A Christmas reflection - God chooses unlikely persons and unexpected places...

That God should choose to live among humans is a remarkable thing!  However, that God should choose to come into the world through a young, unmarried, pregnant girl, and to be announced to poor shepherds in a minor town in Judea is a reminder that God wants to do remarkable things in ordinary persons, and in unexpected places!  


If you're interested in a longer Audio reflection of the ideas in this video you can listen to the following recording of my next Radio Pulpit broadcast (download the 6MB MP3 file here).  If you enjoy the program please do visit the Radio Pulpit website and vote for the show.  I'd appreciate it!


The original posting from which this comes is here:

Our God is intentional - there is not a single detail in all of creation that is not filled with purpose, meaning, and God's loving intention.

I must admit that I have become so accustomed to the Christmas story, and to the characters of this narrative, that I no longer notice the subtler details. When I think of the characters of Christmas I often tend to wander towards what they have become, rather than the truth of who they were. What they have become for me are those cute kids who play Mary, Joseph, the Angels, the Shepherds, the wise men, and of course the 'Baby born' doll (or light bulb) that plays Baby Jesus in the school nativity play!

Yet, I think that sometimes we forget that the very reason why there is a record of the lives of particular people is because God desires to communicate something particular and important to us. God encounters people with a purpose. These characters are no different. Today we shall encounter some very interesting characters - the shepherds that we read about Luke 2:8-20, and we shall see what lessons we can learn about them, about ourselves, and about the God who deliberately wishes to encounter us this Christmas.

I want to encourage you to put the 'school play nativity' scenes out of your mind for the next few minutes. I want to encourage you to ask God to speak to you about the REAL shepherds that were encountered in that field outside of Bethlehem that night. Ask God to speak to you about your REAL life as God speaks to you about their real lives!

I am weary of all the cliched messages in Advent that try to get people to stop shopping and get them out of the malls and into Church... I have wasted many hours preaching sermons like those... We cannot stop people from doing these things with a 30 minute sermon on a Sunday. Rather, we should be encouraging people to find Christ, and the miracle of the Christ of Christmas, in their everyday lives. The Lord has really been telling me that we need something more substantial than the conflict between the economy of Christmas and the Gospel. Thankfully this week's scripture reading has a wealth of meaty stuff to consider!

This message will look at the principles of God's Kingdom that come to the fore in the encounter with the shepherds at Bethlehem. Some social history of the time tells us that these shepherds would have been poor, possibly among the poorest in their community. They were certainly unskilled, and were often people who had a criminal record or were outcasts in society (hence the choice to work at night). Bethlehem, as we know, was not the centre of the Universe! In fact it was a bit like the 'Piet Retief' of it's day... far from everywhere, no great political, economic and social prestige.... Yet, the Christ goes there to be born, and God sends angels to a field outside of this little town to announce the miracle of his birth! So this encounter is about people who don't really matter, from a place that doesn't truly count. Yet somehow they make it into the most popular book in history, and they get a focus one Sunday a year for the past thousand and some years! There must be something significant here.

In this message we shall see what lessons we can learn from these people and their role in the Christmas narrative.

Then for those who would like a text version of the thoughts please download this MS Word file (prepared in 2007)


May you and yours be blessed this Christmas by God unexpected, and inexplicable, presence!  Dion, Megan, Courtney and Liam