Welcoming The Unwelcome

Luke 2:8-21

More often than not, the people who need love the most, are the hardest to love.

The movie A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose career and life were crippled by schizophrenia. He taught at MIT and went on to win the Nobel Prize for his theory of the dynamics of human conflict as it relates to economics.

At the height of his career, after a decade of remarkable mathematical accomplishments, Nash suffered a breakdown. The 30-year-old MIT professor interrupted a lecture to announce he was on the cover of Life magazine—disguised as the pope. He claimed that foreign governments were communicating with him through The New York Times, and he turned down a prestigious post at the University of Chicago because, he said, he was about to become the emperor of Antarctica.

His wife, Alicia, had him committed against his will to a private mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and treated with psychoanalysis. Upon his release, Nash abruptly resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension fund, and fled to Europe. He wandered from country to country, attempting to renounce his American citizenship and be declared a refugee. He saw himself as a secret messenger of God and the focus of an international communist conspiracy. With help from the State Department, Alicia had him deported back to the United States.

Desperate and short of funds, Alicia was forced to commit her husband to the former New Jersey Lunatic Asylum, an understaffed state institution.

In one scene of A Beautiful Mind, one of John’s colleagues is talking to Alicia:

“So, Alicia, how are you holding up?”

Alicia responds feebly, “Well, the delusions have passed. They’re saying with medications …”

The colleague clarifies, “No, I mean you.”

Alicia pauses and explains, “I think often what I feel is obligation, or guilt, over wanting to leave, rage against John, against God. But then I look at him, and I force myself to see the man that I married, and he becomes that man. He’s transformed into someone that I love, and I’m transformed into someone that loves him. It’s not all the time, but it’s enough.”

“I think John is a very lucky man,” the colleague says.

In the movie, Nash’s wife sticks by him through thick and thin. In real life, it wasn’t that easy. She eventually divorced him, although they later reconciled. Both the movie and the real story affirm the difficulty – and beauty – of loving those who are hard to love.

We wonder at the possibility that someone could love a person who is difficult or unlovely, and then we are jolted back to the truth and reality we celebrate at Christmas, and it is the epitome of the beautiful mind. It is the beautiful mind – and heart – of a holy, just, and merciful God condescending to love a race of undeserving sinners. It describes the truth of what it means, and what it is like, to be a people touched by grace.

Today we continue our journey through Advent – a season of preparing ourselves mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically to celebrate the incredible truth that Jesus was, and is, Immanuel, God with us, and that in Jesus God came into this world to rescue us from sin. To save us. Turn with me to Luke 2:8-21.

This passage is a study in contrasts from the beginning. Luke begins by mentioning two of the three most powerful people in the region at the time – Caesar Augustus, who was the son of the great Julius Caesar; and Quirinius, who was the governor of the Roman region of Syria. But he mentions them only in passing. He uses them to set the state, to ground his story in human history, but he doesn’t say anything else about them. Caesar Augustus was the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world, and Quirinius was his representative in that region. Together they represent the unmatched wealth and power and prestige and sophistication and reach of the mighty Roman Empire. In the eyes of this world, Caesar Augustus, who would eventually be worshipped as a god, was the single most important and powerful person in the world at the time. And yet, here, he is mentioned only in passing, his name and reign serving as an historical anchor for Luke’s telling of the birth of Christ. In the story of Christ, they are only significant as markers of time.

On the flip side is a young couple whose marriage has not yet been finalized, a newborn baby, and the group of shepherds who were the first to visit him. Shepherds. We don’t know exactly how they were viewed in social circles at the time of Jesus. In the Old Testament, there were some positive images of shepherds. David was Israel’s shepherd king. The youngest of several sons, who, while his older brothers were off fighting the Philistines with Israel’s army, found himself tending his father’s flocks and running his father’s errands. Kings are never the last born, and David wasn’t of royal blood anyway. He was just Jesse’s youngest son, out tending the flocks. And yet he was chosen as Israel’s second king, and became her greatest king. The youngest born shepherd who became mighty warrior and king.

And shepherd imagery is used of God’s relationship with Israel. The most famous of the Psalms, Psalm 23, begins with the words, “The LORD is my shepherd.” So there’s at least a positive sentiment for the idea of shepherd, if not for the real thing when he was standing in front of you. By the fifth century after Christ, shepherds were viewed as the dregs of society. Any positive concept of the shepherd had been lost. They were ex-cons and other low-life vagrants who didn’t fit anywhere else. It’s likely that in Jesus’ day, the view was somewhere between those two places but closer to the bottom. They may have actually had small land holdings, but without enough land to actually support their family, their farm, and pay Rome’s and Herod’s taxes. So they hired themselves out to work for wages to supplement their income, and they camped in fields with their flocks, protecting the flocks under their care from thieves and predators, without the aid of guns or night vision goggles. If they had to fight someone, or something, off, they had to do so by hand. They were rough and tough and uncouth and socially awkward.

They didn’t know how to act around the higher classes. They were peasants near the bottom of the social ladder. Maybe not the very bottom of the ladder, but they weren’t very far from it. Jewish tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and the chronically ill and lame were down there too. But they weren’t even close to the middle class. They didn’t have enough land for their farming efforts to support their families and expenses and taxes, so they had to work for others, which meant their own farming endeavors were left to their sons, if they had any, while they were off working.

And yet, it is they, not Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, but these insignificant, uncouth, dirty, rough nobodies who feature prominently in the birth of Christ. In fact, when God comes to earth in human form, in the person of Jesus, they’re the first ones to greet him after his parents. Think about that for a minute – the first people the infant Jesus met as he came into this world, leaving behind the glory of the heavens, was his unwed parents and then, a group of uncouth shepherds. Not exactly the people you would expect to be present at and right after the birth of the King who would rule all kings, and the Lord who would rule all lords – which is what King of Kings and Lord of Lords means – is it?

Then again, the Kingdom of God that Jesus said was near wherever he was, the Kingdom he came to establish, stands everything on its head. That’s why there’s so much contrast in this passage. We have the contrast between the majesty and power of Caesar and Quirinius, who are mentioned only in passing, and the poor not-completely-married-yet couple who found themselves parents, whose baby was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords in the flesh. A king mightier than Caesar, much less Quirinius. The king born among livestock and visited first by shepherds.

We also have the contrast between darkness and light. What time of day was it when the angels burst on the scene and announced the single most significant birth in the history of the cosmos to a bunch of shepherds? It was night. The actual level of darkness at night varies significantly depending on the moon’s phase. There are times when I go outside at night and it feels like I’m under stadium lights, the moon is so bright. And there are other times when it’s so dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face. And we still have a little bit of light pollution, even out where we live. Regardless of the moon phase that night these shepherds were out watching their flocks, it was still pretty dark. They had zero light pollution back then.

So the shepherds are sitting out there in the wilderness where they’d set up camp, kind of a home base away from home. They would have cooked over the fire, but people keeping watch in out in the wilderness tend to prefer to do so without a fire, so that they can see in the darkness as their eyes adjust to low levels of light. They don’t sit there staring into a blazing fire, like we see cowboys doing in movies. If they do that, they won’t be able to see a darn thing outside of the small circle of light the fire provides. They didn’t have flashlights to provide a beam of light to help them see. In reality, if they still had a fire going for warmth, at least the ones on watch would be sitting with their backs to it so that their eyes were better able to see in the darkness. And it’s likely the fire was allowed to die down to embers after dinner anyway.

But regardless of the phase of the moon and whatever kind of fire they had going, it was night. It was, for all intents and purposes, dark. And then an angel, illuminated by the glory of God, appeared to them, telling them that their long-awaited messiah had been born. And there’s a radical shift from darkness to light. Darkness away from the glory of God, and light in the presence of God. Again, a dramatic contrast between the darkness of this world and our way of judging value and worth, and the Kingdom of God, which stands everything we know and hold dear on its head. The Kingdom of God is the direct antithesis of everything this world holds dear and stands for.

And then that one angel is joined by a multitude of angels, and the stillness of the dark night is shattered not just by the light of the glory of God, but by the sounds of an army of angels shouting and singing their praise to God in a sudden burst of light and sound in the stillness of the night. A world being turned on its head. God showing in every move, every word, just how wrong things are when we try to live apart from him. That his kingdom stands in contrast, as the antithesis of everything we in our sin have become.

And then he hammers that point home by sending not the powerful and the mighty but the uncouth and the forgotten to a stable in Bethlehem to meet the most important baby ever born as he lay there with his not-yet-fully-married, dirt poor mother and father from Nazareth, a tiny village of which it was said, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

The word we translate as “manger” can mean the feed trough animals eat from. It can also mean the lower level of a home that the animals could use as shelter. And it can mean a stable, or dedicated animal housing. Tradition holds that it was a man-made cave that had been carved out of the limestone hills near Bethlehem by shepherds as a place to herd their sheep into at night, where they could camp in the entrance and protect the flock.

Palaces and mansions were bypassed for an animal shelter as the birthplace for the King of kings. And Caesar and Quirinius were bypassed by shepherds as the first visitors at the birthplace of the Lord of lords. The Kingdom of God isn’t bent toward the powerful and the rich. It is open to all, and if it has a bent, that bent is toward the underdog. The forgotten. The overlooked. The avoided. The ones who are hard to love.

One of the things I absolutely love about the birthplace of Jesus is that it was a place the shepherds would have felt right at home. They knew how to act. It was turf they were familiar with. They would have been painfully aware of their status as shepherds at the gates of a mansion. They would have been barred entrance at the gates of a palace, and they would have felt so very out of place at both. But here, in a stable, they were right at home. Jesus met the lowly, as the lowly, on their turf.

Theodotus of Ancyra was a martyred saint from the 4th century. Of the birth of Jesus, he wrote this:

The Lord of all comes as a slave amidst poverty. The hunter has no wish to startle his prey. Choosing for his birthplace an unknown village in a remote province, he is born of a poor maiden and accepts all that poverty implies, for he hopes by stealth to ensnare and save us.

If he had been born to high rank and amidst luxury, unbelievers would have said the world had been transformed by wealth. If he had chosen as his birthplace the great city of Rome, they would have thought the transformation had been brought about by civil power. Suppose he had been the son of an emperor. They would have said: “How useful it is to be powerful!” Imagine him the son of a senator. It would have been: “Look what can be accomplished by legislation!”

But in fact, what did he do? He chose surroundings that were poor and simple, so ordinary as to be almost unnoticed, so that people would know it was the Godhead alone that had changed the world. This was his reason for choosing his mother from among the poor of a very poor country, and for becoming poor himself.[i]

God bent over backwards to welcome the unwelcome, those who had been unwelcome everywhere but a sheepfold pretty much their entire lives. He made it clear that there was room in the kingdom of God for them too. And that love endures. He’s bending over backward to welcome you too.

Chad Bird is a Scholar in Residence at 1517. He has served as a pastor, professor, and guest lecturer in Old Testament and Hebrew. In an article called “When The Prodigal Son Relapses,” he wrote these beautiful words.

Almost five years to the day after he returned home the first time, the prodigal son emptied his bank account, packed a few changes of clothes, and snuck off for the faraway country. Again.

The first year back he was just glad to be home.

The second year was toughest; he still couldn’t get (rid of) … the shame that chewed away at his soul.

The third year, things leveled out a little. He started feeling more at home, back in synch with his former life.

The fourth year, certain things began to irk him. His old itches longed to be scratched.

And the fifth year, it happened. All the former allurements came knocking, rapping their knuckles on his heart’s front door.

And so the prodigal relapsed. Re-sinned. Re-destroyed his life.

You know him – or her. Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe it’s your child. Or maybe it’s you. That thing you swore you’d never do again, you did it last night. You left the straight and narrow. Prodigals have a way of finding themselves right back in the pigsty.

In that moment … heaven and hell contend within you. Hell shouts, “Now you’ve gone and done it. You stupid piece of garbage. You’re a lost, lonely, hopeless cause. You’re a pig. And that’s all you’ll ever be.”

But there is another voice. It’s the voice of heaven, the familiar lilt of a Dad’s voice, echoing down the long hallways of hope … down to the deepest, darkest caverns of your pain. He doesn’t accuse. He doesn’t berate. He only mouths two simple words … of heaven’s redemptive love: “Come Home.”

The second time, the third time, the thousandth time, he will sprint … to meet you down the street, throw his arms around you, kiss you, and command that the fattened calf be barbecued. The Father is standing on the porch, his hand shading the sun from his eyes, scanning the horizon for the familiar image of the one who will ever remain, his precious, beloved child. “Come home.”[ii]

In the Kingdom of God, the unwelcome of this world, from uncouth shepherds to relapsed prodigals, are guests of honor. Will you come home? Let us pray

[i] Theodotus of Ancyra, a martyred saint from the 4th century

[ii] Chad Bird, “When the Prodigal Son Relapses,” 1517.org (5-22-22); David Zahl, “When the Prodigal Son Relapses,” Mockingbird (3-25-22)