Luke 2:1-20

The only shepherd I have ever met outside the pages of Scripture is a Navajo elder with a heart on fire for Jesus. I’ll call him Edward.

At the end of six weeks of crosscultural ministry with Navajo Episcopalians last summer, my supervisor invited me to spend several days helping Edward tend the sheep on her family sheep-camp. I spent time in a hogan, a traditional, eight-sided, dirt-floor dwelling reserved for ceremonies. In the sweltering heat of midday and early afternoon, I sat in silence, listened to the creatures around me, prayed, and wrote about what I had learned. The rest of the time, I followed Edward around. I siphoned water for the sheep from a huge tank into long metal troughs twice a day. I accompanied Edward in his ancient Chevy pickup along a circuit of bumpy dirt trails, watching the sheep with binoculars and listening to Dolly Parton on cassette tape. At the hottest times of the day Edward would materialize in my doorway with an orange popsicle, or an ice-cold bottle of water.

And when it grew dark, Edward brought light.

I remember most vividly my first night there. I had prayed Evening Prayer at the top of a ridge overlooking a dry creekbed, and I lingered as the stars came out, followed by swooping owls and bats.

As I made my way back to the camp, I was astonished to see the ramshackle outbuildings and sheep corrals had been utterly transformed: thousands of solar-powered Christmas lights and garden lanterns, invisible by day, now laced the deepening darkness. They were the only lights for miles, as if the stars above each had a twin here below, blinking and dancing amid the chicken-wire fencing, the rusty rain barrels, and the sleeping sheep.

Through tears of unexpected joy I glimpsed Edward by my door, with a handful of electric lanterns, to make sure I could find my way.

What words could the shepherds in Luke’s gospel have used to describe this good news of great joy for all the people conveyed to them by angels? To convey their terror when the glory of the Lord shone around them? To explain the significance of the sign: a human child who is the Messiah, wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger?

We do not know what they said, but we know what they did

They made known what had been told them and then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.

They returned to the long hours of the daily rhythm; the darkness of night and the relief of dawn; the water trough and the sheep-corral; the ancient Chevy pickup and the Dolly Parton cassette tapes. But none of it was the same: the stars above now each had a twin here below that burned in their hearts. The shepherds of heaven had appointed them as angels here on earth, ordinary people with good news of great joy.

Joy is God’s purpose for us, and the enjoyment of God our highest calling.

Do you remember the last time you ate a popsicle in the suffocating heat of late July, in the sure and certain knowledge that it came to you fresh from the hand of God, whose only desire was that you enjoy it?

It seems too straightforward, too humble, too outrageous, that the primary thing God would ask of the shepherds in coming to Bethlehem would be simply to enjoy God’s presence, made flesh in the birth of Jesus. But that is precisely what we believe was made possible in a whole new way that night, and every Christmas night: that in straightforward, humble, and outrageous infant flesh, the Creator of heaven and earth would and does become enjoyable to us.

One could get the mistaken impression that Christians are concerned with anything but the enjoyment of God. Followers of Jesus can be very anxious to do all manner of other things: to serve him; to obey him; to follow him; to proclaim him; to repent and return to his teachings. In the midst of it all, we are often moved by the question: What more can I do for him?

In Christmastide, a different question serves as our guide: How can I be available to receive and to enjoy him, in the certain knowledge that this receptive joy fulfills the deepest longing of God’s heart?

But in fact, this is the question at the heart of the Christian life at all times of the year. It is at Christmas that God gives us the opportunity to return to this basic, child-like posture.

A heart filled with that receptive joy cannot keep it secret. It does not proclaim the Messiah as a duty, but spills over with the joy of knowing him, the way heat radiates from fire.

This night, we pray: O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known the mystery of that Light here on earth, may also enjoy him perfectly in heaven.

If heaven brings perfect enjoyment of the Light eternal, earth is surely then our training ground for enjoying the Word made flesh here in the manger.

When we enjoy the good things of this earth as constantly unfolding gifts of a God who desires our joy, those good things teach us something real and substantial about the goodness of heaven.

Adoring Jesus here in the lowliest human form centers our senses in preparation to enjoy him face to face forever.

As a way of life, this kind of enjoyment is anything but passive. As the Anglican theologian Evelyn Underhill wrote, this is not “basking like a pious tabby cat in the beams of the Uncreated Light.” Enjoying God for the sake of God is a costly calling, because it slowly dispossesses us of the many lesser joys we confuse with God. The enjoyment of God calls us, in the words of poet T.S. Eliot, to “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”

God is simple; we prefer a complexity that matches our own. God is love; we struggle to accept being known and loved so deeply. God arrives by night; we are fast asleep. God comes as a child; we expected a capable adult who could solve the problems we created.

But knowing surrender to the enjoyment for which we were made, for even a moment, can change everything. It enables us able to act and to serve in his name with greater freedom, love, and joy. This capacity is his joy in us.

Christmas brings a kaleidoscope of emotions, and joy may not be one you are feeling tonight if you have brought your own burden of pain or sorrow or anxiety. You may want to believe this joy is for you, but the best you can do is let the joy of others bear you along.

Others would object that the enjoyment of God we celebrate tonight is a distraction. How dare we contemplate the enjoyment of God in this warm chapel on Memorial Drive when others taste only misery?

In John’s gospel Jesus assures the disciples on the night before his death, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” If there was ever a moment to deny that God’s primary purpose for our life is the enjoyment of him, it would be the day he died in the flesh and was taken from us. Yet on the eve of that moment, Jesus is quite clear: if we abide in him, come what may, his joy will make our joy complete.

I have witnessed this enjoyment of God more than once in those who are strangers to success and power as the world defines them – who have learned the secret of the enjoyment of God in the midst of unrelenting suffering.

One of them is Edward: a man who is poor; who is alone most of the time; who suffers from several chronic illnesses; who has almost no surviving family members; who has suffered the generational trauma that is the shared inheritance of Native people in a land that was stolen from them; and whose daily bread is earned by physical labor from dawn until nightfall. This same man adorns sheep corrals and barbed-wire fences and his own tiny cinderblock house with an extravagant multitude of tiny electric lights dancing and blinking in what most people would call “the middle of nowhere.”

Why?

All I can say is that, in the center of that sheep camp, there stands a ten-foot, white wooden cross. It casts a long-shadow in the burning glare of late afternoon. But because Edward’s hope is founded in the cross of God’s longsuffering love, he adorns the corner of creation entrusted to him with Christmas lights. Those lights make known the joy he has found in Jesus, even when no one else is there to see it but the sheep and the angels.

In spite of all human attempts to ignore, suppress, or destroy it – joy is God’s purpose, for us, and for all that is made. This Christmas, may our hearts burn with this good news of great joy for all people that it may spill over from our lips and from our lives, to the ends of the earth.

Amen.