Luke 2: 1-20 Christmas Day, Pymble Glory to God in the highest Well, I wonder how your Christmas Day will finish up? What attitude will you have as you head home from your last stop? How will you feel as you crawl into bed? Happy and content? Will you think, Never again? Thankful? Maybe just full? The last verse of our reading suggests the shepherds went home from their Christmas Day experience, glorifying and praising God. I wonder if there might be room in our lives for some praise this Christmas? Now before you write that off as hopelessly boring or irrelevant let me say how I think praise helps us practically today. Praise takes the focus off ourselves, which isn t such a bad thing. In our self-obsessed, sometimes narcissistic world it s often very healthy to lose some personal attention. It isn t all about us, as we sometimes have to remind ourselves. To praise God is, however briefly, to be taken up with God. And becoming so absorbed with God, we can t help but become mindful God s plans and agendas for the world. Our attention is drawn to divine desires, godly goals and kingdom core values. And we are invited to live consistent with those ways. That is, we can t praise God for his peace and actively live in conflict; we can t rejoice in God s justice and at the same time be persecuting people; we can t glorify God s act of transformation and yet resist any change in ourselves. Praise of God requires living consistently with the way of God. So with the shepherds as our guide, let us see what is praise-worthy in this Christmas story. And perhaps it is best summed up in the announcement by the angel to the shepherds when he says, I am bringing good news, of great joy, for all the people. I don t think the shepherds would have much argument with this being good news. In both form and content the birth of Jesus was very good news. In terms of content, God was fulfilling ancient promises to bring about something new. God was coming among humanity as a baby Emmanuel, God with us with all the solidarity that suggests. And in terms of form, well the shepherds were in on it from the beginning.
You see, in the Bible good news is just about always for the defeated, the broken-hearted, those in exile, the poor and those on the fringe and the shepherds fitted neatly into this group of marginalized people. For a range of reasons they were on the bottom rung of the ancient social ladder. When I was in Israel last year we saw a few Bedouin or desert dwellers who are probably what the shepherds were and they haven t changed much in centuries. There is a an outdoor-feel about them, a certain roughness, a certain odour a bit like when your children come home from 2 weeks camping and proudly declare they bathed twice! Let s just say the shepherds were never going to make the ancient equivalent of the glossy society pages and yet God had chosen them to hear the news first. There is plenty to praise God for in this good news. Good news of great joy. I think the joy is associated with the marginalized being given a privileged place in the economy of God, but more than that, joy seems to be associated with hope the hope of change, the hope of something new, the hope of transformation. Now I m not one of those preachers who thinks everything in the world is terrible and there s nothing to celebrate. Far from it; I love so much about the world and its peoples. And yet I long for transformation. I yearn for justice and compassion and peace and reconciliation for so many from refugees and asylum seekers forced from their homelands languishing in camps and detention centres; to low paid workers facing the loss of penalty rates; to victims of domestic violence, mainly women, dying at the rate of one a week at the hands of their partners; from indigenous people punch drunk from the loss of their land and culture; to peaceful, law-abiding Muslims being tarnished with the terrorist brush. So many groups cry out for change and justice! But this child in a manger represents God action for change! As Mary identified in her song of praise in the previous chapter: God has moved to bring the mighty down from their thrones, and to lift up the lowly; he s filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Of course it hasn t all arrived and we can get impatient. And yet there is hope; God has initiated another way of being inviting us to be part of the transformation and that is a reason for joy and praise.
Now I just want to note that living as we do in Australia, in Sydney, on the north shore, surrounded by impressive schools like this one, that many of us might feel we are on the wrong side of God s ledger. And that maybe so. Yet while Luke writes with passion for the least, the lost and the last, as someone has termed it, he also describes many wealthy people responding and turning to Christ. There is plenty of room for the wealthy in God s heart! We are called however, not to defend our wealth and privilege, but to get on side with God s concern for the poor and marginalized. And I think today that includes not just being generous with what we have, but also working for structural and policy changes to improve the lot of those battling poverty and other barriers. This might be part of our practical conversion that while reasonably well-off, we advocate and support changes for those who aren t, even at some cost to ourselves. Yes that sounds like the radical discipleship that Jesus called for. Good news, of great joy, for all people. The third reason to praise God in this short phrase is the inclusivity of God. The good news is for all! The Christ-child is for all! Luke is perhaps looking ahead to the inclusion of the gentiles as God s people in which he has a particular interest, but he also highlights Jesus inclusive ways how he spoke with, healed and called both men and women, young and old, rich and poor, and yes, Jew and gentile. Although it is easy to become tribal in our outlook; fearful of those unlike us, most of us know the joy of being included especially if we have also experienced some deliberate exclusion. But the kingdom of God is open to all and we are to model this inclusive welcome. Come as you are, we remind ourselves in song, of God s invitation. Of course there are implications for our living when we follow Christ, but the invitation is to all who would come. Yes, we can praise God for this inclusive embrace. So having explored some of the reasons to praise God in the Christmas story, what could praise look like this morning? The OT psalms which focus on praise have a certain pattern which is instructive. Like Psalm 96 from which I read earlier, there is usually an outburst of praise or a call for people to praise God O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord all the earth
followed by a reason to praise, For great is the Lord the Lord made the heavens So our Christmas praise might go something like this, Sing to God, people gathered in this chapel Lift your hearts to the Lord this Christmas morning for God shares our frame in the babe of Bethlehem, reminding us that we belong to each other. God sanctifies our humanity in the child of the manger and calls us to our very best. Yes that could be one response. But lest we think that praise is just our words or our singing, the Apostle Paul reminds us that our spiritual worship is how we live our every moment. And one of the fascinating things about the Psalms is that they often call on the whole creation to praise God. Again in our psalm today, Let the earth rejoice, let the seas roar, let the field exult and the trees of the forest sing for joy. But how do rocks and animals worship their creator? How can a tree praise God? By being itself. By being the best tree it can be. By celebrating its tree-ness. OK that might be a bit weird, but I think you can see where I m going. Part of our praise to God is celebrating our humanity by being the best we can be, fulfilling what we were made for. We will all have different ways of explaining that humanness but I think it involves being attuned to God, connected with others in honest relationships, and living loving, generous and balanced lives. You might add other important elements. When I sit at my desk in my study I overlook many wonderful trees that must be in the backyards of homes down Livingstone Ave. And there is one particular eucalyptus that towers above all the others; it must be 50-60 metres high, strong branches reaching out in every direction, it sways in the breeze and is stark against the various coloured skies that we have. This magnificent specimen is living its tree-ness fully, giving glory to its creator in its every move. I want to be like that tree. I want to live fully into who I am
and thereby give praise and glory to God. The Christmas story may be well-known, but like all the stories in Scripture, it cries out for a response. Like the shepherds we are invited to return to our homes after our Christmas experience praising God not for our comforts and full stomachs but for all that God has done and continues to do in the gift of Christ for our world. And if we catch just a part of that, our praise wont just be for today alone. Praise will become part of our everyday experience.