Text: Luke 2:8-20
8 Now in that same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah,[a] the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,[b] praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the child lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them, 19 and Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told them.
Speaker: Mark Rupp
It was the night of the Winter Solstice back in the year 2020. On that longest night of the year, the staff at the Atlanta Friends Meeting House decided to invite the refugees that had been staying with them to pack into their van for a driving tour of the Christmas lights in the neighborhood.
The meeting house had become a kind of sanctuary for refugees and immigrants making their way through the Atlanta area, a place where they could find a clean bed for a night or more, good food and hearty conversation around kitchen tables, and the open arms of hospitality in a strange place that so often looked at them with suspicion and fear.
On that Winter Solstice evening, they packed their little interfaith, multilingual caravan and set out to enjoy the beauty of the season together. As part of this caravan, there were three young boys, and the leader of the group gave them an invitation. He told them, “At the end of the drive, tell me which house had your favorite lights.”
They turned on some soft holiday music in the background and set out along the neighborhood streets. But the sounds from the van’s stereo were quickly overtaken by the chorus of exclamations from the backseat. The leader had told the boys to wait until the end to tell him which house had their favorite lights, but the youngest among them either didn’t hear that part or simply couldn’t hold back.
The very first house they passed, the young man lit up with joy and yelled out “Oooo, my favorite!” This was the first full sentence the leaders of the Atlanta Friends Meeting had heard this boy say since he had arrived. And it was “not just a sentence, but a song. A proclamation. Joy, breaking through the long silence.”
But he also wasn’t done.
Every new house they passed, regardless of how grand the lights were compared to those that had come before, the young boy declared again and again, “Oooo, my favorite!…Oooo, my favorite.” Again and again and again.
Reflecting on this experience, one of the leaders writes, “This was during the pandemic, when many of us were distanced from the people and patterns that gave our lives texture and comfort. We were navigating grief, fear, and exhaustion…But [this boy] wasn’t looking back in mourning, nor forward in dread. He didn’t linger on what we’d already passed. He didn’t try to predict where we were going. He simply embraced the moment we were in, named its beauty, and rejoiced in it. Again and again…On this longest of nights, it was a little boy who became a messenger of joy, peace, hope, and love. Not because all was well. But because he was fully awake to what was.”
This story comes from the book, Welcome, Friends: Stories of Hope and Hospitality with Immigrants, by Anton Flores-Maisonet. Anton will be our speaker for the upcoming Winter Seminar and will share more stories from his work with immigrants and ideas about what it means to practice hospitality in these times. You can register for the seminar at the link in the announcements.
Anton’s book is filled with reflections like these, and what moved me most was how he manages to find hope and goodness even in the midst of so many stories that speak to the deep injustices and inhumanity of our immigration system. Just like that young man fully and deeply enjoying the holiday lights, Anton invites us all to become messengers of joy, peace, hope, and love, not because all is well but because we are fully awake to what is.
And as we enter this Christmas season, we come once more to a story that is both deeply familiar and endlessly strange. Luke tells us that on the night Jesus is born, the first announcement does not go to kings or priests or scholars. It goes to shepherds, working the night shift, watching their flocks outside the small town of Bethlehem.
Shepherds were not symbols of gentle spirituality in their own time. The text specifically says they were living in the fields with their flocks. They worked long hours. They were often viewed with suspicion. They existed on the margins of respectability and social life. And it is into that ordinary, gritty, earthy world that the glory of God suddenly appears.
Luke tells us they are terrified, and that reaction tells us something. Fear is the natural human response to encountering something vast and holy that interrupts the expected order of things. Spacious faith does not begin with calm understanding. It begins with being startled by God’s nearness.
The angel speaks words that echo throughout the Gospel. “Do not be afraid.” This is not a command to suppress fear but an invitation to make space for what God is doing. The message is expansive. Good news of great joy for all people. A Savior is born. A child is given. Not through grand displays of power or spectacle, but in vulnerability. A child wrapped in cloth, lying in a feeding trough.
“Go, find this thing that God is doing,” they tell the shepherds.
The glory of God does not pull people away from earth. It sends them deeper into it. The angels are not the Good News, they are heralds of this Good News. The real sign of God doing a new thing is not in the sky but in a manger. Spacious faith, at least as Luke presents it, holds together heaven’s song and the stench of animals, angels and exhausted parents, cosmic promise and everyday need.
Then the sky fills with praise. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those whom God favors.” This is not just a sentimental moment of poetry meant to inspire future Christmas carols. It is a bold declaration that God’s glory is bound up with peace on earth. Not someday far off in some undetermined future. Not abstractly. But here, in this child, in this world as it actually exists.
When the angels leave, the shepherds do not linger in spiritual awe. They do not debate theology or set up an altar to meditate on what this all could mean. They say, “Let us go now.” Wonder moves them toward action. Their faith was made more spacious with this Divine inbreaking, and they instantly began to explore what this means. They go to Bethlehem and find exactly what they were told. And when they see it, they don’t just keep it to themselves but tell everyone what they have heard and seen. They invite others into this spaciousness, into wondering what this Good News could mean and pursuing it for themselves.
The shepherds proclaim. The people who hear them are amazed. And Mary ponders.
This is one of the quiet centers of the Christmas story. Luke’s gospel is where we find so many songs, including the beloved song of Mary we heard read a few weeks ago. But in this moment, Mary does not respond with speech or song. She responds with attentiveness. Luke tells us she treasures these things and ponders them in her heart.
The word translated as “ponder” suggests holding things together. In the Greek, there is a similar root to the word “parable,” which if you remember our worship series from a few months ago, you might remember has connotations of being thrown together or alongside.
Mary is weighing all these things as she holds them together. Turning them over slowly, I imagine that it is quiet and contemplative, but it is not simply passive. Mary does not rush to resolve the tension between what has been promised and what she is living. She holds the shepherds’ words alongside the cries of her newborn. She holds reports of angel songs alongside uncertainty and risk. She holds the enormity of God’s action alongside the reality that she still has a child to feed, protect, and raise. Mary ponders all these things and treasures them.
All is not well, but in her pondering, Mary is awake to what is and is able to treasure that which is worth holding onto.
Mary shows us a way of faith that makes room for mystery without escaping responsibility. She shows us how spacious faith becomes less about ideas that live only in our minds and more about a posture with which we confront the world. She does not deny the wonder, and indeed she allows herself to sit in that place.. But she also does not let wonder pull her away from the work of love and care right in front of her.
Throughout Advent, we have traced the widening lens of the Gospels. Mark’s urgent beginning with little explanation. Matthew’s attention to fulfillment and community identity. Luke’s layered storytelling that holds joy and disruption together. And John’s sweeping vision of the Word made flesh, light entering darkness itself.
These are not competing stories. They are different ways of making space for the truth of Christ. Spacious faith does not flatten them into one voice. It allows each to speak, trusting that God’s revelation is bigger than any single perspective.
One of Luke’s gifts to us is to show us the importance of pondering. More than once in these Christmas narratives, this author has Mary “pondering,” holding together the wonder of Divine in-breaking alongside the hard truth of the world in which we live. In a world that pushes us toward instant conclusions and constant noise, pondering is a form of resistance. It is a refusal to rush past meaning. It is a commitment to stay with the questions long enough for God to meet us there.
The Christmas story does not arrive in a peaceful world. It arrives in a world shaped by empire, taxation, displacement, and fear. It arrives in a family navigating uncertainty. It arrives among workers on the edges of society doing what needs to be done to survive. Spacious faith does not require pretending that life is simple or safe. It invites us to trust that God is present within complexity.
For many of us, this season holds both beauty and ache. There is joy and there is grief. There is celebration and there is exhaustion. There are songs we love and silences that feel heavy. The temptation is to think that faith means choosing one side of that reality. Either we lean into wonder and avoid pain, or we focus on survival and lose sight of hope.
Mary shows us another way. She holds it all. She does not resolve the tension. She lives inside it with openness and trust. She continues to courageously say yes to the invitations of God to create space for God’s presence among us.
The shepherds return to their fields glorifying and praising God. Nothing about their external circumstances has changed. They still have sheep to tend. The night is still cold. The world is still dangerous. But they carry a larger story within them now and have begun to invite others into that story. Spacious faith does not remove us from ordinary life. It enlarges what ordinary life can hold.
As we move into this Christmas season, the invitation is not to manufacture awe or force belief. We don’t need to flatten out the competing narratives of our own lives in order to create the perfect manger scene. The invitation is to practice pondering. To notice where God’s glory brushes up against our daily routines. To make room for both the vastness of God’s love and the smallness of our own capacity.
Wonder is not escapism. It is attention. It is the willingness to be interrupted. It is the courage to believe that the holy can show up in unlikely places and that our lives, even when they feel fragile or unfinished, are capable of bearing God’s presence.
Spacious faith does not demand that we understand everything. It asks us to stay present. To treasure what we have been given. To carry the story carefully, not as something we control, but as something that holds us.
In this familiar yet strange story, we find ourselves standing alongside shepherds who went and saw. With Mary who pondered. With a child whose birth stretches our imagination and grounds us in love made flesh. May we step into this story with open hearts and find it making more space in our lives for God to show up. May we hold together wonder and realism, hope and honesty. And may the peace announced by angels take root in us, not as an abstract promise, but as a lived, spacious way of trusting God with our whole lives.
And whenever and wherever we catch glimpses of what God is doing, may we too exclaim with our whole being, “Oooo, my favorite!”