One of my earliest and cherished memories of Christmas is participating with my Father in a Christmas pageant at the Otsego Methodist Church. I was probably all of four or five at the time and dressed in the familiar “bathrobe” costume so common to church drama. I played the littlest shepherd and offered a gift of my stuffed lamb to the Christ Child.

At the time and for many years after I never wondered: “Why were shepherds there at the manger?” I just took it for granted that somehow they belonged. Probably you never wondered about that either. But in my mature years, after I began to study the scriptures with a more thoughtful eye, I asked myself why Luke chose to have shepherds as eyewitnesses to the Nativity. Certainly no one in the first century would have taken shepherds seriously as eyewitnesses to anything. We romanticize shepherds in our time. Our idea of shepherds is taken from Sunday school art and pageants. In fact, shepherds in Jesus’ time were outcasts from respectable society. They were what today we would call the underclass, the frequently unemployed, unemployable, and under-employed. Today we would call them blue collar farm workers, ordinary working stiffs. They were a bit profane in their speech, inclined to drink too much, with dirt under their fingernails, and a tendency to petty larceny. There was a reason, you see, why the shepherds were “abiding in their fields;” nobody trusted them to be in town!

If you and I were going to have eyewitnesses, we would do as Matthew did in his version of the Christmas story: put wise men there. Wise men were at the other end of the social scale. Wise men worked for kings. In some traditions they are even pictured as kings themselves as in that (now) “politically incorrect” carol: “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” but I have to tell you they weren’t kings. They were wise men, which is to say they were astrologers, soothsayers, diviners; in other words, the scientists of their day. If you and I wanted to have the most reliable first century witnesses of Christ’s birth, we would probably choose the wise men.

But, strangely enough, none of the witnesses apparently told anyone what they had seen or, if they did, no one paid much attention. So far as we can tell, no one who heard decided to visit the Manger for themselves. The wise men had a chance to return and tell Herod what they had seen – he wanted them to do it – but wisely they chose to go home by another way. And, as far as we know, the wise men never told anyone else what they had seen.

A few years ago I read a fascinating book: “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” It tells some fascinating stories about one of the most fascinating cities in America, Savannah, Georgia, a wonderful historic town. The only reason I had known of Savannah before is that it is a sort of shrine for Methodists since it was at Savannah that John Wesley arrived as a young man to be a chaplain to the colonists and a missionary to the Indians, Wesley spent an unhappy and largely unsuccessful time there before General Oglethorpe sent him home.

Savannah is also the home of the Girl Scouts of America. Juliette Lowe, the founder of the Girl Scouts of America, lived in Savannah, Georgia. Her house is still there, you can take a tour. A young girl was visiting her grandmother who lived in Savannah and her grandmother took her to see the Juliette Lowe house, not the most exciting excursion for a little girl. She told her that she was doing this so that when anybody asked her who founded the Girl Scouts of America she could say “Juliette Lowe.” The next year the little girl visited her grandmother in Savannah again and said, “Nobody has asked me who founded the Girl Scouts of America.”

Apparently no one asked the shepherds what they saw in the manger either. They just looked and left, and we never hear from them again. So, maybe they are not there to be eyewitnesses to this event. What other reason would they have to be there? All Luke says is that they “. . . went away from there glorifying God for all they had seen.” Maybe they are there as examples of how we are to see God’s presence in our world.

We know that there were a lot of other people there, too, but they didn’t go away glorifying God for all they had seen. They saw it. They had to. Did you ever know a new baby not to attract attention? Even if they are out in the barn someone is going to say, “There’s a baby out in the barn.” Everyone will go out to look at it. They’d let the baby grab their finger with its little hand. They would ooh and ah, and ask Mary, “What’s his name?”

A lot of people looked at him, but only the shepherds went away glorifying God for all that they had seen. How do you account for that? What did the shepherds see that nobody else saw?

It’s fascinating, this business of vision and sight. It can be deeply philosophical with heavy questions like, “If no one sees it, does it exist? Is the world the way we see it? Is that the way it really is? Or do our senses filter out the world so that the world that we see is a little different than the world other people see? What if we had more eyes, not only two in front, but two more in back? What if we had sensory organs that were larger than our noses, God forbid! Would we perceive the world differently than we perceive it now?” These are fascinating questions.

There is a wonderful book about vision written by Marius Von Senden entitled Space and Sight. It seems that when surgeons first discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they traveled across Europe and America operating on people who had congenital cataracts, which is to say, people who had been blind from birth. Von Senden said that the doctors before the operation gave the patients objects to identify like a sphere or a cube. The patients felt them, some even tasted them, and were able to identify what they were holding in their hands. After the operation, the doctors gave them the same objects but they could not identify them. When they saw them they had no idea what they were.

They had trouble with space, thus with depth. A newly sighted girl looked at a photograph and asked, “What are all those dark patches” She was told that those are shadows. The doctor explained how shadows enable us to read the shape of something. He said “if there are no shadows, then everything would look flat.” The girl replied, “That’s the way things are. Everything is flat with dark patches.”

A doctor asked a newly sighted man to take off his boot and throw it into the middle of the floor. He did. Then he was told to retrieve it. The man took a few steps and reached for the boot. It was too far away. He took a few more steps and reached. He still couldn’t reach it. Then he began inching forward, cautiously, until he finally reached it. He had no sense of depth.

Von Senden reported that the patients also had no idea of the size of the world that they lived in. They thought that the world consisted of only what they could touch, hear, or taste. There was a dimension to the world that they had no idea existed: the dimension of depth. They had to be instructed to see depth in the world. We may have a parable developing here. Not everybody is able to see into the depth of things.

Von Senden also reported that most of these patients refused to see what their newly opened eyes had revealed to them. They preferred their old world of darkness. They continued to rely on touching, feeling, and tasting. One disappointed father, hoping so much from this operation on his daughter, reported that his daughter would close her eyes when walking around the house. She was never as comfortable as when her eyes were closed.

Maybe that’s the clue why some people could look at Jesus in the manger and see nothing extraordinary. But the shepherds looked at him, and went away glorifying God for all that they had seen. They were able to see into the depth of things.

We all have the ability to see depth, though some of us have never used it, and some of us prefer not to use it. There are people more comfortable moving around the world with their eyes closed. We pretty much see what we want to see. Remember that old refrain, “We don’t have racism here.” We can see very well from a distance, but not so well close up. The same thing is true with poverty. Freeways are great, aren’t they? We can drive right past poverty and never see it.

It’s the same with generations. I heard this not so long ago: “If the music is too loud, you are too old.” A lot of the problem between parents and children is caused by their living in two different worlds, but that’s not true. Parents and children do live in the same world. They just see it differently. One can’t see what the other is able to see.

Now back to those shepherds. Why could they see what other people couldn’t see? What gave them depth perception to see Immanuel, God with us, in a baby? Luke’s answer is very simple. They were told what to look for. That’s the meaning of the angel saying, "I bring you glad tidings of a great joy.” Luke believes that you and I have received the same thing that the shepherds got. We, too, have “glad tidings of great joy.” It is called gospel. In fact, in Luke. Luke’s book is called the Gospel According to Luke. Gospel means “good news,” and “good news” means “glad tidings.” Luke is saying we, too, have received “glad tidings of a great joy.” So keep your eyes open and get some depth perception as you look at the world. You will discover that this is a world different from the one you think it is.

What happens here in church every Sunday is eye exercises. We are here to help people see beneath the surface of things, to see the depth that is present in the world, to see Emmanuel, God is with us, right here, right now!

The Gospel of Thomas was discovered a few years ago in Egypt in a 2,000-year-old dump that was being dug up by archaeologists. It turned out to be one of the biggest archaeological finds in the Twentieth Century. They found a fifth gospel called the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is asked, “Will the Kingdom come?” And Jesus replies, “The Kingdom is all about you, and you don’t see it.”

Robert Oppenheimer, the great physicist said, “There are children in the street who can work the most complex problems in physics because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost years ago.”

Now back to the Von Senden study. He reported that not everybody reverted to their old way of seeing. He told of one girl who, when the bandages were removed from her eyes, was dazzled by the beauty of the world. The brightness and the color of the world overwhelmed her. She closed her eyes, too, but not to hide. She closed them because of the intensity of beholding all this beauty and brightness at once. He reported that she would close her eyes and open them again, close them and open them again. Every time she opened them she exclaimed, “O God, how beautiful”

So how is your vision these days? Have you seen the glory of God shining in a Manger? If you have, then I invite you to accept a P.S., my Pastor’s Suggestion. Friends, to my mind one of the great failures of most “Mainline” church such as ours is our inability or unwillingness to reach out to working class people. Our church, like most churches is almost entirely middle class. If God cared enough at the first Christmas to send a special invitation to the Manger to the shepherds, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we cared enough to invite their spiritual descendants – ordinary working men and women and their families to come to the Manger this year? Don’t tell me you don’t know any to invite! Open your eyes! Working people are all around us.  When they come to our Christmas service we’ll have even more reason to wish each other “Merry Christmas!” because we will be sharing the Joy the world needs so much. That’s what the world needs now. And we can help to make it happen.