the story, but not this one. Not this glorious, ordinary infant that warms our hearts and prepares us for the miracles yet to come.

The angel has some good lines.
But it’s the shepherds that matter.

They hear the news, and they believe it’s for them – for the ordinary folks, in the middle of a hard day’s work: the very definition of nobody special.
And they go out of their way to receive the news, to go to Bethlehem and see. Then they tell everyone – starting with Mary and Joseph, who you might think already know this stuff about the savior born in this stable. They go around glorifying and praising God, and amazing everyone who hears.

The angels announce the news to the shepherds because the news is that God’s glory is NOT for the rich and famous. (Or well it is, but only because God’s glory, salvation and love are for everybody.)

The real meaning of Christmas is that no matter who we are, no matter what others think of us, God has come to us – not just everybody, but to us specifically.
That Christmas is not about a special occasion, but about how God breaks in to the most ordinary of days. Christmas is the holy truth that God comes to us when we are driving, plowing through an endless stream of emails, or taking out the garbage.
That baby in the stable is the love of God showing up when we’re doing the dirty jobs – cleaning up after someone who is sick, washing the dishes, mucking out a flooded basement.

Christmas is God with us when we are bored or exhausted, when we’re putting up our feet after a long work day, when we’re enjoying ourselves, when our hearts are breaking, when we’re not even thinking at all.
God sharing our lives, so that we are surrounded by glory when we’re not doing anything special, even when we feel worthless, even when we just don’t notice.
God’s love is living and breathing and present in every uncounted hour of our lives – that’s the Christmas miracle.

The angels come to the shepherds precisely because they are already busy, and as ordinary as they come – just like many of us.
And you and I hear this good news again tonight because two thousand years ago the most ordinary of people believed the good news was for them, and for them to share.

Christmas spreads through the ordinary.
God comes into the world, and it’s only through the most ordinary of people, events, and stories that we can really know what it means that Jesus is Emmanuel: God With Us.

If the shepherds don’t respond – if we don’t respond – it’s a one-day story. A birth announcement that warms our hearts but doesn’t change the world.
But when we respond, when we make the story our own, it’s a story for all time and for all people, and that does change the world.

The angels still get some good lines, but in the Christmas pageant that is our lives, in the whole Christmas story, the shepherds are the stars.
They trust that the good news the angels bring is for them, and for them to share. They own the story, and tell the story, and over two thousand years they have brought us back to the miracle tonight.

Here we are.
Tonight, the angels come.
Glory shines and sings around us.
Around each and all of us, ordinary as we are.

And it’s our turn to trust that the good news is for us, and for us to share. To look around the world and see with our own eyes the promise God has given, and to tell what we know:
That God is not just here for the party, and the worship, but to live with us,
twenty four hours, seven days, every week and month and year.

And when we shepherds tell that story,
on any ordinary day,
you can hear the angels sing.

Amen.