Alexander Shaia is the author of Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation. A number of years we read the book together in Christian ed
In this video he is talking about the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel. The video starts at the 2:42 mark to get to his main message:
“The Christmas Gospel from Luke is paired to be read at a certain time to what is going on in nature and what is going on us as we are in nature.”
At night we read that portion of Luke’s text where the Angel comes to the Shepherds and in the dawn for their arrival at the manger.
“That whole nativity experience is for us when were are in the night times of our life.” We are in the deepest night around the Winter solstice in our hemisphere.
“The text is really primarily about your life whenever your life is in the deepest night, when your life is in the deepest dark.”
“The Beauty of the Shepherds story in Luke is that it tells about the journey we make hearing deep in the night of our life an angel announce that there is a birth but that we have make a journey through the night to the dawn where we will see with our own eyes that fresh radiance born before us.
“They are sent to the fields to do the work of the least and the work of the lowly. Luke gives us this image because here at this Christmas and in this text where in us is this work of the least and the lowly. Where is our deepest personal pain ? Where is the place in us where we perhaps feel half starved, ravaged, sorrowing, lonely, needy ? Where is that place ? Where is that place of impoverishment ? Where is that place that feels removed from polite society?
“And it’s precisely in this place that Luke says that that the angel will come to announce fresh grace and fresh radiance in our life. And that if we journey with that place in us and with that announcement within us that we too will arrive surely someday at the dawn, someday. That we mark winter solstice and Christmas in the outer reality to remind us that it is an inner truth. Christmas is not only a date on the calendar.. It’s most powerful reality is that it is the promise of every deep night time that someday, some year that we will know Christmas.”