A field

 On Sunday I asked the congregation to pause and come with me to a field. The days after Christmas are apparently being termed 'Twixmas' and because of all the demands of Christmas it's downtime before the New Year. But I pleaded for a little more time in this field before bouncing into the next thing.

This doesn't look much. A scruffy, scrubby looking hillside that happens to outside Bethlehem. We cannot be sure this is the exact field though just behind are shepherd's caves still in use. But what strikes you when you stand looking over this field is that it is so ORDINARY. Just a bit of nothing countryside. An everyday hillside. Really ordinary. And that's so important. It is precisely the point. Because here we see how the real God works - in ordinary places with ordinary people so that no one may miss out.

We must never miss the ordinariness of Christmas. I know there's so much razzle, dazzle as we celebrate but so much is just plain ordinary. Mary and Joseph are nobodies who do not register on any scale of human significance. That's true of so many in the story. And, as for the shepherds on this  hillside, they are at the bottom of the social scale, outliers, ceremonially unclean. Night-shift workers out in the dark. Yet, precisely to these shepherds comes the first public proclamation about the meaning of Christmas. Yes, there have been private visitations to Mary, Zechariah in preparation but this is where, for the first time, the real God tells the world what's happening.  This is how the real |God works: in ordinary places with ordinary people so that no one may miss out.

I love the way that Luke, as historian, tells us at the beginning of the gospel how carefully he has authenticated this.  He assures us that he has used eye-witness evidence and carefully investigated everything from the beginning. He knows it matters. People are going to live and die by this story.

And the public pronouncement, we have heard many times before, needs our attention again......