Luke 2.12-14
This will be a sign for you: you will find a child
wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with
the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to
God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
HOW
SILENTLY, HOW SILENTLY
Upon
reading, Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth, a Hollywood scriptwriter said that God
went about the Incarnation in the wrong way and that, if he was doing it, there
would have been some drastic changes. Jesus certainly would not have been born
in a stable and laid in a manger. His parents would have been people of some
social, perhaps even political standing, instead of two peasants from a podunk
village. Surrounding the event, he went on, would have been a great crowd of
spectators—fans actually—with media representatives in attendance and a coterie
of important public figures. And the angels certainly would not have appeared
to, of all creatures, common, odiferous shepherds on a rural hillside. His
version of the Incarnation would be a fitting spectacular.
But God did it differently. Pregnant Mary, carpenter Joseph, odious Nazareth, and the little town of Bethlehem with “no room in the inn” were all part of the way God does things and the message he brings us. On the social scale shepherds were close to the bottom, but they were the ones who received the message of the heavenly host! The Son of God should have entered his realm at the high altar of Jerusalem’s Temple, not in a stable of out-of-the-way Bethlehem.
Only a handful of shepherds came to behold him. There were no on-the-spot media interviews, no official delegations from the religious authorities, and almost no one heard the angelic choir fill the holy silence of that night: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is well pleased!”---an invitation to the whole world.
Today it is a different setting.
Christmas is everywhere. Christmas is frantic, a time for joy, (even if we
don’t know why), and above all, vital for our economy. Christmas is a time for luminaries
such as Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Reindeer with the red nose, chestnuts
roasting o’er an open fire, unsilent nights, a holiday from sobriety, a higher
suicide rate, loneliness, exhaustion and on ad.
finitum. There is almost no time in these furious days and nights for the holy
silence that enveloped Bethlehem and the shepherds abiding in the fields.
Yet, for those who will receive it, there is a holy silence in which the Incarnation can again be experienced. Philips Brooks said: “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given, yet God imparts to human hearts the wonders of his Heaven. “Today, tonight, this week, let us take the time to listen for and experience that Holy Silence?
Let us be silent that we may perceive
the silent sounds and the unseen sights,
Let us be still that we may know the
wonders of this glorious night!
When the world discloses some great
new thing,
It does so with fanfare and drum,But when God sent his only Son to earth
None but silent shepherds heard him come.
Let us be silent that we may perceive the silent sounds and the unseen sights,
Let us be still that we may know the
wonders of this glorious night!
The bedlam of Christmas will
ne’er bring him near,
The clamor and bedlam he’ll sun;But if deep in our hearts we prepare him room,
In the silence Christ will be born.
But the manger he lay in and the cross he would bear,
Are the same path he calls us to share!
Let us be silent that we may perceive
the silent sounds and the unseen sights,
Let us be still that we may know the
wonders of this glorious night!
Rev.
Larry Althouse, FUMC staff 1978-1993, retired.
