The Christmas story is so familiar. We have heard it many times before. Over the last few weeks it will have been played out in countless nativity plays.

Schools are very imaginative in how they present the familiar tale. Nativity plays help tell the story and help us when we are young learn the story. But the more familiar we become with it, the more we can stop seeing what there is in it to surprise us. The comfort of knowing it so well can anaethetise us to its ability to challenge. If we look at it carefully there are surprises at just about every turn, but I just want to look at one of them this morning.

The first people the angels announce the birth to is not the religious and political leaders, the important people as we might expect if we weren’t so used to the story, but those on the margins of the society, even those pushed beyond the margins. Shepherds were a far from respected group of people, they were looked down on like many despise the homeless and asylum seekers today. We have made our nativities too genteel and so tend to miss this. Luke announces the gospel to the poorest group he can think of.

They are also the group of people who look after sheep and sheep have a powerful link with the Exodus in the Old Testament, an important defining event in the way the Hebrew people saw themselves. Lambs were sacrificed to remember being set free from slavery in Egypt. This is the story of Moses. So by using the people who look after sheep, there is a link here with liberation and being set free from oppression. Jesus will himself come to be seen as the lamb of God, which is a way of saying that he makes it possible for us to have a special connection with God, he frees us from anything that can separate us from this.

So if you were a shepherd in your nativity play, you provided a powerful link with some important bits of the Old Testament, with the struggle for freedom from all that oppresses us, with the cry for justice and God making sure that the connection between us is open.

So on this Christmas morning, let us stick with the shepherds for a moment and explore a little of this cry for justice and liberation, freedom, that they can point us to.

The cry for justice can come in a number of different shapes and sizes. There is the victim of violence who longs for what they have suffered to be repaired. That can show itself in a desire for the other to suffer for what they have done; it can be a desire that what lies at the root of it is put right, that the bonds that should have united us but have been broken, if they were ever there, are put in place. All of these are present in this child who unites us all in a common humanity. What he doesn’t do is feed our anger and our hatreds. As we read his story we find that the hope he brings has a deeply challenging side to it and it is all found lying there in the manger.

There are those who cry for the justice that should be part of peace. This requires a deep respect and honouring of the human value in all people. It is the justice that challenges the double standards of arming suspect regimes one year and looking for arguments to attack them the next. The horrors of September 11th are not repaired by using them as a smoke screen for other motives.

The cry for justice asks questions about how sustainable our lifestyle has become: environmentally, economically and politically. The new Archbishop of Canterbury spoke the other day on the telly about our political debate being weakened by what he called a consumerist culture. I recognise what he was saying because we seem to have a lack of commitment to the institutions that make our common living tick. Lamenting this is not the same as wishing for a blind obedience to authority figures, quite the opposite actually. Churches which are full for festivals and what are often seen as private celebrations are ignored at other times. A consumerist culture is one that buys in to these things when it wants them, but ignores them when it doesn’t. It is one that lacks the day-to-day commitment to them and therefore that which shapes them and is shaped by them. It is one that will adore the cute baby, but ignore the man he grows up into! That is not a sustainable way to live and one day soon as a society I pray we will wake up to it.

There is a common theme in these cries for justice: the cry for the damage done by violence to be repaired, the cry for the justice that should be part of peace and the cry for the justice that asks questions about how sustainable our common life is. They all look for bridges to be built, bridges that unite us. Those who want justice from violence will find it ultimately in the repairing of the fractured bonds that unite us in a common humanity. Those who want the justice inherent in true peace will find it when the bridges that make common humanity something truly honoured are erected. Sustainable living comes when we realise that without commitment to vibrant structures that make common living possible then we ultimately find ourselves with nothing to connect us.

The supreme bridge comes to us in this child in the manger who unites not only earth and heaven, but also affirms a unity between all people. Rich and poor alike beat a track to his door: be they shepherds or wise men. The worship and adoration of the crib calls us to live what we proclaim. The surprises which come to us in and through looking again at the familiar Christmas story challenge the way we live. When we give our heart to this child in a manger an awful lot more follows.

In that spirit I wish you all the joy and peace of Christmas.

© Ian Black 2002

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