Shepherds Watch    (Geoff Neike is leading our service this morning) The reading and reflection for this service can be found below: Reading 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, 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, praising God and saying,  14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,      and on earth peace among those whom he favours!”   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.  Reflection  Come into this story with me.  Let’s pray…  It’s pretty cold, tonight, so we have lit a fire.  You see, we are out here on the hillside keeping watch over our sheep.  We have put them in the pen for the night, you and I, to keep them safe, and we are sitting around the fire across the doorway to keep them from wandering out.  Later on, when the fire dies down, we will stretch ourselves out across the entrance of the pen, the sheepfold, when we go to sleep.  There are several of us here together.  We each have our own flock, but we all share this sheepfold.  When it comes to the morning, we each call our own sheep, and they follow us out.  It’s amazing, but  the sheep know each one of us, and they only follow their own shepherd.  It gets pretty boring at night.  We sit around and tell stories to each other in the evening, and then we try to get some sleep, but it isn’t easy in the cold of winter.  And of course we are pretty high up, here at Bethlehem, so it gets extra cold.  We each have a shepherd’s crook to walk with and to pull back any strays into the flock; some people call that a ‘staff’,  And we have a club, some people call it a ‘rod’, to beat off the wolves if they try to attack the sheep for an easy meal.  But tonight, the most extraordinary thing is happening.  This angel thing has appeared, standing in front of us.  We jump up straight away, with our clubs ready.  And not only the angel, but there is this strange light which has come all around us.  You can imagine how frightened we are!  What is happening to us.  We are used to dealing with wolves, and sometimes the odd sheep-thief, but we have never seen anything like this.  And then, even more amazing, this angel starts talking!  “Don’t be afraid, it says!”  “Yeah right!  I won’t be afraid.  As if! - I’m petrified!”  But the angel goes on, and he is saying, “I am bringing you good news.”  I reckon I could do with some good news!  You see it’s a pretty hard life we lead, and the worst thing is that nobody wants to know us!  You see they call us ‘unclean’ because the life we lead stops us from following the rules about washing our hands when we eat and so on.  And sometimes we have to kill a wild animal that is attacking the flock, and that makes us unclean as well in their eyes, when we have to dispose of the carcass.  Of course, they want to know us when they want to buy a lamb for the Passover meal, but then we bring the lambs into the village market and we clean ourselves up a bit, first.  Good news!  What kind of good news?   So, now the angel is telling us.  “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  A Saviour.  Well, you know by now that I need a Saviour!  A Messiah.  I know enough to know that that means “anointed one.”  It is either Kings or Priests who are anointed, I wonder which he is referring to, perhaps it’s both?  But then again, he talks about Bethlehem, our local town, as the ‘City of David’.  David was a king.  Perhaps that’s it.  And now he is saying “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  He is obviously expecting us to go and look for the child.  How can we do that?  We have the sheep to look after!  Not possible!  But just as we are thinking that it gets even more amazing.  It’s like a curtain is rolled back, and there isn’t just one angel, there are millions of them!  And they are all saying together, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!”  Well, I guess that makes up our mind for us.   This doesn’t happen very often.  We’ve got to go and see!  And just as quickly as it started, it is all over.  So now we are talking it over.  “Did you see what I just saw?”, “What did the angel say, ‘to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior!’ “, “How can we leave the sheep”, “This doesn’t happen every day!  We won’t be long, let’s leave the sheep to themselves.  They won’t go past the fire.”  And now we are making our way down the hillside into Bethlehem as fast as we can go.  We are looking for a baby.  Which one?  Surely there must be plenty of those in the  town?  But wait, the sign the angel said was that it would be wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.  That’s weird!  Wrapping a baby tightly in bands of cloth happens often enough, some people think that it gives the baby comfort; but lying in a manger?  Why not in a bed?  That would be the regular thing to do.  So, I guess we are looking for a stable.  But not to worry, we find a stable, just as the angel said, and a baby lying in a manger.  And we talk to his mother whose name, we find out, is Mary, and to Joseph her husband, and tell them about this strange vision we had seen.  And Mary and Joseph are just as amazed about our story as we are.  You know, as we went down the hill we were wondering if it was all in our heads.  But now that we have actually found the baby, just as the angel had told us, we know it was all true.  So, we make our way back up the hillside to the sheepfold, and it’s all right, the sheep are still safely there.  The sheep are safe!   The angel said, ‘I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people.’  Good News.  In Greek that word is ‘euangellion’.  The Latin of that is evangel.  That’s where we get the word evangelical.  An evangelical is a ‘good news’ person.  I want to redeem the word ‘evangelical’, because it seems to have become almost equivalent to ‘fundamentalist’, especially in the popular press, and it is not that at all.  So, the angel brought Good News to the shepherds.  What good news was that?  ‘To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’  Pretty much every religion is about what you have to do to make yourself acceptable to God.  In the eyes of the religious people around the shepherds, they would have to clean themselves up before they could get into the presence of God.  But the Good News is that you don’t have to do anything to get to God, he has already come to you.  That is the message of Christmas.  Jesus is the Son of God; in fact, he is God.  And God is King;  He has a Kingdom.  And the fact that Jesus has come to earth means that the Kingdom of God has come to earth.  For those around Jesus, the Kingdom of God truly was ‘at hand’ - close.  The trouble, of course, was that not everyone recognised that.  Particularly the religious people who thought they knew all about God.  So the message of Christmas is that, like the shepherds, you don’t need to clean yourself up before you can come into the presence of God.  That baby, at the end of his life on earth, will do everything that is necessary to make the way open for you to do that.  The message of Easter is that the access that we need has been made available, not just to the shepherds, but to everyone.  Yes, you may think you are a sinner!  Don’t let that for a second stop you from going into His presence!  You see it’s only by entering into God’s presence that He will have a chance of cleaning you up!  And, if you don’t think you are a sinner you need to get into his presence, when you do, you’ll soon find out that you are!  We are actually all sinners when you compare us to the standards of Heaven!  Paul says in Romans that ‘all have sinned and come short of the glory of God’. (Rom 3:23)   But the good news is that God loves us all, in spite of anything we have done or not done.  And many of the parables Jesus taught demonstrate how much the Father wants a relationship with us, and how far he will go to make that possible.  That’s good news for everyone.  No exceptions!  And entering His presence is simply a matter of realising that he has come all the way to you; there is nothing for you to do; you simply have to turn round and recognise it.  That’s another way of saying, ‘believe it!’  The Christian life is full of things that work both ways.  Just as Jesus is in the Father, so also the Father is in Jesus.  As Jesus is in me, so also, I am in Christ Jesus.  And here, as I pointed out to the children earlier, the shepherds go to Jesus, but although the shepherds didn’t realise it at the time, it was Jesus who was the shepherd, and they were the sheep!  That baby Jesus, when he grew up, said…  “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.  11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.” (Jn 10 7-18)  The Shepherd has laid down his life for the sheep.  The sheep are safe!  The sheep are safe!  Amen.

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