This is the Unfinished Community Advent Devotional for the Third Week of Advent, 2024
Week 4—Luke 2:8-20
An angel (Gabriel?) and his friends wake up some shepherds, announcing an invasion
Nobody knows what to do with good news better than folks who don’t often get it themselves. Today, as the angel of the Lord explodes into glorious being before a bunch of bedraggled, terrified shepherds in the middle of the night, we find ourselves struck by just how true that can be. The angel could have easily chosen to pull out the trumpets and the lightshow right in Herod’s living room, or written Jesus’ birth announcement in 10-story neon-orange letters right in the skies over Jerusalem, accompanied by a lightshow that would somehow make Emperor Constantine jealous 300 years before he was even born. But instead, the angel pulls out all the stops for a dramatic, show-stopping number highlighting that good news of great joy…
…for a bunch of dirty, overworked laborers, sleeping out in the fields one night. Why?
Because a message of salvation means about as much to people who are safe as the promise of water means to a fish. Good news isn’t needed in the courts of kings, and the powerful don’t need the promise of God’s favor. Mercy doesn’t mean sending the rich away full while the poor stay huddled in the fields for warmth, and God’s justice doesn’t come gift-wrapped for the privileged.
Every word the angels had to say had meaning to the shepherds because it was for them, in a way it could never be for those in warmth, and wealth, and comfort. They didn’t need to be told to go to Bethlehem, they wanted to see this thing for themselves. They wanted to see the truth that our Lord had chosen to emerge into this world in vulnerability, to a poor and outcast family, huddled together in the cold just like them.
Emmanuel – God is with us.
That was the good news of great joy that the shepherds took away from that night. All that stuff about Messiahs and salvations, crucifixion and resurrection, that would come later. For today, in this moment, all that mattered was that God’s divine self chose to be present here, in this place, outside the city walls.
Prayer
Unexpectedly merciful God, we pray that you will be a God who is ever with us, but more than that we pray that you will help us to ever be with you as well. Guide us out of the places of our comfort, out of our warmth and security, and into those cold and lonely fields where you choose first to be. Show us the light that we can never see from city streets, the struggles that we can never know from warm homes and comfortable beds. Identify us with the least of these, Lord, so that we may in turn be identified with you.
In the name of Christ Jesus, the Lord of mercy and love, we pray, Amen.
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