Christmas Eve

President Franklin Roosevelt was tired of all the small talk during receptions at the White House. So, as a long line of people were waiting to shake his hand during a function, he decided to say, “I killed my mother-in-law last night.” But people didn’t hear it. They walked by and smiled and said, “That’s nice.” Then a foreign diplomat came through and FDR said, “I killed my mother-in-law last night.” The diplomat paused for a moment, then replied, “And I am sure she deserved it, Mr. President!”  Now that’s diplomacy.

We live in a noisy world. We get so used to noise that we can’t stand silence. Most of the noise we hear drowns out the sacred sounds. And because there is so much noise, we don’t hear very well.

A Native American and a native New Yorker were walking the streets of New York City together. The Native American had spent his whole life on the prairie. It was his first time in the city. He turned to his new friend and said, “I hear a cricket.” The New Yorker replied, “What do you mean? Look at the asphalt, smell the exhaust, listen to the traffic. How can there be a cricket here?”

The Native American led his friend across the street to the front of a store. There in front of the store was a small tree. He turned over a leaf and there was a cricket. The Native American said, “We hear what we are trained to hear. Let me show you.” He took a bunch of change out of his pocket and threw it on the sidewalk. Immediately, a crowd of people stopped and looked.

Yes, we hear what we want to hear. We see what we want to see.

Imagine you could travel back in time 2,000 years ago.  What would you want to see?

Many folks would want to head to Rome and check out the Forum and the Colosseum. Perhaps attend a chariot race or the gladiator games, then head for the Palatine Hill and snap some pics of the Emperor, Caesar Augustus. You’ll recognize him by the royal purple robes. Fine threads. Look at him strut. Roman coins bore an image of Caesar Augustus. A caption on the coin read: divi filius, “son of god.” It was believed by Romans that Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, was divine—conceived by a serpent as Augustus’ mother lay asleep in the temple of Apollo.

He didn’t realize it, but Augustus, who thought he was so cunning and so powerful, was simply a pawn in the story of the first Christmas. How so? He issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. Everyone was ordered to the town of their birth to register. Thousands of people were uprooted from their homes traveling many miles mostly on foot—trying to find shelter in a town where they may not have resided in decades.

But the joke was on Augustus. The prophet Micah had prophesied (Micah 5:2) that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. But that could only be accomplished if Mary and Joseph had a good reason to travel from their home in Nazareth the 90 miles to Bethlehem.

Augustus accomplished many fine things as the first Roman emperor, among them the Pax Romana, a largely peaceful period of two centuries in which Rome imposed order on a world long torn with conflict. He built roads and vastly expanded the empire. What he also accomplished, though he was not aware of it, was to make this vast area of the world much more accessible to Christian evangelism. It was not that many centuries later that the notoriously pagan Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire. We owe a debt to Caesar Augustus, who thought he was all-powerful, but was really an unwitting instrument of God.

Now let’s head to Bethlehem, a tiny backwater town in Judea, a small, insignificant corner of the Roman Empire.

We encounter shepherds worshipping a baby in a manger.

Shepherds were not considered the cream of the crop. They were a rag-tag bunch of rough-hewn, outdoorsy folk, who lived nomadic lifestyles in the fields and hills. They weren’t the “temple type.” But they were strong, fierce, and loyal. Shepherds were the “field experts” on weather, crops, and wildlife.

They were known to be devout. They were especially astute in the oral scriptures and in reading weather signs and heavenly signs. Shepherds were the “sign readers” (the semioticians) of the ancient world, the prophetic voice and the nomadic memory of a very ancient people.

Like the magi who would later appear, the shepherds were expecting a messiah and constantly looking about for signs of his appearing.

Signs. Hmm. Does anyone here believe in signs?

I’ll name a sign, and you tell me the first thing that pops into your head.

The golden arches: McDonald’s. The Gecko: Geico. The Swoosh: Nike. Mouse ears: Disney.

Well, it looks like you’re all sign readers. It just depends if you are familiar with the sign. If the sign is known to you, it’s not hard to point it out, is it?

Well, for Israelite shepherds, one sign was a ritual related to God’s “covenant of salt” that we might call, in short, “salt and swaddle.”

In the ancient world, the sons of princes and kings were put through a special ritual. It entailed taking the newborn baby, washing the baby in salt water (a sign of purity) and wrapping or swaddling the baby for a couple of hours in strips of cloth. The swaddling signified the uprightness of his future life and a special anointing as a priest or king.

We know the tradition was also used among the ancient Hebrews.

The shepherds lived by the scriptures. They knew all about the salt covenant. A salt covenant is eternal. In ancient times, ingesting salt made a legal agreement forever binding. And God always kept his word. In second Chronicles 13:5, it says, “Don’t you know that the Lord the God of Israel has given the kingship of Israel to David – and his descendants – forever by a covenant of salt?”

All the shepherds needed to do was identify the location and identity of that swaddled child who would be born in the line of David. Even hiding out in Bethlehem, the “underground” faithful would have known about the child conceived by Joseph and Mary, both inheritors in the Davidic line. This would be a special child, and he would be born to be a future king.

To be swaddled was to reveal God’s glorious presence in His priest and king, the Emmanuel. Salt swaddled was code for “God wrapped in flesh,” the Lamb of God, the sign of the Shepherd Priest, the Shepherd King of Israel.

And if this sign wasn’t enough, there was also the experience of the angels declaring the “good news”! That could shake you up a bit, no?

It’s so God that the first evangelists for Jesus were shepherds – shepherds who pined for the honor of Israel, who lay awake at night watching the stars and the weather as they watched their flocks, looking for the signs of Scripture. Lowly shepherds served God with the least of possessions but the greatest of passions – a loyal and faithful heart, a heart that trusted in God’s promises. It was those with heart, the heart of a Shepherd, that God chose then and God chooses today, again and again and again.

This Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world arrived in a manger in Bethlehem. The angels cheered. The shepherds found him following the sign they knew so well.

And Mary pondered all of this in her heart. What would this child become?

“Mary do you know?” the song asks. Caesar didn’t know.

But the shepherds knew.  May you, too, know the joy and wonder of Christmas.