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The scripture reading of the morning is from the Gospel according to Luke, the second chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered eight. "And in that region there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone

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around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, 'Be not afraid, for behold I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you. You will find a babe wrapped in

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swaddling cloths and 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 among men with whom he is pleased.' When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, 'Let us go

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over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.' And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the

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shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told them." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. It snows in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Oh, not as much as we get here in Pittsburgh. But they do know what it is to have slippery seasons. And I suppose the shepherds knew this best of all, for their lives were spent in the fields.

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They had no social status, you see, and no money with which to buy such status. Indeed, they couldn't even participate in the solemn religious rituals of that day because being with the flocks made them ritually unclean. In the first century, you see, you had to be able to be rich in order to be religious.

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That's something for us to think about for a moment. I remember when I came to Pittsburgh, I was told in the very first week what someone described as a joke. Seems there was a very poor, hungry individual sitting on the curb out front of the First Presbyterian Church, weeping. And Jesus passed by and sat down beside

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him and put his arm about his shoulders and said, "Why do you weep?" And the man said, "Well, I've been trying to get into the First Presbyterian Church, but they will not allow me to enter because I am of the wrong social class and status." And Jesus said, "Oh, don't let that bother you. I myself have been trying to get

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into that church for 50 years." Well, the stately architecture of this building and its history, when many of the greatest and most affluent names in the history of Pittsburgh belonged here, and the fact that until just about 25 years ago, you had to rent your seat and the poor were only able to sit where no one else

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wanted to buy a seat, I suppose those things make this congregation very awesome to some people. But they're quite untrue with regard to this congregation today. We are mostly middle class. We have some of those who come from economic need. We have some who have a great affluence. But we certainly are not a

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congregation which excludes anyone because of their status or how much cash they have. The Bible, of course, says that God does not favor any particular group of people. He does not favor the rich or the poor. He is most concerned with those who are in need, and because the poor are most often in that state, He is concerned

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for them. His hatred is directed only at those who oppress others or who gather the things they have through a misuse or an unjust treatment of others. God is no respecter of person. So let us hope that the doors and the ministry of this congregation will always be open to the up-and-outers as well as to the

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down-and-outer. Of course, it must be noted that these Bethlehem Shepherds were, in a sense, at the top of their profession. You see, every day in the temple in Jerusalem, a lamb was sacrificed first thing in the morning and then in the evening. Now, these lambs had to be spotless in every way, and so

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the temple had its own flocks, and these flocks were kept in and about Bethlehem. It's an interesting symbolism, isn't it, that the lambs offered every day in the temple came from the same place where Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, was to come. And these shepherds about Bethlehem also, like all

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shepherds, had some very distinguished predecessors. Abraham was one who kept the sheep, Moses was tending the flocks when God met him at the burning bush, David was a shepherd, and Amos after him. It's always seemed in studying the scriptures that God has some special relationship to shepherds, and I think

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there's an easy explanation for this. When one is alone, when one has quiet times, when one can think long thoughts, when one can dwell on wind-kissed hills and lift one's mind to the thought of God, well, there's a special sanctity in that. Bethlehem was not a big town in those days. It sat on a kind of low ridge,

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just a small collection of sun-bleached houses with some vineyards and fig trees terraced about them, and behind Bethlehem, off in the distance, some limestone cliffs which reflected the sun in many magnificent ways. So as the shepherds would sit in the fields and look at those things, it's not surprising

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that they could think Godward thoughts. Seems the reverse, of course, in the church today. I think there's more commotion than there is devotion. There seems to be such a surrender to the external. Many times our worship services or our acts of praise become little more than noise-making. Like adolescents, we've

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developed a kind of a taste for the loud. Our tradition says that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, but it seems to me that a lot of people think their chief end is to dash through life, adding as much as they can to the din thereof. I make no mistake. I'm not suggesting that I believe in the

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ruralization of God. I've said from this pulpit before that God is just as present on the corner of 6th and Smithfield as He is in Muir's Meadow in Yosemite or at the Grand Canyon, but it must be noted that it is easier to be still before God in those remote rural places than it is in the midst of the

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hustle and bustle of a city. We have to work a little harder at it. Do you have a place where the sounds of the world can be allowed to fade away and where your soul becomes silent before God? Still enough for you to hear God's still small voice? Are you able to focus your mind on Him or do you have a kind of reader's

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digest mind crammed with a thousand stories and some witty sayings and jokes? Can you be childlike before God? Humble and very honest? So focused upon Him that the eyes of your soul see Him? Have you experienced God? The plentitude of God? Are you reverent before God? The shepherds were. It's no accident, you know,

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that Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd. Of course, at that particular time, God must have seen very far away from those Bethlehem shepherds. As they would look down on that city at night, they would see the fires of the Roman guards about the city. The light of those fires must have mocked them. The census

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was on, you see, and extra garrisons had been called up to make sure that everything was done in good order. And they must have thought to themselves that it was the Emperor who was on the throne of the universe and not God. They felt the heel of the Roman boot on their throats and that land had become for them

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not a place of milk and honey but rather of vinegar and gall. They must have cried out with the psalmist long before, "How long, O Lord, how long?" But when they cried out, the winter wind gave no response. Those shepherds needed a theology for slippery places. A few weeks ago, the American Academy of Homileticians met

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here in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and I was invited to be the preacher to the Academy and after preaching to talk with them about preaching. And I chose a theme which dealt with depression and despair. And as we were walking from the chapel where we worship to the lecture hall where we

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were going to share, one of the members of the Academy said to me, "Why did you pick such a theme at this glorious Advent season?" And I said, "Because this is the season in which the deepest depression is found. December is the month in which there are the most suicides. December is just plain bad news

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to a lot of people. They started off in January with high hopes for the next 12 months, and they've seen their dreams dashed, and their businesses collapse, or their jobs disappear, or their marriages fall apart. They've lost loved ones through death. Their children have become insolent and rebellious. Illness has hit

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them and then gone on to hit another. They've experienced profound temptation. January might be a time of great optimism, but December for many people is very dark and very cold, and the flowers that bloomed in the springtime are now covered with a deep snow. This Advent season for some people is a hard and a

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heavy time. The week before Thanksgiving, I was invited by Ashland College to deliver their Thanksgiving address, and I drove over to Ashland to share with them. And after the service, we had lunch together, and then I was taken by the president to see the art collection of the school, a very fine art collection at

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Ashland College, and in his office he showed me a Monet. When Claude Monet came toward the end of his life, he painted a series of pictures in and about Giverny where he lived, and many of them concerned haystacks, and that college owns one of the Monet haystack paintings. And as I looked at it there in

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the president's office, I thought to myself of how Monet in those same years was developing cataracts, and as the cataracts developed and his eyesight became darker and more distorted, so his pictures became darker and more distorted. He painted what he saw, and because what he saw was dark and

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twisted, so his pictures became dark and twisted. Well, there are a lot of people who look out at their lives or the lives of loved ones at this particular time, and all they see is darkness, and they become very depressed and caught up in a profound tragedy. It's very easy to go under in that kind of thing. We need a

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theology for slippery seasons. Those shepherds there in the first century, no doubt, were very anxious about what would happen to their country, and they prayed, and they prayed, and God finally answered. But notice this, God answered at the right time. One of the things that's most difficult for us as Christians, I think,

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is to synchronize our prayers with the judgments of God. You see, we pray selfishly. We pray for what we want when we want it, but God holds back knowing what is best. God answered the prayer of the shepherds at Christmas because the fullness of the time had come. For the first time in history, the Mediterranean

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world was gathered together with a single language, Greek. That meant the good news could spread more rapidly. For the first time in history, the Mediterranean world was tied together in relative peace, what the historians call today the Pox Romana, and during such a time, the gospel could spread more

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rapidly. When the fullness of the time came, when God answered the prayer of the shepherds and came into this world, it was the time and the first time when the known world was linked together by sea lanes and also by roads, some of which are still in use today. And the missionaries of the cross went out over

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those sea lanes and over those roads with the gospel. And also at that particular time, when the fullness had come, the religions which were common to the Mediterranean basin had all fallen into disuse, and there was a great distress among the people, and they yearned for the truth. Then, when all

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these things were exactly as they were to be, then at just such a time, the angels came and made the announcement that God had answered the prayer. See, our difficulty is when we get into slippery seasons, we try to argue God into fitting our schedule instead of the timetable of the eternal. I got a letter from a member

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of our church this last week. This man is in one of our state penitentiaries, and he told me that he had been reading some works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Now, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who was slain by the Nazis in a concentration camp just before the end of the Second World War. And what this

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prisoner from our congregation was saying to me was what Bonhoeffer had said before, namely that you really have to be in jail in order to understand what Advent and Christmas means, because you see, the prisoner in jail can't go where he wants to when he wants to. He's locked in, he's imprisoned, and he's

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contained. He has to rely on some help from the outside, and when that help comes, and only when that help comes, is he set free. So God comes and sets us free, but he comes at the time which he knows is best, which means when we're in slippery seasons, we need to be patient. The angels will sing, but just when

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they're supposed to sing. I can't imagine how it must have been for those shepherds to have been out there alone, and then suddenly an angel appears before them, and they're filled with great awe. They must have fallen on their faces in the snow, and he came out with his message, "Fear not, for behold I bring

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you good tidings of great joy, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord, and you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." And then the chorus broke out behind them, "Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of goodwill." It

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must have startled the sheep echoing off those limestone hills. They were caught up in wonder. That's an important thing to notice in this story. You know, knowledge is something like a stone in the middle of a stream, and wonder is the water that moves through the stream. Now for most of us, wonder is just a thin

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trickle. For the saints and the poets, well, for them it's a shining rivulet, but for God it's a mighty river. God answers us, you see, in ways which are wonderful and utterly beyond our expectation, and we need to remember that in slippery seasons, that God's answers might not be precisely what we expect,

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but they will be more wonderful than what we could expect. He gave to the world then the gift of his Son. He entered into the human predicament as one who was born of a woman and who walked our roads and sat at our tables and ate our food and told stories like we do and cuddled little children and

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comforted those who were in trouble. The Word became flesh. Do you ever think of how how often we learn just because the Word becomes flesh? Here's a father who gives to his six-year-old son an alphabet book, and there are the letters of the alphabet in one syllable to understand each one and to pronounce each one. The boy can

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make no sense out of the book at all, but then his mother sits down beside him and he puts, she puts her arm around him and she begins to explain these letters and these sounds one at a time. And when the Word becomes flesh, when mother begins to do the teaching, then suddenly the lad begins to understand. Now a few years go

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by, he's 13 now, and he's reading everything he can get his hands on, especially adventure stories. But one night he goes to his dad and he says, "Dad, why do they always ruin these adventure stories by putting in these lovey parts?" And his father sits down beside him and he puts his arm around him and he begins

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to talk to him about these lovey parts. And when dad explains, when the Word becomes flesh, comprehension is there. Now five more years pass by, and the boy is 18 years old. And now love is the most important thing in all the world to him. And why? Because some beautiful young lady has entered into his life, and when

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that Word became flesh, he understood for the first time what love really is. Jesus Christ is the pronunciation of the unpronounceable. He's the baby who was born in Bethlehem, and the youth who grew up in Nazareth, and the apprentice who worked in the carpenter's shop. He's the man of Galilee. And historians spoke of

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him, and prophets spoke of him, and psalmists sung of him, and seers predicted his coming. But when he came, he excelled everything they had anticipated, because in him the Word became flesh. And that's an important thing to remember in a slippery season, that God has come for us, and that God is with us. You can stand a

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lot of cold when you've got the warmth of that in your heart. Of course, then the angels were gone, and the sky was quiet again, and the moon passing overhead didn't even stop to look. And the next morning, business took up as usual, and there was the same bartering and bargaining there in Bethlehem. But

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things weren't the same for the shepherds, because you see, the night before, God had come down the back stairs from heaven, and he had a little baby in his arms for people caught in slippery seasons, for simple folk. And by simple, I don't mean the dull. I'm using the word in its most precise meaning. Simple is

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from two Latin words, sine, without, picca, fold, without fold, without clever corners, without duplicity. He came to the open. Those shepherds stood, and they looked at that little baby in the manger, and they had no idea what his life would be like. Of course, that's true with every child, isn't it? We stand and look at the

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child, and the child is a mystery to us. In the course of that child's life, it might rediscover things long lost. It might teach us things that the world itself has never previously dreamed about. All kinds of possibilities are there, and so when we hold the little one, all that we can do is trust and hope.

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And that's an important part of a theology for slippery seasons, to trust and hope. I read about a father four summers ago who was swimming with his 13-year-old daughter and his 7-year-old son in the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast, and he suddenly became aware that they had gotten out so far that the tide

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was carrying them. So he said to his daughter, "Now Mary, you keep swimming, and when you get tired, float on your back. You can float on your back all day long if you want to. I'm going to take your brother back to the shore, and I will come back for you." And with that, he put the little boy on his shoulders and

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swam toward shore. Within a short length of time, hundreds were gathered there on the shore, and boats were going up and down looking for this little girl, and a full two hours and 30 minutes passed before they found her, and there she was floating in the waves. And the man who lifted her into the boat said, "Aren't you

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at all afraid?" She said, "No, I'm not at all afraid, because my daddy promised me that he would come, and my daddy told me that I could float all day long if I wanted to, and I believe my daddy." And you see, he did it. That's what comes to people in slippery seasons, if they trust and hope in God, the promise that he said

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he would come and that he will, and that he will give us sufficient buoyancy of hope to hold us until the right time. You see, a theology for slippery seasons includes these things. First, that God's schedule is more important than ours, so we must be patient. Second, that God's answer is more wonderful than anything

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we could anticipate, so we must be expectant. Third, that God is with us now, even in the ice and snow, the Word became flesh. And fourth, that God always keeps his promises, that he always gives to us the faith and trust necessary to wait for his coming. When you know those things, you can't lose. So the shepherds

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went back to the fields. They'd seen a mother's joy, and they'd seen a father's pride, and they'd seen a baby sleep, and when they walked back there to those hills, the ground was just as hard beneath their feet as it had been when they had come, and they had to pass the Roman guards who swore at them at the

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gates, and when they looked up at the winter sky, it was icy and empty, but they were different, because they had a magnificent memory and a glorious hope. The Lord had come, and the Lord would come, and because they could never be lost to the Lord, they could never finally lose in anything. There is a

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legend about the shepherds. The legend says that one of them was a younger fellow, and he was mute, couldn't speak, and so when they went off to see the Christ child in the manger, he stayed behind to watch the flocks. They came back and told him, of course, and he had in him the same faith and joy that they

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had, and across the years, they say, that faith of his burning so warmly in his life comforted many other people, and then one year there were especially heavy snows, and he out with the flock got lost, separated from the others. He couldn't cry out for help, because he was mute and could not speak. They found him

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the next day in a cave. He was gone, but there was a look of great peace on his face, and when they picked him up, they found his right hand like this. Now, that means nothing to you now, of course, but to them it meant everything, because you see, being mute and not having the sophisticated sign language which we

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have today, he had learned to recite the Psalms by using his fingers. "The Lord is my shepherd." He'd learned that at Christmas, and it gave him God's peace, and they say, and I for one believe it, that when they carried him home, if you listened carefully, you could hear the sound of angels' wings.

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Let us pray. Oh God, in this cold time, when our feet become unsure because of the ice of doubt, the slipperiness of temptation and discouragement, so flood us by faith with thy Spirit, that we might be aglow, thus to have our own souls warmed and

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saved, and thus to be warming and saving to others. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name, amen. ( find our Safari app ) ( or attend the event LINK IN DESCRIPTION )