The Angel's Alleluia

 “The Angel’s Alleluia”  Message @ JRCC – Sunday, Dec 20, 2015

Text: Luke 2:8-20 // Series: The Songs of Christmas

Good morning.  Thanks Julia for reading that story for us.  Welcome to Christmas Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve!  My name is Brad, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge.  We’re glad to have you with us for this EPIC Sunday morning.  As we begin, I want you to think back to the pictures you just saw in that book… think about how sheep are portrayed in story books.  Sheep in picture books look so cute! Don’t they?  Now take a look at the sheep in works of art - Sheep in works of art look so fluffy!  Painted to look like little cotton balls – this is a portion of the art done by the Moore family.  Sheep are especially cute when they are done up as stuffed animals – so adorable!  Even Minecraft sheep are cute (kinda).  But here’s the thing…  Sheep in real life are not always so cute and cuddly.  Especially if you BUT Have You Ever Tried Shearing One?  I grew up in northern BC and there was an agricultural college that that a demonstration farm.  One of our school field trips was to go out to this farm and we were to get up close and personal with the sheep.  Well, first of all, sheep in picture books or stuffed animals don’t smell but these sheep were stinky and dirty.  Their wool was all matted down.  And we had arrived for our field trip on the day when they took sets clippers like this and cut the fuzzy wool off of those sheep.  I can assure you, there was nothing adorable about it.  The sounds of and smells of that field trip day are seared into my memory because I learned an important life lesson that day…Sheep Don’t Generally Like Being Shorn.  What I really learned, however, was how different the reality of sheep was from what I saw in the picture books.  While they looked all light and fluffy, they were actually fairly dirty, smelly, ornery animals.  I learned that day the difference between appearance and reality.  That Point: Appearances Can Be Deceiving!

In the month leading up to Christmas, we call this season Advent which means “arrival”, here at Jericho we have been exploring a series of Songs, the Songs of the first Christmas, in the New Testament book of Luke.  We began looking at Zechariah’s song (a song that changed tune from doubt to thanksgiving); We looked at Jesus’ mother Mary’s song –she sung in the key of confidence in God who acts & who redeems.  Last week – Rob Thiessen reminded us about Simeon’s prophetic declaration of faith.  Today – we look at our final Song in Luke’s gospel – a song that the angel’s sang.  The Angel’s Alleluia.  Turn with me in your Bible or on your phone or device to Luke 2.  I’ll be reading from 2:8-18 in the New Living translation – it will appear on the screens for you to follow along. 

Scripture Slide 1 = Luke 2:8-9

Here’s Sienna Chuah’s artistic vision of what that may have looked like – I’m not sure what she titled her piece but if I was to give it a title, it would be Freaked out Sheep.  I love it!  Let’s keep reading to see what happens.

Scripture slides 2,3,4 = Luke 2:10-20

Here in this passage, we have three pictures that are painted for us where there is a difference between the expectation in our minds and the realty.  Since we’ve already talked about sheep, let’s start with the shepherds.  When you and I think about shepherds, what comes to your mind?  Most likely, its colouring book kind of shepherds, or children with tea towels over their heads for a kids Christmas pageant.  It’s all pretty tame and pastel-like.  But here’s where the Smethurst girls in their art piece I think are on the right track. Look at how scruffy their shepherds look.  Maybe it’s the goatee but these look like shifty no-good kinda dudes to me.  Think about it.  Even in the Middle East today, shepherds live a nomadic existence.  We may romanticize it, but it’s a hard life.  Out in the elements all day and all night.  You would begin to smell like your sheep!  And In the ancient world, in fact, shepherds were considered unreliable, often viewed as thieves, seen as shifty.  They were not allowed to give a testimony in a court of law because they were considered smelly, shifty, outcasts.  Not the stuff of colouring books.  But think about it for a moment.  It was to these outcasts, these people on the margins that God sent an angelic messenger to tell them about the birth of Jesus.  Their culture may have di=despised and rejected them BUT God chooses them to discover and declare the greatest mystery in the history of humankind, the birth of Jesus!  And smelly and dirty as they are, they come.  They don’t clean up, they simply respond by coming and seeing what God is up to. 

There’s another group in this story that we often confuse the perception and the reality and that is the angels.  When you think of angels, what do you think of?  I think we are all too often influenced by Renaissance era art – here’s a piece by Raphael that may be familiar to you.  But here’s the thing, if I’m a shepherd who can defend my sheep against lions, tigers, bears oh my! – and I’m out keeping watch and that fat cherubic being appears to me, I am more likely to laugh or poke it with my staff than I am to be afraid.  But look at what the text says: it says, consistent with the other appearances of angels in the Bible, when the angel appeared among them and radiance of God’s glory surrounded them, they were terrified.  I love how Josh Groom’s piece and Curtis Cottrell’s art pieces portray this so effectively…  Just look at the faces of the shepherds – they are freaked out!  And then, it’s not just one angel… the one angelic messenger was joined by the armies of heaven.  A vast host of others.  If you are scarred of one angel, imaging a fear-inducing heavenly army occupying the sky above you!  BUT… here again we see a difference between the expectation and the reality.  The armies of the God of heaven, who holds all power and majesty and who could decimate and destroy anything at the word of their commander, instead of waging war, they proclaim peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.

To help you remember just how different appearances can be from reality, I brought with me today a colouring book.  It looks like a normal coloruing book, doesn’t it?  Ah, but look at the title.  You see it’s not just any colouring book.  It’s my fun, magic coloring book.  You see there’s something different about this colouring book..  When you look inside the pages [Flip pages]….  Oh, wait a minute.  I forgot something.  Kids, what does a coloruing book normally have in it?  Pictures.  I think I forgot to put those in this morning.  Well, not to worry.  This is a fun magic colouring book so let’ me think about this really hard for a moment.  OK.  I think I’ve figured it out. You see, we’re talking about the difference between our expectations and reality.  So I need to adjust my expectations.  I need to expect that there will be pictures in this book. Can you udo that with me?  Count to 3 with me & expect that there will be pictures in this book.  [flip]

That’s better!  But you know what?  If it’s a colouring book, they should really be colored in, shouldn’t they?  Well – if it worked to imagine the pictures getting into the book, why don’t’ we imagine the pictures getting coloured – that should do it.   Because remember, though this looks like an ordinary colouring book, it isn’t.  It’s a fun, magic coloring book.  Are you ready – I’m going to count to three, you guys can do it with me… and we will imagine the pictures getting coloured in.  1, 2, 3 – Oh come on, guys… you imagined the pictures disappearing again!  We worked hard to get them in there no they’re gone again!?  Let’s try it again.  I’ll count to three – imagine pictures back in the book. 1,2,3. Good job!  OK, now you’ve had some practice.   Let’s do this – fully coloured in pictures.  Count to three with me and we’ll make this seemingly ordinary colouring book do something amazing.  Colour itself in.  1,2,3. [flip].  You guys are amazing! 

I brought this seemingly ordinary colouring book along to prove my point.  That things are not always as they seem.  The shepherds, they might have seemed like scruffy, unreliable, outcasts but they became messengers of the good news of the arrival of Jesus to our world.  The text says they told everyone what had happened and what the angels had said to them about this child.  Did everyone believe them? No.  But all who heard the shepherd’s story were astonished.  And perhaps part of that astonishment came because of who was telling the story or the notion that angelic beings could deliver a message not of judgement or terror, but good news of great joy which shall be for all peoples.   

But the greatest contrast between appearance and reality perhaps lay not with sheep, shepherds or angels.  But lay wrapped in strips of cloth, lying in the manger.  The greatest contrast between appearance and realty was that Jesus, the one announced by the angels as Saviour, Messiah, the Lord - came to our world, not as an empire builder born in a palace but as a A tiny human baby… laid on the straw in a feeding trough for cattle.  Centuries earlier, the prophet Isaiah had been given a vision of this discrepancy.  Speaking of Jesus

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” (Isaiah 53:2)

Nothing about the scene night would give us an indication of what was truly happening.  Which is why so many people in his day and in ours miss the significance of that first advent.  Sure, it was a tiny human baby

BUT this baby was the King of Heaven lying beneath the stars He created.  Fully God, fully human.  The Lord of the Universe chose to come to earth that night to show us how much He loves us.  To live among us, to identify with our weaknesses and frailty, our own lack of faith, our own wrestling with doubt and fear and anxiety.  He knows and understands because He experienced everything that you and I as humans experience.  And yet the great mystery is that lying there on that bed of hay was the second person of the trinity, Immanuel. God choosing to be with us.  I love the way poets & songs writers attempt to wrestle with this great truth.  John Donne, 17^th Cen English poet & pastor, grapples with this in his Christmas:   

Seest thou, my soul,
with thy faith's eyes,
how He which fills all place,
yet none holds Him, doth lie?

  - Nativity, A Christmas Poem by John Donne

The lord of heaven and earth, who cannot be contained and whose power knows no limits, chooses to willingly confine Himself to time and space and the limitations of human frailty.  The appearance and the reality so starkly different we must pause and ask ourselves the question WHY.

Why would God choose to operate in this way?  In the book of Philippians in the New Testament, the apostle Paul who encountered Jesus in a vision and whose live was radically changed, answers this question for us by quoting one of the earliest songs or hymns of the first century church.  In Philippians 2, we learn that Jesus,

“Though He was God, He did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, He gave up his divine privileges… and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, He humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross…

 “Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

This was no magic trick or sleight of hand.  This was God’s incredible love on display for all the world and all of history to see and experience.  You see friends, the greatest demonstration of love is if you are willing to give up your life for another person.  And that is precisely what Jesus did.  He was willing to give up or set aside the glories of heaven, to be born in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago, to live an exemplary life, to die on a Roman cross.  WHY?  All because of love.  When Jesus hung on that cross and died, it may have seemed like all was lost.  But just like the manger, the cross is not what it appears to be.  Because Jesus lived the perfect life, free from sin, shame, guilt, and evil.  And when he sacrificed His life, He took on Himself the punishment that you and I deserve for all of the wrong things we have ever done.  And when we say “yes” to God, we receive the greatest gift ever given, the gift of forgiveness.  The gift of real, full, meaningful live that begins now and goes on forever.  The gift of relationship with God through Jesus. 

But just like any gift that’s under the tree this week, you have to receive it.  And there is no mystery as to how that transpires.  You and I need to practice what was modeled for us by the shepherds when they first heard the angel’s song.  The first thing they had to do was decide if what they had heard and seen was true.  If it is worth believing its worth investigating.  They had to get over their own pride or fear or concerns about what it might mean to stumble into the town of Bethlehem in the middle of the night asking around for a newborn baby.  They chose to seek and to see.  And for them, seeing was believing.  Perhaps today you are on a journey of discovery or exploration.  You’re not sure if God is real or if the Christmas story holds anything of significance for you.  I invite you to maintain your curiosity.  To seek and to see what this Jesus is all about.  You’ll find here at Jericho a community of people who are on a journey of faith together.  At various places and with various experiences, but united in our core purpose to be disciples of Jesus who embody God’s love everywhere we go.  We would love for you to join us in this journey together.  We want to walk with you as you explore or as you grow.     

Maybe for you, you’ve been around stories of the manger for a long, long time.  To the point that they have become too familiar to you.  I wonder if you can ask God to give you a fresh sense of wonder this season to see the amazing difference between the mundane appearance and the profound reality of Christmas.  We can get caught up in the apprearances of presents and family and warm times together, all of which are wonderful gifts, but there is so much depth and richness to Advent that is there for us to invite others into.  My challenge to those who are in this category is to do what the shepherds did.  They were bold in their declaration of their experiences.  They told everyone what they had seen and heard.  Maybe you want to invite a neighbor or family member to Christmas Eve here in the arena bowl, maybe you take a neighbor in need over a Christmas care package and pray for and with them…  The shepherds didn’t keep that good news of great joy to themselves.  When the angel appeared to them, the shepherds had a choice to make.  And they made the choice not only seek and to find but also to go and tell.  Grow in your boldness today. 

The shepherds came to the most unlikely place to find a king, a manger.  And they bowed their knees and worshipped.  The shepherds went out declaring that story, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and all they had seen.  Are you and I willing to do the same? 

As the team comes to sing a song for us, I invite you to take that same journey in our heart and mind this morning…. 

Come and worship…  hear the song that the angels sing   

Come and worship… take the journey that the shepherds took

Worship Christ, the Newborn King. Remember this baby was born to die

Let me pray for you.  “O God, who by the announcement of the angels revealed your only Son to us; mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may be led onwards through this earthy life, until we see the vision of your heavenly glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives & reigns, one God, world without end. Amen.

Benediction:

We people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in deepest night, are lit up with a brilliant sight. Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. The spread of his influence and of his peace will never end. Therefore, go out into the world with great joy, and the grace of Bethlehem’s matchless Child, the love of the God who never ceases to amaze, and the fellowship of the Spirit who never wearies, will be with you this holy season and evermore. Thanks be to God!