I’d like you close your eyes for the next one minute and fifty seconds and listen to a dialogue you may recognize. There are a couple of pauses along the way, but don’t worry. Just close your eyes and let your mind supply the images. (A recording of Linus’ reading of Luke 2:8-14 is played) Does anyone not know where that recording comes from? Does anyone not remember Linus answering Charlie Brown’s forlorn question about the real meaning of Christmas?

A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in 1965, and my family was among the half of all Americans who watched it that night – right after Gilligan’s Island. It almost didn’t air. CBS network officials were uncomfortable with the show for several reasons. It didn’t have a laugh track as did Gilligan’s Island and most other TV comedies. The children’s voices were real children’s voices, an unheard of practice, and the music was too jazzy. But most of all, the network executives were uncomfortable with a plot that hinged on Linus’ reading of the story of the nativity from the King James Bible.

Only the insistence of Charles Schulz kept the story as it has been for forty two years. I wonder if his insistence has not helped make at least this one passage of the Bible familiar to forty two years worth of Americans who are increasingly unfamiliar with the Bible. And if the Word goes forth not to return until it has accomplished that for which it was sent, I wonder what this one minute and fifty seconds has accomplished in its forty two years.

Charlie Brown has been having a Charlie Brown day. His little sister Sally asks him to help her write a letter to Santa. “Just send money. How about tens and twenties?” she has her brother write. When Lucy complains that she never gets what she really wants for Christmas, Charlie asks what it is that she wants, “Real estate,” she answers. Charlie is sent out to find a Christmas tree while all his friends prepare for a Christmas pageant, and, of course he is mocked when he returns with his famous Charlie Brown tree.

Finally, in despair, he asks his question, “Isn't There Anyone Who Knows What Christmas Is All About?” Linus pulls his thumb out of his mouth and says, “True, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.” He walks across the stage, his blanket dragging behind him and quotes Luke, chapter 2 verses 8 through 14. He walks back across the stage and says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was aired for the 42nd time two weeks ago and its ratings were the highest in its time slot. If only for one minute and fifty seconds, some Americans are still hearing what Christmas is all about.

Linus read only half our reading for the morning. Let’s continue at verse 15:

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen which were just as they had been told.

Shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. No one knows exactly what time of year it was. Some think it may have been spring time and the shepherds were in the fields because it was lambing season. Others point out that because Bethlehem was so close to Jerusalem , these were lambs destined for temple sacrifice and it could be any time of year – even the dark dead of winter, December.

Shepherds as a social group, a vocational class, were not well respected. They are night clerks at a convenience store, workers at a car wash. Shepherds had dirt under their fingernails and never took time to wash with the kind of ceremonial washings the Pharisees said made you pure before God. In a way, their reputation was well earned. Even Jesus talks about the hireling who, unlike the good shepherd, abandons the sheep and runs away when he sees the wolf coming.

The testimony of a shepherd was not accepted in a court of law. Respectable people could not afford to believe what a shepherd might say.

We have no reason to suppose that the shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem that night were anything but honorable men, but they still bore the scorn of their class. Someone would always say, “But he is a shepherd” when the villagers would pass on news they’d heard from one of them.

It may be that, other than Joseph and Mary, no one else but the shepherds was awake that night in the region around the little town of Bethlehem. I think it’s more than that. I think God chose to send his angels to preach the first Christmas sermon to Bethlehem’s shepherds precisely because they were shepherds and because these shepherds were just the kind to respond to a calling God.

Some have pointed to the poetry of shepherds being the first to hear of the birth of the one who would be called the Lamb of God, and I think that such poetry does not escape the notice of the God who wrote the music by which the planets dance through their orbits.

But there is more than that. God chooses shepherds to be the first witnesses of the incarnation. They are barely credible witnesses to the most incredible event of all time. They are like a French farmer in Normandy on a cloudy June morning in 1944 who has risen early to tend to his morning chores. As he looks across his fields to the gray waters of the English Channel, he can hardly believe what he saw. He closes his eyes and then opens them again. They are still there, the dim outlines of a thousand ships. The invasion has begun. The end of tyranny is in sight. Who will believe him? The shepherds are the first to know that God’s invasion of time has begun.

Quietly tending their sheep, the dark silence is broken by the blazing light of an angel of the Lord. As Linus’ King James Version puts it, the shepherds were sore afraid. The angel begins his address as angels often do. “Do not be afraid.” And then this: “For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

There can be no more stark a contrast than the contrast between the news – the birth of a Savior, who is Christ the Lord, the anointed one of God – and the sign given to confirm the news – a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

God does not invade the sin oppressed earth with battleships and destroyers, landing craft and tanks. He comes as a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes; by the way, all babies are wrapped in swaddling clothes, nothing unusual there. And he is lying in a manger, a feed trough. It’s not usual, of course, but it is not the kind of sign you would expect. He is a newborn being cradled by a mother and a father who are living in a FEMA trailer. He’s a baby they’re keeping warm in the laundry room at the Holiday Inn Express; all the rooms were taken. Lots of visitors in Bethlehem because the Imperial census was being taken. Unusual, but not miraculous.

And so God trusts dubious witnesses, shepherds, to alert the world that the Savior has come. God always trusts a dubious witness, the church, you and me, to alert the world that the Savior has come. The only sign he gives the shepherds is that this Savior is in overflow housing in Bethlehem.

God’s call to the shepherd is implicit. When you have good news to share you don’t let it go untold. But before they start spreading the word, the shepherds check the angel’s words. God is always happy to have us verify the truth of what he says. They hurry off to Bethlehem and find things just as they were told. Mary and Joseph and their swaddled baby lying in a manger.

Luke doesn’t have the shepherds linger long at the manger. They barely have time to pose for the Christmas card pictures before they are off telling everyone who will listen about what they had seen and heard that night.

Luke tells us that the people were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. The word amazed is the same word that gospel writers will use later to describe the crowds’ response to Jesus’ teaching and the wonders done at his command. So are the people of Bethlehem amazed because shepherds, even good shepherds, had been given the angel message? Were they amazed that the promised one of God should be born in so humble a place? Were they amazed that the Savior of the Nations would be so marked at his birth rather than the day he rode into Jerusalem on his mighty war horse? The shepherds just reported what they had seen and heard.

For those of us who have heard and seen and tasted the good news of Christ’s coming, for those of us who have been assured that sin’s tyranny is soon to end, for those of us who know that the rightful king has landed in his enemy-occupied kingdom, there is an implicit call to truth-telling, word spreading.

I often come back from the mission field, from Brazil, with amazing stories of God’s work in our world. They are stories I am called to tell because I have seen and heard them. I will, I’m sure, tell stories about Park people when I am gone from here – names changed to protect the innocent and others. These, too, are stories I am called to tell because they are part of me, I have seen and heard them. I am called mostly to tell the story of God at work in my life, my ordinary, common, boring life. In its own unspectacular way it is the story of God’s invasion of my sin-occupied life, the King returning to claim the throne that is rightfully his, the throne I usurp whenever I put myself before God and others. The best stories I tell, or you tell, though, are worth telling only when they point, in one way or another, to the same good news the shepherds heard that night in the fields outside Bethlehem. It is good news of a great joy to all people. Unto us is born in the City of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Even if you only have one minute and fifty seconds, go tell the story.