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Why the Shepherds? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 17, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ezekiel 34:1-10 Luke 15:1-7
What revelation of God have we missed at Christ’s birth that would return us to the world as we know it, glorifying and praising God for all that we had heard and seen? Given the evidence at hand and death’s obvious dominion, how can we believe God actually has come to dwell with us in any way that really matters? Logic, I hate to admit, would be on the side of Pat Robertson. You may remember how we recently wrestled with what sort of God became flesh in the birth of Jesus: a God who demands sacrifice and blood, hence the Son of God born to pay the price for our sin…or a God who has come to take the place of the victims of violence--be it the violence of human evil or the violence of nature’s caprice--hence the Son of God born to accompany us through the valley of the shadow and bear our pain. Pat Robertson clearly has heard and seen the former, if not at the manger then surely on the cross: a God who is vindictive toward the least of these because God’s justice in the face of our pact with the devil must be satisfied. Pooja Bhatia, a journalist and fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs, is strangely persuaded. She tells of the singing she heard all over Port-au-Prince in the hours that followed the quake: “songs with lyrics like ‘O Lord, keep me close to you’ and ‘Forgive me, Jesus.’ Preachers stood atop boxes and gave impromptu sermons, reassuring their listeners in the dark: ‘It seems like the Good Lord is hiding, but he’s here. He’s always here.’” Yet the ongoing devastation tilts the unbelieving Bhatia to throw what there is of her theological lot in with Robertson. “If God exists,” she writes, “he’s really got it in for Haiti. Haitians think so too. Zed,” a housekeeper in Bhatia’s apartment complex, “said God was angry at sinners around the world, but especially in Haiti. Zed said the quake had fortified her faith, and that she understood it as divine retribution.” “Why, then, turn to such a God,” Bhatia asks in conclusion, “who seems to be absent at best and vindictive at worst?” The question of Bhatia and the carnage in Haiti summon us again to the manger, this time on the heels of the shepherds lest we fail to hear his still small voice cry this day for God’s children…lest we forget how Love was born and burned its way into our hearts: not with vengeance but in absolute vulnerability. Why, I had begun to wonder this week before an earthquake insinuated itself on this morning’s proclamation, did the angels wing their way to shepherds abiding in the fields by night, rather than farmers working the rocky land of Palestine by day or fishermen hauling in their nets on the Sea of Galilee at dawn? All were poor and would have fulfilled Mary’s song from the start. All were marginalized in a society ruled by might and meanness. “[W]e cannot help noticing how those who insist that/We ought to stand up for our rights,/And how important we are, keep insisting also/That it doesn’t matter a bit/If one of us gets arrested or injured, for/It is only our numbers that count,” says the Second Shepherd of W.H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio. “In a way they are right,” says the Third Shepherd. “But to behave like a cogwheel,” says the First, “When one knows one is no such thing.” “Merely to add to a crowd with one’s passionate body,” says the Second, “Is not a virtue.” “What is real/About us all,” adds the Third, “is that each of us is waiting.” Waiting is often all the shepherd can do: waiting for the sheep to graze, for the season to change, for the stragglers to catch up, for the morning to dawn, for a stranger to attack. Shepherds who abide in the field are characters given charge of the most vulnerable and stupid of creatures. At most they may persuade, pursue and keep watch. Yet without the shepherd, the sheep would wander aimlessly in life toward death. How curious, then, that throughout the Scriptures known to Luke, the shepherd was a figure given center stage in the story of our salvation and even likened to God. Abel was the first man murdered because God found favor with the offering of his lamb, the firstling of his flock, instead of the fruit of his brother’s field. Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when an angel appeared to him from out of a burning bush. David was a shepherd whose song of God’s shepherding we already have sung and whose reign as Israel’s shepherd was unequaled until his heir, whose reign will have no end. Because the story Luke had been told from the beginning placed shepherds in the center of the action, the story Luke was given to tell of Christ’s birth could not be told without them. Though what we miss from the distance of 2000 years are the two sorts of shepherds Luke has in mind. We know the one. “In the same region there were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night,” he writes in the paragraph after the paragraph that first mentions Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, the governor of Syria. In the days when a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, politicians were identified in Scripture as shepherds even as they were revered in the culture as saviors. Paullus Fabius Maximus, proconsul of Asia, proposed the new year begin on the birthday of Augustus, “We could justly hold it to be equivalent to the beginning of all things….; [for] he has given a different aspect to the whole world, which blindly would have embraced its own destruction if Caesar had not been born for the common benefit of all.” So too the provincial assembly at the time of Christ’s birth held that providence had sent Augustus as “a savior who [had] put an end to war and established all things…[who] when he appeared exceeded the hopes of all who had anticipated good tidings; …the birthday of the god,” they declared, “marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming.” Some think Luke meant to counter the provincial powers-that-be directly with the message of the angels sent to announce good tidings to all people through the dispossessed shepherds, and to sing of peace on earth in opposition to Herod’s reign of terror. The prophet Ezekiel had done the same before him. To be sure, Ezekiel first attributed the scattering of the people to God’s judgment (back to Robinson); but in our text he places the blame for their suffering squarely on ruthless shepherds, on selfish “saviors” who kept God’s people in poverty ever since the monarchy had been established. “Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” God asks rhetorically. “You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.” Suddenly our imaginations quit the quiet hillside of Sunday school posters for the real politics of our 21st century lives, for Papa Doc’s legacy in Haiti or for Aristide who was not so much evil as inept. We need not travel to the Holy Land to behold these shepherds first-hand: the ones whose prosperity has been purchased by another’s poverty and whose importance is premised on another’s insignificance. In words that cannot help but send our minds to the parable of the Lost Sheep in Luke, the Lord tells Ezekiel that he will do what the shepherds, the rulers of the people, failed to do: namely he will search for the sheep that have been scattered [who literally are in exile] and will bring them home. There they will feed on the mountains and by the watercourses—not only nations but nature will be redeemed, the earth will no longer quake. “I will lead them with good pasture…and there they shall lie down in good grazing land….” David’s song that was our Psalter speaks of this almighty Shepherd even as the images of the 23rd psalm herald another Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine in search of the one lost until he finds it. In every instance, the images evoked by the shepherd’s keeping of the sheep are images that suggest a social order we cannot imagine this side of the grave, a realm where the Good Shepherd, who “must be at once God and a descendent of David” reigns. Sometimes I think we have grown so accustomed to following shepherds who have neither strengthened the weak nor healed the sick nor bound up the injured nor brought back the strayed nor sought the lost, that we have ceased to be those who wait, as Auden’s shepherds waited, for life to be otherwise. Sometimes I think we have grown so accustomed to treachery and greed or to selfishness and ease that we have even become champions of the shepherds who take our life from us rather shepherds who give up their own lives for us. So it was in Ezekiel’s time that God’s judgment fell not only on the shepherds but on the sheep who followed them and apparently became like them, “I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats,” says the Lord God to Ezekiel a little later in the 34th chapter. “Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged.” Therefore not the shepherds in high places nor their mindless followers but to shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flock the angels come on that dark night long ago, that they might return glorifying and praising the love that waits for us unasked, unforced, unearned. Come then this morning, my friends, my flock, in half-belief to kneel where shepherds lately knelt and find him in that unlikely place as they said. “It seems like the Good Lord is hiding, but he’s here,” declared the preacher to the dead and dying in the streets of Port-au-Prince. “He’s always here.” I declare the same to you. He is here among us like a shepherd who waits with us. He is in the ruins as the still small voice who cries for his lost sheep. He is not to be found in the crumbled palace nor can he be said to side with the vengeful, death-dealing powers. Rather because of the witness of the shepherds, we have been led to find him hid in poverty and need, in hunger and homelessness, in the absolute vulnerability of a baby. “Perhaps a God who hides is better than nothing,” concludes Pooja Bhatia. Or perhaps it is that the messengers of such a God appeared first to those who were lowly enough to behold him hid in a manger bare; perhaps the heavenly host appeared finally when the night was dark enough for those abiding in the fields to see a great light. Perhaps, even now, he is being born amid the devastation of the human heart for all the people. Let those of us who have come in half-belief return glorifying and praising God for the birth of a frail newborn Babe whose still small voice cries this day to our hearts out of Haiti. |