Kings vs. Shepherds

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, December 30 as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 2:8-20 and you can read it here. 

You know, I read this sermon now and wonder if this really is what I think about sin, or about Jesus and his relationship to our sin.  For me, these theological questions are not puzzles to solve but countries to inhabit -- countries where I might reside for a time, but which will never capture or require my full allegiance, because there are so many other lands that are equally strange and captivating, and just as real and just as true. 

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

As far as the Christmas cards and the manger scenes and the pageants are concerned, Christmas has four major ingredients: a manger; Joseph, Mary, and sweet baby Jesus; some shepherds; and some kings. 

Those are all the folks who were there. 

Those are all the things you need to tell the story. 

But as it turns out, in this case, it’s not a both/and.

It’s an either/or. 

 

The version of Christmas that gets told most often, the one that forms the foundation for most pageants and manger scenes, not to mention “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” is Luke’s version of the story.  Luke is the only one of the four gospel writers who tells the story of Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem, of the manger, and of the shepherds. 

The magi from the East, meanwhile, appear only in the Gospel of Matthew’s version, and their visit to Jesus take place sometime after he’s born, possibly as many as two years later. 

Matthew’s gospel was written before Luke’s, which means that whoever wrote Luke was reading Matthew, and using it as a basis for his own version of the story.  So when we see differences between Matthew’s version and Luke’s version, we know that the author of Luke is trying to tell us something. 

The author of Luke reads Matthew’s version of the story, in which Jesus is given a royal welcome by wise men bearing gifts fit for a king: gold, frankincense and myrrh, and says, No, no no, that’s not how it happened at all. 

The author of Luke tells us that Jesus was greeted, not by kings, but by shepherds. 

It’s a decision the author makes. 

A choice. 

One that reminds us exactly who it is the author of this Gospel says Jesus is concerned with. 

Not with kings,

but with shepherds. 

As he’ll do throughout the gospel, the author of Luke places God not among the important insiders, but among the forgotten outsiders. 

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

 

*

 

Everybody loves sheep.

Sheep are wooly, and they’re cute when they’re babies.  

To our modern ear, shepherds are probably pretty cute too.  They look cute in the paintings and on the Christmas cards, with their robes and their staffs. 

But the reality of shepherds for Luke’s audience was a little bit different. 

 

For Luke’s audience, shepherds were thieves.  They were shiftless roamers: men who made their homes out in the fields and slept on the ground.  To watch over their sheep, they stayed up all night, drinking and being generally unseemly.  Most importantly, everyone knew that they grazed their sheep on other people’s land.  And so they were not to be trusted. 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

Matthew’s version, a courtly welcome with costly gifts, is replaced by an angelic announcement delivered to a bunch of rowdy ruffians, dirty from days in the field, unshaven, unshowered, making crude jokes, and just about to take long pull from a bottle in a paper bag. 

 

*

 

Last night I went with a friend to see Central Park Five, Ken Burns’ most recent documentary about the five Harlem teenagers who were convicted of the rape of a white, Upper East Side woman in 1989.  These five children, ages 14 to 17, were held for over 24 hours without food or sleep, outside the supervision of their parents, then told they could go home if only they would “tell a story” about what happened that night. 

And so each of them did tell a story: each of them gave a statement in which they were led to give imagined details about a crime they had neither witnessed or committed. 

The context in which this crime occurred had everything to do with what happened next.  New York in the late 80’s was crime-ridden and violent.  Six murders a day was not out of the ordinary.  The city was bisected by race and class.  The subways were gratified and trash-strewn, and crack had just hit the streets, introducing that fatal trifecta of poverty, cash, and guns. 

Just five years earlier Bernhard Goetz, a white man, had shot four young black men on the two train, wounding three and paralyzing one. 

He was found guilty for criminal possession of a weapon and served six months in jail.

His was not the only race-driven crime in this city, which was bristling with fear and ridden with poverty.  

The five teenagers convicted of the rape of Trisha Meili, or “The Central Park Jogger,” as she was known at the time, were picked up in the park that night hanging out with a group of at least 25 other teenagers and pinned with a crime by a police force desperate for the illusion of control over a city in chaos. 

 

The details of their confessions did not match the details of the crime. 

The timeline of their night in the park did not match the timeline of the crime. 

Their DNA did not match the DNA found on the victim. 

And yet they were found guilty by a jury of their peers 

and each imprisoned for between seven to eleven years. 

Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times, “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."

 

Logic, reason, and evidence.

None of them were enough to overrule desire:

our collective desire to find a face for our fear. 

 

*

 

As I watched the documentary, 

watched the story advance steadily toward its all-too-predictable conclusion,

I found myself thinking, 

This is sin.  This is our sinfulness.

 

Our collective desire to blame and punish without thought. 

The place where we tip from a crowd to a mob. 

This is sin. 

 

It’s a word I use sparingly at St. Lydia’s, because too many of us have experienced this word being used as a weapon, and it can touch nerves that don’t need to be touched.  But I want to talk about it tonight.   

 

For tonight, it might be helpful to draw a distinction between Sin and sins, 

simply as tool for making some clarifications. 

Some of us were taught in Sunday School that God forgives all our sins.

These sins seem to be things like lying or stealing a pack of cigarettes, 

or maybe saying a bad word to our sister. 

Transgressions, really. 

Things that can be counted and tallied up. 

The solution to sins, we may have been taught, 

was trying harder. 

Trying harder to avoid all those pitfalls, 

negotiating our lives like an obstacle course. 

 

But I would argue that Sin is not something that can be tallied up. 

Neither is it something one can avoid. 

Sin is not one, individual act of thoughtlessness or indiscretion.  

Sin is a state. 

Sin is a condition in which we live, 

and from which we have no escape. 

Not because we are bad people, or not trying hard enough, 

but simply by virtue of the fact that we are human. 

 

Sin is the tragic, collective momentum of fear and hatred from which we convicted  

five innocent children of a crime they did not commit. 

Sin is our dangerous potential to tip from a crowd to a mob. 

Sin is our failure to look at the evidence, 

and turn people into symbols of that which we despise or seek to distance ourselves from. 

Sin is our stubborn, collective refusal to acknowledge that we are, 

in fact, 

sinners. 

 

The difference between sins and Sin is important. 

It’s important because people who live in the condition of Sin, 

which is all of us, 

like to find people who are guilty of a few sins, 

to carry the Sin of us all. 

People who live in the condition of Sin, 

which is all of us, 

would rather find five innocent teenagers to blame for the misery and fear of a city, 

than look at the system we’ve created 

in which some feast while others go hungry. 

In which some are kings while others are shepherds. 

 

It’s easy to slap a pair of handcuffs on a kid for stealing a pack of cigarettes.

Easier to do that than to figure out how we, collectively, 

abandon our youth to poverty and lack of education. 

It’s easy to throw a couple of kids from Harlem in prison for a decade.

Easier than contemplating what we gain 

when we load the burden of our own Sin 

onto their backs to carry. 

 

*

 

Come, Thou long-expected Jesus,

the hymn goes, 

Born to set Thy people free;

From our fear and sin release us; 

Let us find our rest in Thee.

 

God comes and dwells among us in the person of Christ 

not to keep us from stealing cigarettes 

or saying bad words to our sister, 

but to liberate us from the captivity of the condition in which we live: Sin. 

 

We are Christians because we have found, 

that in following this particular path, 

in telling and retelling these particular sacred stories,

we catch a glimpse of a reality created by God’s love, 

which is so complete, 

so overwhelming, 

that, every once in a while, 

our fear slips away 

and allows us, for just a moment, 

to see clearly. 

 

It is this funny, backwards thing,

that God releases us of our Sin 

not by erasing our running tally of flops and failings, 

but by loving us so completely.

Loving us in defiance of our condition of Sinfulness. 

It’s as if we suffer from an illness. 

And the love of God is the cure. 

 

Let me assure you that God’s love for you is complete.

Death was no match for Christ, 

and the condition of Sin is no match for God’s love. 

And that means that you are free. 

 

*

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

 

The news of Jesus’ birth is given to the shepherds, 

not because they’re sinful and in need of healing, 

but because they, like the Central Park Five, 

are the bearers of the Sin of the world. 

Like Antron, Kevin, Raymond, Corey, and Yusef, 

the shepherds are easy to blame. 

Their small sins are easier to point to than our, collective, 

large one. 

Like Antron, Kevin, Raymond, Corey, and Yusef, 

we can call these shepherds names, 

brand them as depraved or unseemly, 

eye them suspiciously and cross to the other side of the street when we see them. 

All of it is easier than looking at the reality we’ve created around us:

a city divided, graffitied and litter-strewn and dangerous. 

Whether it’s the shepherds or the Central Park Five,

we find a face for our fear.  

 

From our sin and fear release us,

goes the hymn. 

I am struck by the pairing of those words, sin and fear.

And then the possibility captured in the word that follows:

release.

That this child, 

this God-child born in a feeding trough 

on the wrong end of the wrong town, 

this story of God among us, 

who lives among us and takes on our Sin and carries it to the grave and breaks the grave open

releases us from it.  

 

 

And that’s the question I want to talk about tonight. 

In this season of God-among-us, how are you being released from sin and from fear?

Comments

[D]

Thank you for this. I found it deeply moving. And in a very succint, yet revealing way, you've more or less articulated how I see "the world" these days.

The events of recent weeks have led me to conclude that beyond all of our complicated discussions and our subjective filters, there lies a simple concept, which is that in each and every moment we are asked to make a choice. It is a choice between hope, love, and community; and fear and aggression. And we so often, we make the wrong choice.

On a related note, I've only recently stumbled upon your sermons and I have been really enjoying them. There's a long story . . . but the short version is that thanks to Paul Knitter, Paul Tillich, Marcus Borg, Meister Eckhart and some others I've sort of challenged myself to reembrace and reimagine my "Christian" path. To quote Knitter, "without Buddha I could not be a Christian." But as it turns out, I'm also getting a lot of help from people like you. So thank you.

[Emily Scott]

Dear D,

I'm glad you've stumbled across the sermons, and even more glad that they are reaching you in some way, or expressing something you're exploring. Do keep reading, and learning, and discerning, and I'll do my best to keep writing.

And thank you for taking the time to comment here. It means a great deal.

-Emily

[D]

And I have no idea why my name posted as "D." Perhaps the "D" was is for "divine" or "dialectical theism" - either way, I suspect intervention.

-Chris