Shepherds and a Baby

We’ve heard two passages read today. The first – from John 1 – is the great soaring climax to the Christmas story, stating that the impossible has happened and God is fully present in the darkness of our lives. I won’t go deeper into that wonderful chapter this morning, but we hear it as the backdrop to Luke’s story about the shepherds.

Luke 2 is a story that we have heard often. We know it well, but it never grows old. Shepherds out in the field with their flocks. Angels appearing and blazing the skies with their glory and song. Parents with a baby boy in the humblest of places – the antithesis of the glory of the angels. The shepherds again, binding together the glory and the baby.

Glory

Let’s talk about the glory first. Some commentators say that the fact that the shepherds were in the fields at night suggests that this is not actually “in the deep midwinter”. In winter, they would have been in shelter keeping warm. I grew up celebrating Christmas in the middle of the summer, and the scene suggests that Australia and Zimbabwe are closer to their experience than Manitoba is. So, they are in the fields near Bethlehem.

I wonder who these shepherds were. Some commentators note their low status in Judean society – you don’t go to shepherds for high status. Other commentators note that the Old Testament uses the image of shepherd as a metaphor for the kings of Israel – so perhaps they did at least have the respect of the people. One speculation intrigued me. Most shepherds would be out in a more remote area than Bethlehem. Shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem were probably attached to the Temple in Jerusalem. Their flocks would have provided the sheep for the temple sacrifices. If this is the case, the angels chose the shepherds precisely because they were already dedicated to God’s service. And the shepherds were excited because they really were waiting for and already working for the coming of the Messiah.

In the end, however, there’s no getting around it. They were shepherds, and shepherds were sort of like farmers in Manitoba. Respected. Hard working. Getting dirty when they need to. You don’t go to the barn when you want to show off for high society, and you don’t go to the shepherds when you want to show off.

Except that the angels did go to the shepherds to show off. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying …” It must have been an incredible sight. One angel frightened the shepherds, so the angel said, “Don’t be afraid!” What must an army of angels have done? They were too overcome to get out their smart phones and record the event. They could only gasp and gape and revel in the Shekinah glory poured out all around them.

I have seen displays of natural glory, usually in the form of lightning displays. I am profoundly uncomfortable when the skies light up with one lightning bolt after another. I remember driving our son home from a soccer game in Kentucky as the skies grew dark with storm clouds and were then lit up with one flash after another. If you combine that kind of overwhelming power with the clear words of praise to God in the angels’ song, you get something of the experience that overwhelmed the shepherds. Powerful. Uncomfortable. Glorious. Wonderful. Absolutely astounding.

When it was all over and they could breathe again, they started processing. “Let’s go see this baby!” “The angels said, ‘in Bethlehem’. Let’s go see!” And they did. They went and found Mary and Joseph and the baby and the stable. Here was the polar opposite of the display they had just seen. We were just with our younger son and his wife, meeting our youngest grandchild. He was about three weeks old when we first saw him. Babies do not project lightning displays of power. They cry, and they eat, and they sleep, and they wait for a diaper change.

No matter how we dress up the manger scene, it remains a picture of humility and smallness, in sharp contrast to the glory of the angels. The point is that this humility is the vessel in which we find the glory of God. God’s light shining in the angels comes to us veiled in the baby. This is a basic principle of the moral universe: Light comes wrapped in love; power comes to us in weakness; glory is revealed in the small things of life.

The opposite is also true. When people in our world set out to show how great and powerful they are, they cut themselves off from the God who revealed God’s self in the humility of the manger scene. Much of what we do in our world, we do to impress people. The principle of glorious light wrapped in simple family love contradicts our human displays of power.

A Lesson from LOTR

I have seen a series of essays recently in social media, reflecting on ideas from one of the great fantasy books and movies of our day, Lord of the Rings. I have edited one of these essays (by Genny Harrison) for us this morning. Here it is.

 

At the most important moment in modern fantasy, the hero fails. Not quietly. Not ambiguously. He stands at the edge of the world, feels the full weight of evil loosen its grip, and chooses it anyway.

At the edge of Mount Doom, with the fate of the world balanced on a single will, Frodo Baggins does not throw the Ring into the fire. He claims it. The moment every heroic narrative has trained us to expect as triumph becomes instead a confession of failure. Tolkien does not flinch. He lets the hero break.

And yet the world is saved.

This is not a plot twist. It is a moral thesis. The destruction of the Ring happens not because Frodo earns victory, but because mercy extended long before the ending finally comes due. ….

By the time he reaches the Fire, Frodo has endured starvation, sleep deprivation, repeated physical injury, and sustained psychological terror. Modern neuroscience would describe this as cumulative trauma. …

The quest only succeeds because of Gollum. And even that rescue is not redemption in the sentimental sense. Gollum does not transform into goodness. He falls into the fire because of what he already is. The deeper truth is that Gollum is alive at all only because he was spared when mercy looked foolish. First by Bilbo. Then by Gandalf. Then most dangerously by Frodo himself.

The Ring is destroyed not because Frodo conquers it, but because Frodo once chose not to destroy someone else.

This is a devastating inversion of the moral economy most of us were raised to believe in. We are taught to look for visible proof that goodness works. Tolkien gives us an older logic. Moral victories are often retroactive. The most transformative decisions rarely announce themselves as such. They look inefficient. They look naive. They often look like failure.

In the medieval moral tradition that shaped Tolkien, mercy was not sentimental. It was strategic in a way power could never be. Mercy refused to close the future. It kept outcomes unresolved. It preserved the possibility that evil might one day undo itself. …

We live in an age that worships visible dominance. We measure virtue through performance. We reward leaders who claim they can bend chaos through sheer will. Tolkien issues a quiet warning instead. When power becomes the proof of goodness, goodness collapses.

Frodo fails because no one was ever meant to pass that final test.

The world is not saved by the flawless execution of the righteous. It is saved by the accumulated weight of restraint. By choices made without assurance of payoff. By mercy that looked wasted at the time. By patience that looked irrational. By hands that refused the easy kill and kept the future open instead.

…. The modern fantasy is that effort always guarantees justice. Tolkien tells a harder truth. Sometimes the most important moral decisions you will ever make will feel powerless when you make them. Sometimes the victory will not belong to your endurance at all. It will belong to mercy that looked like weakness years earlier.

Frodo does not win.

Mercy does.

And it does not feel triumphant.

 

The idea that God redeems the world through our failures is a complex and difficult one; it is also profoundly Christian. We want to set ourselves against evil and defeat it, when instead we are invited to join forces with a baby in a manger. We don’t join Herod’s side. We don’t join Pilate’s or Caesar’s army. We don’t ally ourselves with the leaders who say they will destroy our enemies. Instead, we choose the baby who grew into the man Jesus. We choose the one who willingly died and accepted into himself the pain and heartache of our broken world. We choose to live out the love and mercy of God revealed in Jesus.

Conclusion

What this looks like, as Genny Harrison reminds us in the essay on Frodo, is doing the right thing because it is right. It may seem hopeless, but we show mercy and love always. We may not see any change around us, but we act out the mercy and love of God each day. Small acts of mercy. Small acts of love. Living in harmony with the Creator of the world.

I said that we may not see a big change in our situation when we do what is right. I may reach out to a brother who is down and out and then see the same person again tomorrow, still struggling. Maybe an analogy can help us see how important the small acts area.

The big changes that we see are like the landscape around us. It’s important to shape the landscape well. We build our homes and devise our social structures and so on. We want these to be good. The small acts – the things we do every day without even thinking – are like the deep places of the earth, the tectonic plates. Tectonic plates under the surface of the earth move slowly, but they move with great force. When they build up enough force, they cause an earthquake that shatters the surface of the earth.

Why would I think that the small acts of mercy and love are the tectonic plates beneath the surface? Because they come from God’s deepest nature – as revealed in the glory of the angels and the presence of the baby. God has made our world so that love and mercy and justice are the bedrock. You can build injustice and division on the surface, but sooner or later the earthquake of God’s love will shatter the surface of our lives. Then, if we have built with that same love, we will find ourselves where God wants us to be.

I think that Martin Luther King’s famous line is making a similar point, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” May we follow the shepherds to the stable this Christmas. May we see the glory of the angels wrapped in the love of the baby. May we respond by acting in ways consistent with God’s light revealed in love. “He has showed you, O man, O woman, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, that you shall do justice and love mercy and be ready to walk after the Lord your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Steinbach Mennonite Church

21 December 2025

John 1: 1 to 5

Luke 2: 8 to 20