Well, hey, good morning, Menlo Church.
Welcome or welcome back to our Advent series, "Hope is Born," where we are preparing to celebrate Christmas as more than just kind of our normal annual tradition of to-do lists, but actually reflecting on what God has done for all of humanity as we prepare to celebrate Jesus' birth, life, death, and even resurrection as a piece of what this holiday is all about for us.
If it's your first time joining us, or maybe you're a first-time joining us in a long time, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. Our goal is that you leave today with more hope than you walked in with, regardless of what you're walking through. No matter what you're headed back to, God is with you, and He wants you to experience that more fully today.
We are a multi-site church, which is really fun. It means that we are a church in multiple locations joining together. I want to welcome our Menlo campuses in San Mateo, here in Menlo Park, Mountain View, Saratoga, and those of you joining us online. I'm so glad that you're a part of this with all the different things happening around Christmas.
In this series, we have spent the last couple of weeks talking about a really important couple, Mary and Joseph, and the incredible sacrifice and surrender that their stories model as a part of this Christmas story. This week, we are going to talk about the shepherds, the shepherds of the shepherds, and the shepherds of the shepherds.
I regularly make this point when we study passages like this in the Bible, where we have a high degree of familiarity. I actually think that this really happened, that what we're about to read, we are reading historic events that for thousands of years, Christians have studied this because it holds the power of life and the gift of eternity. So even if that's hard for you to believe, I would just encourage you to maybe consider it for the first time.
From Santa to the elf on the shelf, to the trappings and traditions of the holiday, there are some really great parts that we can have fun with, but let's make sure that the stories of Scripture are uniquely elevated in the way we think about and celebrate Christmas together.
Before we get started, I'm going to pray for us, and if you've never been here before or never heard me speak, before I speak, I pray kneeling. Part of the reason that I do that is for everything that I just mentioned. In a world with lots of decorations and distractions, God broke through and He offered us a unique way to know Him that is still available to you today.
So no matter where you are in your story of faith and life, would you pray with me?
God, thank you so much. Thank you for the tremendous gift that is your Son that we remember uniquely in this season. God, I thank you that no matter what brought someone into a room here at Menlo today, or has them online with us today, that you love them, that you know them, that you made a path back for them. Would you help that message to be clearly communicated today in a way that we can walk away with? For those of us that know you, to bring that hope with us, and for those that don't, God, that you might place that hope in them today. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
So our family usually has a pretty big December. I don't know about yours. It's pretty full. There's something going on kind of all the time throughout the course of any given day or evening. What we have learned to do is try to dip away for a little bit of time early in the month. A couple of weeks ago, we left for a couple of days to spend some time in Southern California.
I don't know about you, but if you think, where can I just go at my own pace and really relax and just charge up emotionally for the month ahead? We spent a day at Disneyland. I'm still recovering.
As a matter of fact, when we were at Disneyland, we finished our day at the end of a fun and long day at World of Color in California Adventure. The fireworks in Disneyland are fun. They're amazing. They're iconic. But World of Color takes place on the other side in California Adventure, and it's pretty epic.
We had seen World of Color before, but we had never seen the Christmas version of World of Color. To be honest, it was really well done, but it was a little disappointing. It felt a little understated until this one sort of crescendo in the show around a Trans-Siberian Orchestra piece. The water is so high that they are projecting images on it. The music is everywhere. The lights are in full effect.
My wife, Alyssa, looks over at me at one moment and she said, "Where has this been?" Because it was so different than everything that we had seen or heard up to that point in the show. It felt like it came out of nowhere. Moments like that, they're memorable on purpose. They stick with us on purpose.
Today, we are going to explore the life of a group of ordinary shepherds that would make World of Color look like Town of Black and White. They knew their job really well. They were experienced at middle-of-the-night surprises to protect their flock, but nothing like what we are about to see together.
As we consider Christmas this year, we kind of step into it, right? The shepherds teach us this really important lesson that I hope we'll learn together: that we can find the remarkable in our routine. Even if you're tired of the ordinary, even if you wish you could graduate from it, even if you are annoyed by the people that are represented in it, there is reason, very good reason, to keep going, to stay alert and aware, and wait for what's ahead.
I wonder, what are the parts of your routine that you take for granted? Maybe it's your daily commute or the consistent habits of exercise or meal preparation, or even maybe the regular people that you say hi to in your neighborhood, at your school, in your office.
Our routines create these patterns that we can stop looking at if we're not careful, but we shouldn't. Repeatedly throughout the Scriptures, we are challenged to stay alert, to stay awake to what's happening all around us.
Actually, there's this kind of tendency in the world context that we all live in to lull us to sleep, to sort of stop paying attention. But for the shepherds, sleeping wasn't an option. They were the night shift on purpose because even when things seemed calm, even when it seemed like everything was okay, it wouldn't necessarily stay that way.
We are introduced to this scene in a way that parallels some of the same elements that we've seen with Mary and Joseph over the last couple of weeks. This is actually, for them, months earlier in the experience, early in the pregnancy. For the shepherds, it's the middle of the night, on the very night that Jesus was born.
They teach us that ordinary doesn't mean arbitrary. Just because the shepherds were experiencing their ordinary middle-of-the-night shift doesn't mean that that was arbitrary. There was a plan to it, there was a purpose to it, and there is for you and me too, even in the midst of our ordinary.
Professor Matt Durden illustrates this idea of what God can do with ordinary as a foundation for something more in a structure that is sometimes called the hierarchy of experiences, which I find really helpful. In it, he breaks down that ordinary is something that we may pay attention to. Hopefully, we do pay attention to it. It serves as a foundation to the things in our life that are memorable, that often are identified as things we feel emotion about.
Then that serves as the foundation to things that are meaningful, where we learn lessons in our life that might not otherwise stick without the first two. It all rolls up to something that's transformational, that brings real change in our life.
Now, it can be tempting to want to skip over a couple of those. It can be tempting to say, "Well, how do I just get to transformational?" Well, I ignore my routine and my ordinary because I don't want to do it. But we find the memorable amidst the ordinary. We find the meaningful amidst the memorable and the transformational in the meaningful.
It's a progression in which God uses the routine in our life to bring about things that are remarkable. One of the reasons that we can find Christmas time such a special time of the year is because the ordinary, memorable, and meaningful all get sort of mingled together in these things that we call traditions.
As a matter of fact, in so much of our world today, we are so different from one another and we accentuate those differences. But there are these ways around Christmas time to just rally everyone back together.
Our passage today actually gives us a moment to do that because this passage, whether you've been in church for a long time or this is your very first weekend, you know this. I told you. There's so much of how we tell the Christmas story that has these moments of nostalgia, things that become memorable and meaningful out of the ordinary, and that's amazing.
But I think there's also a caution when we watch a clip like that, that the ordinary can sometimes sort of transform the way that we think about God. We can't think about a story like this into something that's a storybook, into something that's just a sort of a fable that we tell each other every year.
I think there are actually a number of things we can miss if we don't delve into the aspects of the real-life historic event that these verses hold. Now, we think of shepherds as kind-hearted caretakers, and we think of sheep as fluffy pets. But the actual scene of Luke 2 and the significance of the moment, this group of shepherds, they would have been widely considered dishonest troublemakers if for no other reason because of their job.
As a matter of fact, for sheep, they were just gullible and ordinary creatures that needed protection and oversight. Sheep are the only animal that need a shepherd, right? If they fall over, they're sunk. They need those shepherds. The shepherds were on guard to be actually really this necessary caretaker and guard for the sheep, or sheep that would have otherwise been in danger, not just of someone stealing them, but of predators killing them.
There was a period every springtime where this was a normal annual rhythm where shepherds had to stay for several months with sheep all night to protect them. That's the moment that we're stepping into. They're on the edge of their seat while they wait for potential danger at any moment from any direction.
The pattern of the angelic experience that we see in this passage is very similar. It's very similar to the beginning of what we see with Mary and Joseph with a couple of differences I want to highlight. First, this visit didn't happen in a dream. It happened at night, and I bet they wish they were dreaming, but they were awake. They were awake when a heavenly angel appears in the sky.
In addition, they experience it together. Last week, we talked about whether or not Mary and Joseph may have compared to the angelic experience that we have today. Notes about the angelic visits that both of them had. Was it the same angel? Did it speak the same way? Were there things that were different about it?
But we know that the shepherds experienced it together and talked about it because we see it in this very passage. How could they not, right? They experienced this life-changing moment together.
The angel is pretty to the point in this passage. The angel says, "Don't be afraid." The angel is saying, "Don't be afraid," as the darkness of the night has been torn open. A creature referred to as a warrior of light shows up with God's glory around him while they are expecting predators to kill them and the sheep near them.
Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, definitely won't freak out, right? There's a really good reason that they would have been afraid. There's a really good reason that most people, when angels visited, the first thing the angel said is, "Don't be afraid."
But the angel goes on to tell them that there is a child being born, who is the Messiah, the rescuer of God's people. He came as a baby in swaddling clothes in a manger in the region that they are in that moment. God sent an angel to an unimpressive group of ordinary people to find God in an unimpressive place in the midst of ordinary people.
And all that wasn't wild enough, right? From there, there's a choir of angels that shows up. They're singing a section. There's a hymn of a psalm written hundreds of years earlier, anticipating the moment when at the perfect moment in human history, God would send His Son to be the ultimate gift for humanity that they needed but didn't know it.
Now, these shepherds, they showed up for their shift that night at work with an expectation of the kind of things that they might experience in their ordinary night. The type of things that they would have were quite different than what they experienced.
But in the midst of the ordinary, they discovered the extraordinary. That's the potential that God has for all of us when we will stay awake and alert in the midst of our ordinary. That's the potential that God still has for you today in the midst of your routine.
We can find the remarkable in our routine even today. Maybe it's at school for you. Maybe it's the school drop-off for some of you. Maybe for some of you, it's the class you wish you didn't have to take. Maybe it's on the Zoom call that you think probably should have and could have been an email. Maybe it's the mail.
But when you wish you didn't have to be there, God is still there with you, a loving God who loves you just as much as He was with these shepherds 2,000 years ago.
So what did they do? See, Linus doesn't give us the next part of the passage, but the next part shows us how much this moment impacted the shepherds. The second scene in this passage teaches us that meaningful moments require movement. If we want it to really impact us, we have to move. We have to really mean something and matter in the long run. We have to do something with it.
We can't stay so locked into our routine that it never takes us there. Think about the extraordinary moments in history and the people who made a difference for major social change, or maybe they stepped in and advocated for the underserved. They weren't the only ones that solved the problems in the flow of their lives. They were just the only ones who were willing to let God disrupt the flow and pattern of their lives.
Earlier this year, an American tourist named William Radebaugh was playing golf at one of the most iconic and prestigious courses in Scotland when a woman ran up to him and his friends asking if anyone had a phone where they could call for help because there was someone trapped in the water drowning.
William, who not for nothing is from Ohio, just saying, he leaves his golf clubs behind. He sprints for the water. He jumps into the water. He swims 200 yards and he rescues the person who was drowning.
Upon returning, this is my favorite part of the story, upon returning, he borrows someone's extra pair of pants and finishes his round. And I would just say, as someone who doesn't play golf particularly well, his excuse for like a low, you know, after the turn, second half of his round, his excuse is better than anyone ever, you know?
Now, your week probably had less drama in it than that. Less drama than saving someone on a golf course, less drama than an angelic vision in the middle of the night. But you sense promptings from God all the time, even if you're not a follower of Jesus.
I think for some of us, it's like in a church service like this, where you just sense an ought from God. Like, I ought to do this. I ought to reach out to that person. I ought to be investing there. I ought to be caring for that.
Maybe for you, it's in Bible study throughout the week or a personal time of prayer. Maybe it's just in the regular flow of your life. You're driving somewhere, you're walking somewhere, you're talking to somebody, and there's an ought that you feel.
Well, my question for you is, are you moving to the prompts or still pondering? There will always be reasons not to move to the prompts. There will always be reasons to explain away the need to actually do something, to head the way that God is calling you.
I think there is a huge benefit when we take the small promptings that we have from God and we move toward them. The shepherds, they certainly did that. Luke gives us a snapshot of how, as he continues the scene this way:
"When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, 'Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.' And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told them. And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb."
Luke says, of rough and tough shepherds, they left this group of people that God trusted with this amazing idea that when so many other people wouldn't trust them with anything outside of taking care of some sheep, God trusted them through an angelic visitation to include them in the most important rescue mission in the history of the world.
I think it's probably justifiable that they would have been freaking out a little bit in this moment, wondering what they might do next. But that didn't stop them from leaving their post to go see Jesus.
Now, this is another one of those moments that when you stop and you go, okay, this is a historic event, we ask ourselves the question, like, what happened with the sheep?
Now, there's a lot of scholarly debate about what would have happened, what could have happened, and one of the sort of scholarly possibilities is that there is a smaller group of shepherds that were skeptical of what they had just heard, and so they were willing to stay back and take care of the sheep while the others left to go see Jesus.
I just think, what a crazy moment that those shepherds missed. If it's true that there were shepherds who were unconvinced after what they had just experienced, honestly, it probably makes us feel a little bit better because some of you think, "Oh, we're going to go see Jesus, and we're going to go see Jesus. I would follow God, I would believe in God, I would trust God, I would reorient my life if God would just show up in some, like, big and powerful ways."
I would just tell you this: whether it's this passage or other ones, there are times throughout the Scriptures where people see unbelievable acts of supernatural activity from God, and they still don't believe. Extend some grace to yourself.
Mary and Joseph, they had to wait to meet Jesus for a month, but the shepherds, it was just a few moments after they'd heard about Jesus for the very first time.
Now, when they get there, the scene was ordinary, even unimpressive, but they still believed because of what they'd heard. When they get there, it was a smelly stable with a manger. There was no white noise machine. There had been no birth plan. There was no top-of-the-line crib. It was a cool night with animals close, and a baby you would have never guessed was anyone but a child. A child from a young, newlywed, Middle Eastern couple who had traveled for the census. It felt normal.
But it didn't stop them from describing their night. The shepherds, probably interrupting one another with details that they felt like the other one wasn't doing justice to, or the emotional reaction that they felt like was necessary, like when we share stories with friends.
They weren't overwhelmed by the manger. They had already been overwhelmed in the meadow, and now they were sharing that wonder because they were carrying that wonder with them to the manger.
One of the special things that we see in the passage is their willingness to let God meet them in the ordinary, to stay alert, to pay attention, to look around them, and then respond.
As a matter of fact, what they experienced, it didn't just help the shepherds' faith. It didn't just grow them. It grew everyone around them. We see it with Mary and Joseph, that it fuels their faith. It had been months since Mary and Joseph had had their angelic visits in their dreams. Probably enough time had passed that they're wondering, "Did that really happen? Was it really as I remember it? Is this really still the plan?"
Now, the night that Jesus comes, all of a sudden, there's this incredible confirmation. Mary, she had responded to the prompts of God. Now, she could ponder how God was showing up in miraculous ways.
If you've ever been the person that goes and visits new parents in the hospital with a baby, there's like this rhythm, this routine that you're supposed to do. It's kind of an unwritten rule. Some of you don't know it, and so you violate it, and I'm going to give it to you now.
So even if you're not a note taker, this is how it works when you go see a baby in a hospital with new parents. You go, you compliment the baby, you make a joke about sleep, and then you leave. That's how it works. Everybody's tired, right? Mary was tired.
It was a long night after a long day, after a long journey at the end of a long pregnancy. They shared what had happened. They believed that Jesus really was who the angel said he was, and then left. But they had so much faith that even after this pretty ordinary routine thing that they'd just seen, they were praising God for all of it.
They were praising God for all of it. They were praising God for all of it. For the angel in the sky, for this choir of angels. And the most ordinary was the most significant. They got to see the Messiah as a baby.
But as I think about this story, I often wonder what happened to these shepherds. See, we read this and we go, well, we know what happens next in the story. The very next verse in the book of Luke is Jesus at 12 teaching. But that wasn't their experience.
See, Jesus, He wouldn't begin His public ministry for 30 more years. The Christmas story of that first Christmas ended that night, but their lives continued. How did they talk about this? What happened with this newly formed faith in their life as they went back to their normal day jobs?
So many of our experiences start in our routines, and they never make their way to the remarkable. But the shepherds, they give us a pathway. They give us a pathway to follow.
Just like that pyramid I showed you a few minutes ago, you can sort of take a step back and you can go, what does it look like for me even now to identify the ordinary in my life? Maybe you start that even while we're still together today or today at some point or this week. You write down the ordinary, the things you've taken for granted, the things you've stopped paying attention to.
So many of you have these experiences of your routine that you never pay attention to. But if you pay attention to them, I wonder if there are ways that some of those might become more memorable to you. If you consider them, they might become more meaningful to you with lessons that you can carry into your life.
If you saw God show up in those ways throughout your regular day, what would it look like for it to really change you? Somebody asked me at the end of the last service, "Phil, why don't you think we see angels anymore?" I think some of it might be because we're on our phones.
Like they're in front of us, but we already have a glow. I just think so much of the promptings that God wants to give us, we're too distracted to hear. I wonder, where has your attention slipped from what or who is right in front of you?
Maybe the normal routines of a Christmas card that you get in the mail or a group of Christmas cards can give you a chance to be more honest about how your week has gone, what you've experienced over the course of the last few months. What's happened at school or with your family or with your friends or at work?
What's a way maybe for you to just spend a moment praying for the people on that card that were thoughtful enough to send it to you? Maybe it's spending some time in line at the store with your last-minute gift purchases, praying for the people around you who are stressed, who are wondering if the thing they got is the thing that the person will appreciate, or striking up a conversation with someone that you don't know instead of doom scrolling social media or checking your email again.
Look, I get it. It's easy to unplug from the ordinary, to plug into the artificial. We're incentivized to do it. Remember, we can fill lots of things in our lives, but we can find the remarkable in our routine just by reorienting our focus to what is actually happening in real life rather than assuming what's real and turning to what's fake.
I want to challenge the way we consider Christmas this year, and maybe it's not too late. For some of you, you're like, "Phil, we only have 10 days left. What good is this going to do?" But I think you may have more of an opportunity to do this than you realize.
See, Christmas is one of those things that comes with all kinds of expectations, the glow and the gloss that comes with the pressure to have it all perfect, to figure all of it out exactly the way that you're supposed to do it can sometimes fill us with pressure and rob us of the very peace that God came to deliver.
See, Emmanuel, it means God with us. He isn't just a detached deity. He got into the messy reality of a broken world to show us how much He loves us, how much He loves you.
I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but an infinite God slowed down. He slowed down to the speed that we could comprehend and receive, and that hasn't changed.
We have four kids, and when our little boys want to play, it's always on their terms, right? It's the activities of a bike or Legos or soccer or whatever they want to spend time doing. The way that I show love to them is that I get on their level. I play with them.
If I said to them, "Hey guys, we're going to do some bike maintenance or read a scholarly book about this Bible passage or look at a technology video on YouTube," that's not loving them. They don't care about any of that. I love them the way they want to be loved.
And I do that imperfectly. God does that perfectly. Perfectly at an infinitely greater scale for each and every one of us. That's what Christmas reminds us of.
So how can we respond to this Christmas? How can we mirror that kind of intentionality to find the remarkable in our routine?
I want to finish with a few suggestions about how you can discover or maybe rediscover the remarkable love and presence of Jesus this Christmas.
First, spend less. Some of you are like, "Phil, too late." Look, I know that there's probably a lot of spending that's already taken place, but you have 10 days, and I'm guessing that for some of you, you have significant spending that's still in front of you.
If your family is anything like my family growing up, it sort of like went back and forth. On any given year, either my mom or my dad would decide that we like hadn't done enough yet. In the final days leading up to it, they would brave their way to this physical place where all these stores were. I think we called them malls. They would buy a bunch of extra stuff.
I'm just telling you, don't. When we live without limits, it's exhausting. I've heard it said before, you know, we're trying to live our life with one true God, not with idols, not with false gods in our life.
I've heard it said before that any area of our life where we are living without limits is an idol. I think our expectations and experiences sometimes around the way we think about gifts and experiences of Christmas can become idolatry.
Number two, scroll less. It's so easy to compare your Christmas reality to the highlight reels of other people's social media projections. That's not real either. Maybe for you, it just means you're going to delete social media until January of 2026.
And you're like, "Phil, but how will I show off all the cool things perfectly staged to take a picture for Instagram?" You won't. You'll just be present with your family.
Third, read more. This could be an Advent reading guide. It could be a devotional. But honestly, even if you're not a follower of Jesus, I think there's just benefit in reading. I think picking up a book and physically reading just slows us down.
If as you do that, you think to yourself, "Oh my goodness, I couldn't ever do something like this. This is going way too slow," it may not be that it's going too slow. It may be that we have gotten accustomed to going too fast.
Then fourth, give more, which leads me to our offering time. You're going to acknowledge the plan. No, it's not a pitch for giving here at Menlo. You guys are so gracious and faithful in that. We're so thankful.
Maybe God's calling you to give if you've never given, but this is really about who are the people or the organizations that God is calling you to be generous with as we finish the year. The great news is if you spend less, oftentimes you will have five minutes to give.
Or if anyone has set a financial margin to be able to think about giving more generously and more strategically. Somebody just told me a story about how years ago they took the money that they were going to spend on stockings for their kids and they started asking their kids, "What organization do you want me to give this money to in your name?"
I haven't told my kids yet, but I think it's a good idea. What if Christmas left you with the same kind of interruptible routines that the shepherds had? You could see and hear from God more clearly because of it.
What if we weren't exhausted by Christmas? This might not be easy, but it's worth trying. I would encourage you as we think about that idea of ordinary and God meeting us in the midst of it, not being so fast to rush through it.
Imagine what He could do. Would you pray with me as we think about the next 10 days together?
God, I'm so grateful for your kindness in our lives, exemplified on Christmas, that as we prepare to celebrate this incredibly important moment in our annual calendar and rhythms, whether we're followers of you today, or this is maybe just a part of our normal rhythm throughout the year of sort of just dipping our toe in the faith water, it reminds us, God, that even though we didn't deserve it, even though we can't earn it, you came for us.
You lived a perfect life. You died in our place so that we could know you now and forever. God, I pray that whatever the things are that are sort of distracting us or creating detours away from you and what this really means, would you help us to steer clear of those things?
Would you help us maybe, God, to reprioritize where our time is being spent, where our dollars are being spent, where our attention is being directed in the coming days, that it would be more aligned to you than it has ever been before?
The same hope that you extended to Mary and Joseph and those shepherds 2,000 years ago, you extend to us today. And God, we want to receive that. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank you. Join me in thanking Junior and Becky for coming down from San Mateo for? That was really fun. A new friend of mine named Mike has been in the service taking pictures too. So if you're like, do we just let random people take pictures inside of our services now? Yeah, totally. No, that's just a new guy right here. You can say Merry Christmas to Mike. He's right there if you want to say hi.
Well, as you kind of are thinking about the week ahead and some pressures that you feel or some relationships you're walking through or some situations, you just know are bigger than you, they're there on purpose that you would be able to pursue God with those.
We have people right up here that would love to pray with you as you're getting ready for the week ahead. If you're looking for a next step here at Menlo or you need information that you don't have, you can find that at Info Central just outside these doors.
We are so glad, so thankful that what we get to experience with you is not just moments like this, but a regular rhythm of this because God meets us in the ordinary. God meets us in our routine. That's where the remarkable can be discovered.
So looking forward to being with you next weekend. We're going to talk to them about the Magi and then for Christmas Eve on the 23rd and the 24th.
Menlo Church, go as ambassadors of hope. Wherever you go this week, you're going to find people who are overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated. And while you may feel some of those same emotions, as a follower of Jesus, you have an infinite reservoir of hope for you not only to tap into for you, but to give to other people.
May you go and be a blessing with others because of it. I love you. God bless you. See you next time.
on Dec 15, 2024
