Luke 2:8-12
Christ is born! Let us glorify him!
“Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”
Approximately one year ago, the Pew Research Center issued a comprehensive report on religious affiliation and religious practice in America, based on extensive polling, research, and analysis. Pew found that 22% of Americans identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” or SBNR.
What does this mean, exactly? Well, it might mean something a little different to different people.
But the basic contours of this self-description would usually be that an SBNR person does have a sense for the supernatural, and is conscious of a divine force of some kind. How personal that divine force is will vary.
But almost everyone who claims to be SBNR has an aversion to what is generally described disdainfully as “organized religion.” For SBNR people – that is, those who understand themselves to be “spiritual but not religious” – their grasp of the divine, and their sense of how the divinity relates to them and of how they relate to the divinity, begin and end inside of themselves: in their own minds and thoughts, in their own emotions and experiences.
There is no divine authority outside of them and beyond their personal opinions, holding them to account to an objective moral standard, to which they must conform. There is no divine benefactor outside of them and beyond their subjective feelings, offering gifts and heavenly blessings that they need to receive, to make up for what is lacking inside of themselves and in their own inner spirituality.
The shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem, on the night when Jesus was born, were definitely not “spiritual but not religious.” For sure they were not this, once they were addressed by the angel.
When the angel told the shepherds that he was bringing them “good tidings of great joy which will be to all people,” the first thing he included in those good tidings was that there had been born to them “in the city of David a Savior.”
A Savior? Those who are “spiritual but not religious” don’t usually feel a need for a religious Savior who would come to them, from outside of them.
To admit the need for a Savior is to admit failures and flaws, missteps and mistakes, that have resulted in harmful consequences that the SBNR person cannot repair on his own, and from which he cannot save or rescue himself.
But the shepherds had no problem with the idea that they needed a Savior. They knew that an objective evaluation of their lives from the outside, in the light of the Ten Commandments, would certainly expose many lapses and transgressions on their part. They had no delusions to the contrary.
God’s external law measured them, and found them wanting. They did not measure themselves by the standard of their own internal spirituality. They knew that such a process would be a self-evaluation characterized by self-deception and self-justification.
And they were excited and overjoyed to know – based on the outside testimony of the angel – that the Savior they needed had now come – to a town close-by no less!
As simple shepherds, they almost certainly would not have had a carefully worked-out theology of messianic redemption and vicarious atonement. They would almost definitely not have been able to predict what kind of life and death was going to unfold for the babe of Bethlehem in the years ahead.
But they knew – deep down they knew – that there was something about that baby, and something in that baby, that they needed: something that would save them from their guilt before a righteous God, through divine forgiveness; and something – someone – who would save them from their alienation from a holy God, through divine reconciliation.
It’s also interesting to see that when the angel told the shepherds where the baby was, and what anyone who might go to see him would find, he didn’t need to tell them explicitly to go to Jesus. But he knew that they would go.
The angel’s announcement pulled them to go, and pushed them to go. The angel’s announcement lifted up their faith, beyond a contemplation of their own doubts and fears, and drew their faith toward something higher and greater.
The shepherds were not SBNR, who thought that they might be able to have a “Jesus experience” that began and ended only on the inside – within their own spirituality. No.
The angel had not told them to look for the Lord inside their hearts. He had directed them to look for Christ the Lord, so that they could properly worship Christ the Lord, in a particular newborn baby, lying in a particular manger. And so they said to one another:
“Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.”
And as St. Luke reports, “they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger.”
I don’t know how “organized” their walk to the manger was, but it was definitely a “religious” walk. They went physically to a specific place where something important was waiting for them. They went there to find something for their souls that they would not have been able to find just by consulting their own experiences and emotions.
The birth of Jesus, with everything that this birth meant, broke into their lives – and into their souls – from the outside. The salvation from sin and death that came to them from Jesus, came to them from the outside.
A Christian spirituality – which these shepherds had in a nascent form – is a spirituality that is able to receive what God gives. A Christian spirituality – which is a religious spirituality – is not a spirituality that brings into existence out of itself, or for itself, its own salvation, its own enlightenment, or its own eternal hope.
These things, and so many other marvelous things, come to us from God. From God, and not from ourselves, they then enter into us – sometimes even surprising us with how wonderful they are – through an external revelation and proclamation that delivers to us something new, and something necessary.
The 22% of the population who understand themselves to be “spiritual but not religious” have a hard time understanding the meaning of Christmas. And that is because the meaning of Christmas includes the truth that the God who created us all, exists outside of us all.
He speaks to us through angels and prophets, through apostles and preachers, telling us things that we would not otherwise know, but that we need to know. And his pardoning and healing grace comes to us as he gives himself to us – in the person of his only-begotten Son – in specific moments of human history, and in specific places.
The Christmas story in particular is indeed real history. The Christmas story does not begin with the kind of fairy-tale phrase that often introduces myths and legends: “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.”
Rather, the story begins with a declaration of who the emperor and regional governor were when these things happened – which was the way real events were dated by chroniclers in the first-century Roman empire. And the story tells us that these things happened in a very specific, real place – a place that can be visited today – in the city of David.
The Christian faith as a whole, as God touches us and engages us in and through that faith, is filled with such concrete, objective moments. I was baptized on Easter Sunday of 1962 in a specific church in Germantown, New York.
This past summer, during my trip to the northeast, I visited for the first time the church elsewhere in New York in which my father was baptized on April 2nd, 1939, and in which my grandmother was baptized on April 16th, 1933. I touched the font from which the washing of regeneration had been poured upon them – in a way that the shepherds may have touched the manger in which their Savior slept.
These baptisms did not arise from our inner spirituality, or from the inner sense of the divine that we had devised in our own minds with our own imaginations. These baptisms were gifts from God, originating in him and in his fatherly love, and bestowed upon us from the outside.
God made promises to us, and God invited us to believe these promises for a lifetime and into eternity: promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation; promises made to penitent and redeemed sinners; promises made to God’s adopted and regenerated children.
I don’t know if I would categorized all of this as “organized religion,” but God certainly has organized his way of bringing his grace to us through the means of grace. He does it through earthly means, and through other people, in concrete places and at specific times.
That’s what God was doing on the first Christmas, for the shepherds. That’s what he is doing for you and for me on this Christmas, and in the service that is being held in this place right now: where his Word has been read, and where the message of Jesus Christ, born to save us, has been sung and celebrated for us: so that all of us can hear it, believe it, and receive it.
“Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”
Christ is born! Let us glorify him! Amen.