Christmas Eve Homily:

“No Chorus, No Lights, Just a Whisper”
The Reverend Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
December 24, 2011

In Old Testament times, shepherds were not reputable people. They were not well-off owners of valuable livestock – in fact, they were mere hired hands, looking after someone else’s valuable livestock. Their job was to keep the sheep alive, make sure they were not stolen, eaten by wolves, or just plain lost. In fact, shepherds had such a bad reputation in those days that years later when the adult Jesus told a story about a “good shepherd” it was as shocking to his listeners as his other parable, The Good Samaritan. It was unheard-of. Everyone knew shepherds were unreliable, dirty and smelly from living amongst the flocks, and likely not honest. (Most owners would probably go look first at the shepherd’s hut if a lamb was reported “lost.”) I’ve often thought about how Mary and Joseph must have reacted when the odiferous and unruly group of shepherds piled into the stable that night so long ago.

But, as we are told in the classic Christmas story, “The Shepherd’s Whisper,” first published in 1941 by the newspaper columnist Heywood C. Broun (not his son the sportscaster) not all of the shepherds gathered on the hill outside Bethlehem that night went to follow the star and see the newborn baby. One shepherd, Amos, stayed behind.

He wasn’t nasty about it or anything. As he kept telling his colleagues, it wasn’t in his heart. He didn’t feel moved to go, and he certainly wasn’t going to go just because everyone else was. Plus, he had an important job to do: watch over a flock of frightened sheep to keep them from hurting themselves, for as everyone knows, sheep can panic easily and end up over a cliff or in a pile, with lots of injuries. And on top of all that, one of his ewes was near term, and would need his assistance with the birthing of her lamb. So he refused to go, stubbornly sticking to his guns in the face of ridicule and cajoling and even anger from the other shepherds (who apparently, true to form, felt no compunction at all about leaving behind all those valuable sheep to fend for themselves.) It was not in his heart, he had important responsibilities, he would abide.

It’s not that he didn’t see the bright angels, or hear them singing their joyous song, or notice the unearthly radiance lighting up the midnight sky. He saw, he heard, he noticed – but he remained unmoved. Signs from God, voices of commanding angels with voices like thunder, heavenly songs, weird bright stars – it worked for all the other shepherds, but not for Amos. It was not in his heart, he had important responsibilities, he would abide.

I like to think of Amos as one of the world’s first religious skeptics, maybe a proto-Unitarian Universalist. A staunch Humanist parishioner of mine years ago in Chattanooga once commented in answer to a jesting question that if he did hear the voice of God telling him to go do something, he’d get a check-up to see what was wrong with him. Let’s face it, for many of us religious liberals, choruses of angelic song and bursts of heavenly light just don’t have the effect on us that they seem to have on more conventionally religious folk. Some of us need something less dramatic.

A whisper told Amos that he was a Divine figure to the helpless sheep which depended on him. A whisper told him that he too could be a Savior in his own way. A whisper told him, that lowly and despised as he was, even as his concerns were dismissed by the other shepherds, that he had the ability to make his own choice. And he made it. How UU is that?

Despite all the fuss made over the centuries over the lights, the angels, the star, the chorus of voices and all, perhaps the real message of Christmas lies in Amos’s whisper. After all, if there were too much noise that night, how would anybody hear if the baby started crying? Or if one scared sheep bleated out in pain?

If we allow the sacred message of Christmas to be drowned out in loud tape recordings of carols we used to like but are now sick of, holiday jingles rewriting favorite Christmas songs til we can no longer remember the original words, frantic bell ringing that’s supposed to sound joyful, and peevish arguments over whether it’s better to say, “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” then we will not be able to hear the more important but less flashy sounds of the season.

The most important things about Christmas are not the angels, the singing, or the lights. Despite all that, Jesus was born to two ordinary people in a country occupied by a foreign power. They are not well-off, not famous, not (despite the genealogies of Joseph in the nativity story of Matthew) of royal blood or lineage. They’re pretty much working class. Because of some bureaucratic order, they’re on the road, with no good place to stay, so they’re stuck sleeping with somebody’s animals. And yet the baby born that night grew up to change the world, and is still changing the world through the power of his teachings.

Mary and Joseph could be any homeless couple anywhere, like the man and his wife sleeping on a grate in Washington DC, a few days after Christmas in 1991. My son, then 9, tried to give them the $20 bill his Nana had given him but the man refused to take it. “I can’t take your Christmas money, baby,” he told Stevie. Instead, the man did accept some bills from my son’s father, and we were left to explain to Stevie about the man's pride not letting him take a large bill from a child.

That couple’s children could grow up to change the world. Children sleeping tonight at the Salvation Army Shelter just down the street from the church could grow up to change the world. Children in Central City could grow up to change the world. Children of undocumented workers could grow up to change the world. Children born tonight in University Hospital, in a barrio, on a reservation, in Iraq or Pakistan, could grow up to change the world. Unfortunately, little Keira Holmes will not grow up to change the world because she was killed this week in a shoot-out across the courtyard of the “Callio” housing project.

The whisper we need to hear says that each child, each person, each one of us, is important, no matter the status of our parents or the economic resources of our family, no matter our race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or gender identity, or what country we live in or what country we’re from. The whisper we need to hear says that since we have the potential to change the world, the decisions we make matter, the choices we make matter.

Let us draw hope and strength and courage from that message. Let us be inspired by the shepherd Amos to make our best efforts to be Divine figures, to be our own kind of Saviors, to be the people who change the world for the better.