In the name of the God who is love ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Well, go on then, get moving. Was it not clear? “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests on his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” How else can I say it? “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” It’s almost like we don’t know how to hear Good News anymore.
Lest we forget it, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is news and news begs delivery and response. News is something that moves us to action – like news that a storm is coming makes us prepare. And news is something to be shared – that’s why we have newspapers and news networks. The Gospel is not a set of ideas, not some nice comfort that we carry in our hearts, not a procedure for cleaning up our act and living our best lives now. No, the Gospel is news of what God has done and continues to do in Jesus Christ. At Christmas, we celebrate the Good News that God has come to us to do for us what we could not do for ourselves – be our Savior. The Gospel is the good tidings of comfort and joy, that Jesus has come to save us from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.
As news, the Gospel anticipates and necessitates a response. Children are a good example of different types of responses. Earlier today, we had our Christmas Pageant and I’m pretty sure there was a lot of anxiety in households across Salisbury as parents and grandparents were trying their best to get those children ready: wrestling leggings onto squirming toddlers who were to be dressed like animals, convincing some of the teens to turn off the video game or put the phone down and get dressed. Sometimes it seems like children move at speeds that are inversely correlated with the amount of time until we need to be in the car.
But give it another six or so hours and those very same children will be flying down staircases into living rooms to open presents at breakneck speeds. It’s really a question of motivation. “We need to leave for church” just isn’t quite as exciting as “Santa was here.” So when we hear the news that “For unto us a child is born,” what stirs in us? Is it a sense of thankfulness, excitement, wonder? Or is it a ho-hum “Yea, I remember hearing that last year about this time”?
What would it take to move us? Back in the fall, I was out on a run before dawn in our neighborhood. I wear a vest that has a headlight on it so that I can somewhat see the road in front of me. I noticed there was a stick and I planning to jump over it; but when I got closer, I realized it wasn’t a stick, it was a copperhead snake. I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast. Or what if I told you that the first one to run to the sidewalk and back gets a million dollars? Or maybe if Yo-Yo Ma was playing a Christmas cello concert over at Bell Tower Green? I bet we’d all move pretty fast.
There’s a word that runs throughout tonight’s Scripture readings that is helpful in thinking about our response to the Good News of Christmas and that word is “zealous.” It’s not a word that we use often, as it has connotations of being a zealot – an extremist. But that’s not what, at its core, the word means and that’s not the sense of how the Bible uses the word “zealous.” To have zeal means to have enthusiasm, passion, loyalty, or even jealously; jealousy here in the positive sense of the term – as we’re only jealous of people we care deeply about.
Christmas is a holy day all about zeal, and it begins in Isaiah. We heard the prophecy that there will be rejoicing as at the harvest or when dividing plunder. A fruitful harvest is a sign that things are going to be okay for the season – there will be enough to sell and eat, so we can rest easy. And dividing plunder is only something you get to do after the battle, when victory is yours. You can lay down sword and shield and relax securely. These are the ways Isaiah describes the salvation that is coming to us – it is the news that all is safe and secure.
This is quite the promise, and this section of Isaiah’s prophecy concludes with “The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” In other words, our salvation comes as a gift of grace. It’s what we heard in Titus: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” What brings about our salvation is not that we finally learned our lesson, finally figured out how to live in peace and harmony with one another, finally invented the technology that will eliminate all of our problems, finally were good enough to have warranted saving. None of those things are any closer to being true than they were in Isaiah’s time.
No, our salvation comes not as the result of our efforts, but God’s gracious zeal to be our Savior. At Christmas, we so often think about gifts. What do I hope to open and what do I want to buy for them? And gifts, as expressions of love, are fine. Ultimately though, Christmas itself is a gift we receive from God. And “gift” really is the correct word for the coming of Jesus. God comes to us as our Savior not because we’ve said the right prayers, asked nicely enough, or earned a visitation from the Almighty. No, Christmas comes from the zeal of God.
God is so very loyal to us, even when we go astray. God created us for love and by love and deeply desires for us to flourish in love. And, yes, God is even jealous when we turn towards the idols of wealth, prestige, and power – not because God is a jilted lover or is envious, but because God knows that those other things won’t actually save us or make us happy, they will only distract and enslave us.
At Christmas, we receive the news that God is so committed to us, so zealous for us and for salvation that in Jesus, God came down from heaven to save us. The gift of Christmas isn’t that we earned this gift, but that God has given us his very self as a gift of pure grace.
This zeal shapes the response that the shepherds had to the Good News. After the angels tell them “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,” they go with haste. Another way to translate “with haste” is “with zeal.” The shepherds go full of expectation and enthusiasm. And perhaps why they went so zealously is that they knew just how badly they needed this Good News.
Times were tough in the first-century Israel. It was a time of a tyrannical government, a pagan occupation of the Promised Land, and rampant economic exploitation. As we heard at the start of Luke, there was a census. Though we have a census every decade, a census was not good news for the shepherds or the common folk of Israel. A census meant one of three things: taxes were about to go up, people were about to be conscripted into the Roman army, or Rome was planning on sending more troops to the region and wanted to know how many to send. A census was news, very bad news. The shepherds were used to fending off wolves, but this census represented an even more menacing threat.
The news of a Messiah was such glorious and unexpected news that the shepherds went with zeal to see this thing that had taken place. Perhaps that’s why God chose to have the angels announce this to the shepherds. Shepherds aren’t the establishment; they aren’t those in power. Instead, the shepherds, especially the ones who watched their flocks by night near Bethlehem knew how to notice a gift when they saw one. Some of the sheep they were raising would be the sheep used in the sacrifices in the Temple in nearby Jerusalem. In other words, these shepherds knew what a sacrificial gift looked like. Well, when it came time to reveal the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, shepherds make the perfect witnesses.
Do we know how to recognize God’s coming to us? The blessings of our lives – do we think they are the fruits of our hard work, or do we receive them as gifts from God? When we find peace, joy, or hope, do we feel the Holy Spirit moving in us, or do we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done? At Christmas, the shepherds remind us to examine our lives and see them as full of the gifts and grace of God.
And these gifts are given for a reason. The gracious love of God might well be given to us unconditionally, but it is not given unpurposefully. One New Testament scholar has written that a gift is made perfect in that it can be used. Some of us will receive gifts tomorrow that, simply put, are useless to us. It would be like giving me a hockey stick – I don’t know how to ice skate and I have no interest in hockey. Sure, you might give it with the best of intentions, but I can’t use it, so the gift will never be perfected. The gifts of God are different though – not only are they pure gifts given from the gracious zeal of God, but the blessings of God are things that we can absolutely use.
We heard in Titus that, “Jesus Christ it is who gave himself for us that we might be his own people who are zealous for good deeds.” The gifts that God has given us – generous hearts, helping hands, voices that call for justice, mouths that speak blessings and mercy – these things are to be used that we might reflect God’s goodness into the world. The gift of Christmas is given that we might zealously respond to the zealous love of God.
Howard Thurman was an African-American theologian, mystic, and civil rights leader in the 1900s. A lot of people point to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Malcolm X as the leaders of the American Civil Rights movement, and they were instrumental, but Howard Thurman was the spiritual mentor of the movement. He wrote a short poem called “The Work of Christmas,” and it describes well the zealous response that Christmas anticipates from us.
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flock,
the work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
to heal the broken
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among [siblings],
to make music in the heart.
The Good News of Christmas is that God has blessed us not only with mercy, forgiveness, grace, and peace, but God has given us holy work to do in the name of Jesus. We are gifted with the sacred vocation of being a people who participate in the saving gift of love. It is ours to be zealous about beloved community, justice, and peace, and in doing so we get to participate in eternity.
It all begins with the greatest gift that God has to offer: God’s own self in Jesus. God so zealously loves us, that God comes to us in grace to show us the most excellent way of love. This is the Good News that motivated those shepherds to go with zeal to see this great thing that has taken place. And it is the gift that enables us to grow in love more and more. It’s the best news there is, “For to us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
