Sometimes the events described in the Bible bowl us over with their sheer size. The picture in Genesis of God commanding light and darkness to go their separate ways, summoning the seven seas like chargers, and, with a word, drawing up the massive continents from the primordial ooze of the formless earth. That’s scale! Or, hundreds of thundering Egyptian chariots dashing headlong after the fleeing Hebrew slaves. Suddenly the once dry gap in the sea is invaded by a violent wall of water, foam filling the nostrils of horses, their eyes white with fear. Horsemen are thrown from their mounts. Charioteers are swept away by the swirling torrent. Then a death-marked stillness settles on the surface of the sea. Immense! Or again, the vision in the Book of Revelation of the saints in heaven gathered in a multitude greater than the eye can see, an ocean of faces and white robes larger than the mind can measure, an endless throng finding the place in their hymnbooks, and triumphantly singing, "Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God!" Compared to this the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sounds like a quartet.

In the face of scenes of such magnitude, the church’s attempts to make them come alive in worship has seemed like a frail and tiny vessel, a thimble dipped into the ocean. How do mere sermons and hymns, prayers and readings, anthems and responses encompass events of such breadth and height? William Sloane Coffin, the pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church, once told of the Easter sunrise service held annually on the rim of the Grand Canyon. As the resurrection account was read about the angel rolling away the stone from the tomb, a massive boulder was pushed over the edge and the congregation watched it crash mightily into the depths of the canyon. "Too dramatic?" asks Coffin. "No," he replies, "the Gospel message itself demands such drama."2

Tonight is Christmas Eve, and the familiar story we have heard from Luke’s Gospel is itself one of those events which threatens to overwhelm us by its scope. It begins, to be sure in a small and gentle way, shepherds resting on a Judean hillside keeping wary watch over the flocks. But suddenly the episode spills beyond the edges of imagination’s canvas. The night sky is flooded by the light of glory. First there is one angel, then another and another, until finally there is a heavenly host, putting on an angelic display so terrifyingly spectacular that the King James Bible seems deeply understated when it reports that the shepherds "were sore afraid."

Tonight, all across the land, in fellowship halls, sanctuaries, and church basements, those who know and love this story will try to re-create it, and the results, compared to the original, will seem pitiably small. A gaggle of neighborhood boys, the very ones we have seen kicking a soccer ball across the front yard, will stand on a hillside of indoor-outdoor carpet, guarding cardboard and cotton-ball sheep with makeshift staffs, their terry-cloth bathrobes almost, but not quite, hiding their worn Adidas sneakers. Suddenly a gauzily angelic version of the little girl from next door will burst onto the scene, lisping the good news through the gap where her next tooth will eventually grow. Other angels will soon join her, their foil-wrapped wings bouncing wildly to the beat of "Gloria in Excelsis." When the angels have fluttered to stage right, the shepherds will lumber left to Bethlehem to find a fawn-eyed Mary and a sheepish Joseph, whose steady downward gaze is fixed upon the blanket-wrapped doll in the plywood creche.

These bathrobe Christmas pageants, and indeed all of our attempts to convey the range and power of whatever-in-the-name-of-God happened that night to those shepherds, seem so weak and small. They appear to dim the blinding luminosity of those moments to the flicker of a single candle, to reduce the size of those great events to the scale of a Hallmark Christmas card. As the essayist Annie Dillard once put it,

... if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-three photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid.3

Perhaps this is so, but before we put the bathrobes back into the closet and dismantle the plywood crib, we should look again and carefully at the way in which Luke describes this event. The important thing to notice is that Luke does not dazzle us with spacious description. How bright was this shining glory of the Lord? Luke does not say. What did the angels look like? Luke is silent. How many were there? Luke declines to count them. What exactly were the angels doing as they filled the sky with song? Luke has no comment. What expression was on the face of the newborn savior? Luke says nothing. It is as if Luke pulls our attention away from the events themselves and focuses it instead on something else, namely the responses of those who were involved. The shepherds were "sore afraid," but returned from Bethlehem "glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen." The people who heard their reports "wondered at what the shepherds had told them." Mary "kept all these things, pondering them in her heart." As for the "glory of the Lord," Luke is reticent, but when it comes to those upon whom it shone, he breaks his descriptive silence and saves his fullest language to portray what happened in their lives and hearts.

Frederick Buechner tells in one of his sermons about some useful advice he once received from a young ship’s officer aboard a British freighter. It was night; the ship was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the officer had been peering into the darkness, looking for the lights of other ships. He told Buechner that the way to see lights on the horizon is not to look straight at the horizon, but to look just above the horizon. You can see the lights better, he told Buechner, when you do not try to look at them directly. "Since then," writes Buechner, "I have learned that it is also the way to see other things."4

Just so, Luke moves our gaze from the light on the horizon to the places just above, below, and off to one side. We are told of the light which filled the world that night, but we do not really see it. We see instead the reflection of that light on the faces and in the hearts of those who were present.

Surely one of the reasons Luke does this is because he knew how arrogant it would be to attempt to do otherwise. What pushed back the darkness that night was nothing less than the glory of God, and human language and action simply cannot scale those heights. To try to do so risks vanity at best, idolatry at worst. I once attended the annual Christmas show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and an impressive show it was. After entertaining presentations of seasonal chestnuts, like Dicken’s "A Christmas Carol," the review moved to its finale, a recreation of the nativity itself. In command of a stage the size of a city block and with the virtually unlimited resources of Broadway at their disposal, the producers were not at all reluctant to attempt to give us a taste of the real thing. There were no neighborhood kids wandering uneasily around the sets here. These shepherds were professional actors in authentic garb. Real sheep and camels made their way to center stage, where a matinee-idol Joseph and a Mary of breath-taking beauty cuddled a live, irresistibly precious, baby Jesus. Above the scene was a flashing, electric star, several stories high, surrounded by fluttering angels projected almost magically from a booth in the rear. Handel’s "Hallelujah Chorus" filled the theater with several hundred decibels of bone-vibrating sound. The place jumped with light and movement, and the audience scarcely knew where to look. It was a massive spectacle, which lacked only one thing - the glory of the Lord. The very attempt to look directly at this moment, to replicate its majestic size, had, ironically, drained it of all mystery. Everyone’s eyes were filled, but no one pondered anything in her heart.

But there is another, and more important, reason why Luke turns our gaze from the light itself toward the faces of those people who were illumined by it. Luke wants us to search those faces and to find our own faces reflected there, to find ourselves once again filled with wonder, to ponder these things in our hearts, to contemplate the possibility that we, too, might glorify and praise God this Christmas Eve for all that we have experienced because of the life of the Christ child born that night. As New Testament scholar Raymond Brown stated it, the shepherds "are the forerunners ... of future believers who will glorify God for what they have heard and will praise God for what they have seen."5 Luke does not want us to be fascinated by this story’s height; he invites us instead to explore for ourselves its depth.

There was once a Christmas pageant at a small church in which the part of the innkeeper at Bethlehem was played by a high school student. He was a quiet and polite boy, but the kind of boy for whom the word "awkward" was an apt description - awkward in manner, awkward in social relationships, even awkward in size, his growing frame always pushing at the limits of his clothing. His peers liked him well enough, but he was the sort of person who was easy to overlook, to exclude from the center of things. When Joseph and Mary appeared at the inn, he stood ... awkwardly ... in the doorway, slumping a bit toward the couple as they made their request for lodging. He then dutifully recited his one line, "There is no room in the inn." But as Mary and Joseph turned and walked wearily away toward the cattle stall where they would spend the night, the boy continued to watch them with eyes filled with compassion. Suddenly responding to a grace which, though not part of the script, filled the moment, he startled himself, the holy couple, and the audience, by calling, "Wait a minute. Don’t go. You can have my room."

And that is why, when all is said and done, those Christmas pageants in church fellowship halls, sanctuaries, and basements perhaps capture the Christmas story best. They are, like Luke’s gospel itself, pictures of what happens to unremarkable people in a dark world when suddenly, and in ways they do not fully understand, the glory of the Lord shines upon them. Like the characters in Luke, the players in these pageants do not pretend to express the light; they only try to reflect it. The cast, drawn from those who populate our workaday lives, embodies in its very ordinariness the truth of the angel’s promise, "Unto you is born this day a Savior." There is the kid from down the street, wearing a tinfoil crown and carrying a cigar box of frankincense. There is our daughter, adjusting her wire halo as she lauds, "My soul magnifies the Lord." And there we are, too, staffs in hand, stumbling over each other to get near the newborn King, our unsteady voices searching for the correct pitch as we sing anew, "O come let us adore Him, O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord."

1. Portions of this sermon previously appeared in Thomas G. Long, "Bit Parts in the Christmas Pageant," Journal for Preachers, Vol. VI, No. 1 (Advent, 1982), pp. 14-21. This material is used by permission.

2. William Sloane Coffin, "Our Resurrection, Too," in Paul H. Sherry (ed.), The Riverside Preachers (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1978), p. 162.

3. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 95.

4. Frederick Buechner, "The End is Life," in The Magnificent Defeat (New York: The Seabury Press, 1966), pp. 79-80.

5. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1977), p. 429.