It's Not Ours

It’s Christmas Eve. I always picture the shepherds as they were watching the flocks on what they thought would be an ordinary night. They were “sore afraid” at the sight of the angels. I don’t blame them.

Until I was researching a Christmas play I was writing, I didn’t know much about shepherds. I knew humankind is the “sheep,” and God is the shepherd in Psalm 23. I knew being compared to sheep is not flattering. I knew sheep are dumb, wayward animals who, as humans are wont to do, follow the crowd – herd. I knew all that, but I didn’t know much about shepherds.
Luke says the shepherds were “in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”
Shepherds, I discovered, were thought of as, well, pond scum. They were migrant workers, usually working for one person for a while, and then going somewhere else.
They had the reputation of being thieves. The pay was low; the job was either boring (watching sheep graze) or terrifying (fighting off wolves). Fathers didn’t say to their sons, “Study hard so you can be a shepherd.” No. It was more like “Son, see those shepherds? They didn’t do their homework when they were your age. Do you want to be like that? Hit the books – now. I mean it.”
So the lowest of the low were the first to learn of the King of kings. Ironic, wouldn’t you say? You would think God would send the news first to a high priest, not a bunch of ignorant shepherds. But you’d also think God wouldn’t choose for his son to be born in a stable, either.
How many people in the world have change in their pockets and money in the bank? You probably do – I hope you do. Having that much money is something we take for granted. Do you know what percentage of the world’s people have as much as we do?
Eight percent. Eight percent. If Christ were being born today, people like us wouldn’t be the first to know about it. God’s sending the news first to lowly shepherds reminds us God loves every single one of us, no matter how despised, no matter how dirty.
There’s a lesson here. We’ve got a lot. Most people have little or nothing. We have to share. The blatant lies flying around about President Obama’s health program infuriate me. It’s really not his program, anyway. A majority of Congress has to support the bill before it becomes law. His program has many flaws, I’m sure, but everyone should be able to get health care, period. Everyone. Whether they “deserve” it or not is not for us to judge. It’s really not our money we’re hanging onto so tightly. It’s God’s money. We are stewards only. We, like the shepherds, are taking care of what is not ours.
The Senate passed their version of the Health Care bill this morning.