Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; December 17, 2023
Readings: Luke 2:8-20 (children’s talk); Isaiah 21:11, 12; Apocalypse Revealed §158
As far as we know, the shepherds were the only ones who received the joyful news on the day that the Lord was born. The angels didn’t sing to the whole of Bethlehem: they sang to the shepherds. This must have been because the shepherds were ready to receive this news in a way that the rest of Bethlehem wasn’t. In this sense we want to be like the shepherds: when the Lord makes His advent—when He draws nearer to us—we don’t want to miss it. We don’t want to sleep through it. The Lord is offering us heavenly gifts all the time; wouldn’t it be wonderful if we actually heard that good news?
The quality that probably stands out the most in the shepherds is the simple joy that we considered during the children’s talk. When the angels went away from them, the shepherds didn’t discuss what they should do: they went into the city “with haste” (Luke 2:16). And then they told everyone what they had seen (v. 17). There’s something wonderfully innocent about their eagerness and their lack of self-conscious doubt. And it’s clear that when it comes to receiving the Lord, innocence is the most important quality. The mind does matter; but in the end it is the heart that receives Him or doesn’t receive Him. The angels came to the shepherds because the shepherds’ hearts were open.
But we talked about this during the children’s talk. There is another dimension to the shepherds, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on for the rest of this sermon. In the deeper sense of the Word, the shepherds stand for people who are paying attention. At the start of their story, we’re told that the shepherds were, “living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). They were literally awake when almost everybody else was asleep. And they weren’t just awake: they were watching over their flocks. They were protecting something. They were standing vigil in the darkness.
There are a lot of passages in the Word that associate watching, or being watchful, with the coming of the Lord. For starters, in the Gospel the Lord says over and over that His people should watch, because they do not know the day or the hour in which He is coming to them (Matt. 25:13; cf. 24:42; Mark 13:35; Luke 12:40). And He says, “Blessed are those servants whom the master, when He comes, will find watching” (Luke 12:37). These teachings are associated with the Lord’s second coming. But if we go back to the Old Testament, we find teachings about watching that were given long before the Lord had even made His first advent. For example, here’s a prophecy from the book of Isaiah: [read 21:11, 12].
By themselves these words are fairly mysterious; but in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told that this is an advent prophecy (AC §8511.4; TCR §764). Specifically, the morning that comes symbolizes the coming of the Lord. He is the morning. As Zacharias says, He is “the Dayspring from on high” (Luke 1:78). In the second book of Samuel He is said to be “like the light of the morning when the sun rises, a morning without clouds” (23:4; cf. AC §§22, 2405; DLW §233; TCR §§109, 764). When the Lord was born on earth, He created a new morning for the whole human race. Ever since then, this process has played out over and over on an individual scale. Sometimes our hearts and minds are in darkness. When the Lord breaks through that, there is a morning within us.
In the prophecy from Isaiah, the watchman is the one who sees that the morning is coming. Which makes sense: a watchman on a city wall would be able to see that daybreak was near before the people below him, in the shadow of the wall, could see this. Besides, the watchman would be awake as day began to break; almost everybody else would be asleep. This prophecy seems to be set at nighttime: it begins with that cry, “Watchman what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” (Is. 21:11). This watchman is standing vigil in the darkness, waiting for the coming of the morning.
The watchman has a lot in common with the shepherds from the Christmas story. Both were protecting something: the shepherds guarded their sheep, and the watchman guarded the city. Both had to peer out into the darkness. And both were awake when almost everybody else was asleep. And these qualities have something to do with being able to recognize the presence of the Lord. This state of mind is connected with the ability to receive good news from heaven.
What does this really mean? Surely the Lord isn’t saying that He wants us to be suspicious—that He wants us to fixate on the shadows because bad things might be coming. Being watchful isn’t the same as fixating on the bad stuff. Being watchful just means paying attention—to the good and the bad. What the Lord wants is for us to be spiritually awake. We’ll turn now to our next reading, which is from the Heavenly Doctrine, from the book Apocalypse Revealed [read §158].
To be watchful—or to be spiritually awake—is to have truths and live in accordance with them. But what’s the point of saying that we should do that? Isn’t that what everybody who comes to church is already trying to do? The contrast that this passage sets up is between those who do these things—those who learn truths and live them—and those who think that they’re doing these things, but in reality are only going through the motions. The reading says that the ones who are “asleep and dreaming” are the ones who lack truths, and are “engaged simply in worship” (AR §158). Another passage from the same book says that the kind of worship that’s being talked about here is “lifeless worship,” and that lifeless worship is what we’re engaged in when we go to church and do churchy things, “yet without desiring to know any truths of faith or wishing to do any goods of charity” (§154).
In other words, lifeless worship is the state of just not wanting to go very deep. It’s a state of more or less doing what we’re supposed to do: doing enough stuff that looks good on the outside that we can convince ourselves that we’re good people—or at least, convince ourselves that we’re doing fine—even though, on the inside, we have no interest in learning about spiritual things, no interest in changing the way we see the world, and no real interest in letting our hearts be changed either. We’re just going through the motions. We’re like sleepwalkers: our spirit—the part of us that’s actually alive and conscious—is not present in the things that we do.
This state is called a state of “lifeless worship,” but obviously it isn’t the “worship” part that’s the problem. Going to church and praying and reading the Word are never bad things to do; it’s just that these things don’t do much for us if we aren’t awake while we do them. It should be obvious as well that we can be spiritually asleep—or sometimes people say “dead inside”—even if we virtually never do churchy things. If going through the motions of a religious life isn’t enough to wake us up inside, then not even bothering to go through the motions probably won’t be enough either. The less thought we give to spiritual things, the less likely we are to realize that the world in front of our noses is only the outmost edge of the real world, and that we were designed to engage with spiritual reality, and that there’s just no way for us to be truly happy as long as most of what we are is mothballed or sound asleep.
To wake up is to realize that there is more—more than the shell that is life in this natural world—and to want to understand it. This is why the reading says that “watchfulness… is obtained only through truths” (AR §158). Truth is light; truth is what reveals the world within. Of course merely hitting the books isn’t enough to wake us up: the reading says that to be watchful is to have truths and live in accordance with them (ibid.). Truths that are never allowed to be more than ideas are inert and dead: we discover the power of spiritual truth when we try to live it, when we step into the stream, as it were. The reading says that truths “appear in their own light and in their own clarity when a person lives according to them” (ibid.). When we try to live as though we are spiritual beings—as though we are God’s creatures—and we seek the truth that makes that life possible, that’s when we wake up.
This is what it really means to be watchful. This quality is what we’re meant to understand by the watchfulness of the shepherds and the watchman from the prophecy. These figures stand for people who are spiritually awake—and especially for people who choose to remain awake even when much of the world around them goes to sleep. And it just makes sense that these are the ones who recognize the Lord when He draws near. He won’t appear before the eyes of our bodies; so if the eyes of our spirits are shut, how will we ever see Him? When we’re spiritually asleep, the truths of the Word are just ink on a page, or like boring presenters mumbling over the radio. But if we’re awake, the truths of the Word are like messengers from heaven—and sometimes they sing together, like a multitude of the heavenly host.
There are two more things that I want to say about watchfulness. First, I said earlier that being watchful isn’t the same thing as being suspicious or paranoid. That’s a true and important distinction. Being watchful doesn’t mean that we see evil where it doesn’t exist; but it does require us to be honest about evil when we do see it. Sometimes night falls. When that happens, we can either go to sleep, or we can look boldly into the darkness. For the most part the darkness that we need to be concerned with is the darkness within. But that stuff is hard to think about; that’s the stuff that makes us feel that we’d rather just remain sleep. The natural mind says, “Why would I be spiritual if being spiritual is hard? Why would I be spiritual if that means that I have to reflect on evils within myself?” But is hiding our faces really better than facing the darkness? Besides, if we can’t acknowledge the night, how will we ever notice the coming of the morning?
The second thing that I want to say about watchfulness is that the shepherds and the watchman from the prophecy weren’t just watching out for themselves. They were protecting someone else. They were watching over their flocks—or their people—by night. In addition, the Heavenly Doctrine says that both shepherds and watchmen symbolize those who teach and lead other people (AC §§343, 8211.5). The significance of this is that being spiritually awake goes hand-in-hand with living for more than just ourselves. When we’re asleep we live in a small world: we see ourselves and our own desires, but everyone else is more or less hidden by a fog. Waking up involves recognizing the real humanity of the people around us, and with that recognition comes a certain responsibility: a shift from looking to be fed to being the one who tries to feed someone else; a shift from always asking, “how do I get through this” to looking up and asking “what does this person need?”
Waking up is a slow process. And maybe when we do wake up, we’ll discover that we’ve woken up in darkness—that the spirit we’re now aware of is a spirit that needs help—and that the morning is only a promise. But the morning always comes. And those who keep watch are those who see the break of dawn.
And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “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.” (Luke 2:9-11)
Amen.