“Bible animals: Sheep”
Luke 2:20
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Born in August of 1930, Forrest Fenn was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, and was awarded the Silver Star for his service in the Vietnam War. Then after he retired from the Air Force, he ran an art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, together with his wife, Peggy, where he sold a variety of Native American artifacts, sculptures, and art.
And business was good! In fact, he was making as much as $6 million a year!
But in 1988, after he was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, he decided to leave a treasure behind--a box full of gold nuggets, rare coins, jewelry, and gemstones. The only problem was someone would have to find it, because he buried it somewhere north of Sante Fe.
But he left a clue as to where someone could find it in the words of a poem. Part of it went like this: “Begin where warm waters halt and take it in the canyon down, not far, but too far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown. From there it’s no place for the meek, the end is drawing ever nigh; there’ll be no paddle up your creek, just heavy loads and water high. If you’ve been wise and found the blaze, look quickly down, your quest to cease, but tarry scant with marvel gaze, just take the chest and go in peace.”
In the years that followed, literally thousands of treasure hunters went looking for Fenn’s treasure, but all of them came up empty. As many as five people even died!
Finally, in June of 2020, a medical student from Michigan named Jack Stuef found it “under a canopy of stars in lush, forested vegetation” somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. When the items inside were auctioned off a couple of years later, the treasure was valued at a little over one million dollars!
And while that treasure’s been found, there are lots more that haven’t been found, like the Treasure of Lima valued at $300 million supposedly buried on an island off the coast of Costa Rica, or the Lost Fortune of Key West worth more than $400 million.
And if all that’s a little too far away or exotic for you, there’s always John Dillinger’s suitcase hidden near one of his hideouts north of Minocqua, in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. That treasure’s valued at right around $200 thousand! And it is yet to be found.
And in the words of Luke chapter 2, we find another group of treasure hunters, shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. I’ll start at verse 8: “And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger’” (Luke 2:8-12).
If you think about it, the Christmas story is full of surprises. Zechariah never expected to have a child in his old age, and neither did his wife, Elizabeth. Still it was to them that the angel Gabriel came to say, “You will have a son, and you will name him John” (Luke 1:13). Mary was just a young girl from a small, out-of-the-way town called Nazareth. Yet it was to her that Gabriel came to say that, out of all the women on earth, she would bear the sinless Son of God. And when her fiance, Joseph, heard the news, he made up his mind to just walk away. Still an angel came to him to say, “Don’t be afraid to take Mary home as your wife” (Matthew 1:20).
Then came the census and the command to return to their place of birth. And after they made their way from their home in Nazareth all the way down to that little town called Bethlehem, there were no doctors, no hospitals, and no maternity wards. There was barely even a place to stay. And of all things, a manger, a feeding trough, would serve as a crib instead.
And who would come to worship Him? Not the scribes or the Pharisees, not kings or princes, and not even a single member of the Sanhedrin. Instead, first came shepherds, watching their flocks by night, then wise men, advisors to a distant king.
Christmas is full of surprises.
In his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, author Philip Yancey tells of sitting, one Christmas season, in a beautiful auditorium in London, listening to Handel’s Messiah.
He had already spent that morning touring museums and seeing some of England’s former glory--the crown jewels, some ruler’s solid gold mace, and the Lord Mayor’s gilded carriage. And there in that auditorium he could see the royal box, where the queen and her family would sit.
And as he sat listening to the choir sing, And the Glory of the Lord Shall be Revealed, he thought about how the world’s rulers typically travel around the world--with bodyguards, a trumpet fanfare, flashing jewelry, and a flourish of expensive clothes.
For example, whenever King Charles travels abroad, he takes along at least one butler, two valets, a chef, a private secretary, a typist, not to mention numerous bodyguards--an entourage of some fourteen people.
But that’s nothing compared to how his mother, the queen, traveled. Whenever she went anywhere, thirty-four people tagged along!
Yet, there in Bethlehem, we find the most remarkable surprise of all. For God, in human flesh, was born of a woman and laid in a manger, to redeem us from our sin.
And who came to visit Him and to worship Him? Shepherds.
Now it’s easy to say that shepherds aren’t among the highest ranks, the upper echelons, of society. In fact, some authors have gone so far as to say they were not just looked down upon, they were outright despised.
For example, in his book, The Christ of Christmas, author James Boice wrote, “[Shepherds] were looked down upon...they were despised and mistreated. They were thought to be crafty and dishonest…so bad was their reputation that they were not even allowed to bear testimony in a court of law. It was assumed people like that would lie.”
But that wasn’t always the case, for these Bethlehem shepherds weren’t just your average, ordinary shepherds and neither were their sheep your average, ordinary sheep.
They were, after all, barely five miles from the capital city of Jerusalem, the very home of worship and sacrifice.
To put it another way, the hillsides of Bethlehem were, for all practical purposes, a first-century factory farm, controlled directly by priestly temple livestock traders, caring for lambs raised purely for the feast of Passover and temple sacrifice.
So you see, to be a Bethlehem shepherd was pretty important after all.
And it was to them that Christmas came.
And what did they do when they heard the news? I’ll let the Bible tell the story. Verse 15: “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” (Luke 2:15-16).
And that’s not all. For just as soon as they saw Him, the Bible says, “they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this Child” (Luke 2:17). And then “they returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, it had been told them” (Luke 2:20).
“They returned,” the Bible says. Where did they return to? Back to their sheep, of course. Back to their lives and their livelihoods, their families, their neighbors, and their friends.
But when they returned, it wasn’t business as usual. They didn’t say, “Well, the holiday’s over. Let’s get back to work.”
Instead, they went back transformed. They went back with a sense of awe and wonder. They went back with hearts about to burst, filled full of joy and wonder, glorifying and praising God, for Christ, the Savior, was born.
He was born bloody in a manger, to die bloody on a cross. He grew up in a backwoods town called Nazareth, the son of a lowly carpenter. He befriended shame-filled prostitutes and respectable teachers alike. He rubbed shoulders with unschooled fishermen and lofty synagogue rulers. He showed His love to poor, helpless widows and powerful centurions. He knew hunger as well as feasting, laughter as well as grief. He knew loneliness and betrayal and rejection. He became one of us in every way, and ultimately took the sins of a broken world onto His shoulders, and suffered hell on our behalf as He hung on the cross.
He plunged all the way down to the depths of our misery as He bound Himself to our humanity. Then He rose back out of the depths, to lift us up with Him into life with God.
That’s why His coming matters. That’s why Christmas matters.
No wonder then that, just as soon as the angels announced Jesus’ birth, they said in chapter 2: “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known unto us” (Luke 2:15).
And what did they find when they looked in that manger? They found the peace with which He would calm the storms, the bread and fish that would feed thousands, the new eyes by which blind men would see, the new legs with which lame men would walk, the living water bubbling up to eternal life, freedom for a woman caught in the act of adultery, the tears He would weep over Jerusalem, the bread of life and the cup of salvation, the cross that would conquer sin, the words, “Father, forgive them,” and the open tomb of resurrection.
And that’s why, as the Bible says, they returned, “glorifying and praising God, for all they had heard and seen” (Luke 2:20).
In the words of author and editor Joseph Bayly, “Praise God for Christmas. Praise Him for the Incarnation, for the Word made flesh. I will not sing of shepherds watching flocks on a frosty night or angel choristers. I will not sing of a stable bare in Bethlehem, of lowing oxen, or of wise men trailing a distant star with gold and frankincense and myrrh. Tonight I will sing praise to the Father who stood on heaven’s threshold and said farewell to His Son as He stepped across the stars to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. And I will sing praise to the infinite eternal Son who became most finite, a Baby who would one day be executed for my crimes. Praise Him in the heavens. Praise Him in the stable. Praise Him in my heart.”
Gracious Child, we pray, O hear us, from Your lowly manger cheer us, gently lead us and be near us, till we join Your choir above. In Your name we pray. Amen