For All People

Luke 2:1-20

Try to imagine that you’ve never heard this story.

I know that many of us have been told – and have told – this story over and over, in word and song and image, until it’s a part of your permanent record. But I’m asking you to step away, just for a moment, from the candle glow and the rich tapestry of tradition and story and song, and imagine that you’ve never heard of babies in mangers.

That you’re going about your daily life, maybe at work, and an angel of the Lord is standing in front of you.

Just…there. Probably without a tinsel halo, but unmistakably an angel.

And you are frankly and unexpectedly terrified. Because the raw power of the presence of God drops the floor out from under you a lot faster and harder than those spinny rides at Six Flags.

Do not be afraid, says this creature of awe.

Look, I’ve brought you news of great joy for all people. 

I brought you the one thing that is really, really for everybody:

For awful people and fabulous people. Nerdy people and sporty people and mean and nice. Enemies and friends. Important, notable people and invisible, uncounted people. Faithful people and uncertain people and oppositional people. Strangers.

Seven billion human beings on the planet.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that many an “all”.

But here is this messenger of God, standing in front of you, saying “I brought you this news. God picked you, particularly you, to know this one thing which is joy for that unimaginably many all people.

There’s proof, the angel says. Proof you get to see. Right down the hill in Bethlehem. Check it out.

Obviously, you go and see. “No” isn’t really an option when the power and presence of God is that focused on you.

But how do you think of yourself now? How do you respond?

How do you live with, live into, the experience of God putting the great joy of EVERYONE in your particular hands and heart, eyes and ears, in a world that doesn’t ever seem to have enough joy to go around?

That’s what happens to the shepherds, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary night in the hills around Bethlehem.
Suddenly they are the few people in the world gifted – or burdened – with the one thing that is great joy for all people. Holding in their ears and eyes and hearts the news so big that it belongs to all the world.

Why would God pick you or me, or one particular group of shepherds, when God could most certainly tell everyone on earth at once? How on earth am I, are you, are we, going to share this with all people? Most of us aren’t even on local TV.

I fear that I might be paralyzed by that knowledge; by the responsibility of being entrusted with the gift of God’s joy that belongs to everyone else as much as to me.

Luckily for us and for the Christmas story, the shepherds aren’t paralyzed. They go and see just what the angel promised: Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.

Then they tell their story: their story about hearing this news directly from God, about being given the great joy that is for all.

And then they go back to their ordinary work, “glorifying and praising God” for seeing the great joy of all the earth, just as they were told. They live out their joy while they go on with their lives. They aren’t shy about it; they just do what comes naturally.

Because they know – they know now, from their own experience – that God’s got this.

God tells whoever God wants, because God has the great joy of all people – friends, enemies; politicians and migrants and bus drivers and executives and internet trolls and people on the other side of the earth and the people I can’t imagine right now – God has the great joy of all people covered; completed.

God has come right to them – personally, particularly to these shepherds to tell them that they – ordinary, unimportant they – know what God has done for every single person on this earth. For the earth itself.

That great truth is a great responsibility, yes. But in hearing and seeing and telling, they discover that it is God’s responsibility that they have been invited to rejoice in and share.

That’s what happens to us tonight too: to you and to me every single time this story is told to us.

We hear the angel bring us the news of universal joy. We encounter the child in the manger. We share with the shepherds this one particular experience that is great joy for all people. And we know what God has done for every single person on earth. For the earth itself.

The power and presence of God may come over you and me more gently than the shepherds: in the candleglow and the music and the wonder and love of the familiar story, without the heart-stopping angel.

And in the midst of that, God still says to you - to you, particularly, and to me - behold, I bring you good news of great joy for all the people. You will see it, you will know it, in the child in a manger.

Let yourself feel it, right now: all the joy and peace and glory you came here tonight to feel. All the joy and peace and glory you long for; wait for; everything you love about finding the child in the manger. Feel the great joy and peace and glory of God, joy for all people. And know that God has put it in your hands, yours to hold and respond.

Now what do you do?

Well, like the shepherds long ago, it’s not our job to save the world.

It is our job, when God puts the whole world’s joy into our hands, to embrace it. To go and see. Not wait for the right time to check it out, but to go now and see what God is doing in the world, as soon as God has told us.

It is our job – it should be our joy – to see, and to tell. To tell the crazy, amazing story of how God picked particular shepherds long ago, particular you and me here and now, to be washed over with the glory of God, filled up with good news, and meet the child in the manger.

It is our job to celebrate our way back to and through our daily lives. Glorifying and praising God without embarrassment, absolutely naturally – because that is natural when you’re full of God’s own great joy.

Because you and I, like the shepherds long ago, now know from our own experience, from what God chooses us to hear, that God has the whole earth’s joy handled, completed, for always and ever.

Here in the candleglow; in the tradition and the peace and the music, it’s our gift to embrace the joy that God pours out for all the world; the world beyond our imagining. To let that joy move us and lift us and change us, not just tonight, but as we make our way back to daily life, glorifying and praising God for all that we have heard and seen, as it has been told to us.