If you go to a small Christian village outside of Bethlehem called Beit Sahour, you can find the fields where tradition has it the shepherds encountered the angel telling them that the Messiah was being born down the road in Bethlehem.

If you were on a tour bus today and asked the driver to take you to that "Shepherds' Field," your driver would have to think for a minute. He or she will have a choice to make. The choice might depend on the driver's own faith tradition. Or it might depend on what she thinks you want. Or it might depend on whose souvenir shop, outside of which entrance, he has an arrangement with to get a cut of whatever you purchase. It might even depend on how much time you have for this little detour. All this because there are actually three places in that little village identified as the Shepherds' Field.

The most often visited field is the place claimed by the Roman Catholics and run by the Franciscans. There's a lovely chapel there, and a cave where you can see where the shepherds probably slept and how folks lived in the Palestine of 2000 years ago. There's a display of the Holy Family there, replete with place for baby Jesus--even though that's not what is said to have happened in that place.

Your driver might also take you to an even older place, which Eastern Orthodox Christians claim to be their Shepherds' Field. Here are vestiges of ancient devotion, with discovered remains of fourth, fifth, sixth century churches and more.

Yet if your driver figures you out and decides you're more the social action type, you might be driven to the local YMCA.  It's built where some Protestants have claimed a place where the angel told the frightened shepherds about Jesus.

Three places, confused for at least 1600 years.

One can dismiss this confusion to silly Christian disunity and argument. Or one can see a parable of Christmas in it all. I'm sure it's both, but I'll go with the parable for now. For do we not all start in different places on our way toward Bethlehem? Do we not need to encounter the angel wherever we find ourselves, get caught up by both fear of and desire for the One who will save us from ourselves—no matter our life experience?

Christmas calls us from some very different fields to take a journey to the same place. We're directed to the place right next to the trough that's been cleared of food for the donkeys and made welcoming to this One born among us. We're invited to be taken in by the same baby's face that arrests our attention, that woos us away from fear and toward Love.

Each of us, called from our own places, can find Christmas when we discover that in some small way we're no longer the one seeing, but that we are ourselves the ones being seen—right there in Palestine, and right here in our own place and in our own time. It happens when we let this Jesus see us. It happens when we let him see into our very souls, to welcome us from our various fields of life so we can enter a new home--rough hewn, but beautiful. It happens when we find ourselves right next to other shepherds from other flocks in other places who have found there way to this very same place.

And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. (Luke 2:20)

There are many familiar traditions associated with Christmas that we expect to experience as members of families, churches and communities each Advent season. We expect to see red and green decorations, Christmas trees, evergreen wreathes and Christmas lights and so forth. There are the foods that we look forward to enjoying – Christmas cookies and other baked goods, Christmas candy, delectable party foods, and then there’s Christmas dinner: a goose, or roast beef, a ham or maybe a turkey!

There are also the things we expect to hear – like the story of Mary and Joseph, classic Christmas carols, other popular Christmas music and the familiar clang of the Salvation Army bells, along with the sounds of many kinds of other bells. It is hard to imagine the Christmas season without hearing the sound of bells. Bell ringing is certainly not foreign to Pinnacle worshippers. A substantial number of our children, youth and adults meet each week to prepare bell anthems for various Sunday worship times.

The sound of bell ringing is deeply rooted in British culture. Almost everyone in Britain lives within hearing range of bells. They provide the grand soundtrack to our historic moments, call out for our celebrations and toll sadly in empathy with our grief. The bitter-sweet sound of just one bell or the majesty of a whole peal, has become part of the English heritage and much of the country's history can be traced through the history of its bells. They call us to wake, to pray, to work, to arms, to feast and, in times of crisis, to come together. Above all, bells are the sound of freedom and peace as in World War II they hung silently until the day they could ring in the peace.

Those of you who have participated in my Pipe Organ Encounters at Pinnacle have discovered the star at the top of the organ case. The “cymbelstern” meaning “cymbal-star” is a musical instrument, which rings small bells at random as an accompaniment to organ music. It was common in northern Europe, Germany in particular, throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. After about 1700, the bells were tuned to particular notes.

So what does all of this bell-ringing mean to us as Christians? Churchgoers come from far distances and are not able to hear the bells ringing, calling them to worship. That’s what Twitter and Facebook and email are for. The hymns that are sung at worship are not heard in the rush of traffic or through the sealed air-conditioned cars buzzing past. But church bells can do one thing - they help us think about the church’s relationship to the world around her.

Bells call Christians to abandon the world and assemble for worship. They call out to us to flee our normal routines, our day-to-day activities, and come to where Christ is present in mercy and life and join with angels and archangels in the feast that has no end. We are called out of the world to be the church and receive forgiveness from our crucified Savior. That is what the word “church” means in Greek. “Ecclesia” literally means, “called out.” We abandon the world to be united to Jesus.                                           

As we approach the “big day”, I hope that each of you will find a bell and ring it out with gusto.

Ring the bells, ring the bells,
Let the whole world know
Christ the Savior lives today
As He did so long ago!

 Merry Christmas!

“If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.” ~I Corinthians 13: 2b-3

We all have Christmas traditions that we hold on to. Whether it is putting up the lights on a certain day every year, or getting family and friends together. When my wife was little she lived in Missouri. Her parents were both pastors and had to lead worship until late into the night on Christmas Eve. They had a tradition that between the two services her parents led, they would open one present, which was usually pajamas. They would put them on and go to bed, and then Christmas morning they would get up, load their presents in the car and drive to Kansas to spend Christmas with her grandfather. Because of this tradition, after the Christmas Eve service my children get to go home and unwrap one present, pajamas, and wear them to bed. As a parent, I think this tradition is more for us than our kids so we aren’t forcing them to put on clothes in the morning before opening presents so we can take pictures.

My family always attended the late service. So before the service, we would go out to dinner and spend Christmas Eve dinner together - just my parents and my sister and me. Afterwards, we would spend an hour or so driving around looking at Christmas lights before heading to worship. While not on Christmas Eve but a few days before Christmas, we still do this with our family to help us get into the Christmas spirit.

Three years ago, just after Jude turned one, Becca and I found ourselves in a Christmas rut. With three kids under 5 the world was starting to take over Christmas. Every time a commercial would come on it was, “I want that.” When we went to the store it was, “buy me this”, “I want that.” It got to the point that we didn’t want to go anywhere or watch anything on TV because we didn’t want to battle with our kids. The real reason to celebrate Christmas had lost its meaning to busyness and commercialism.

A few years earlier, Becca and I had a friend who died suddenly at the age of 26. For some reason that year, in the midst of everything that was going on, Andrew and his family were put on Becca’s heart. As we sat at dinner one night with three kids under the age of 5, we started talking about Andrew and his family and how hard it would be to lose a child. One thing lead to another and Becca said, “What if this Christmas we do something different? What if we did something in honor of Andrew that was more about helping others than about ourselves? What if instead of waking up first thing in the morning and opening all of our presents, which we had done the previous 4 years and was a nightmare, we started our morning off doing something for someone else?”

We told our kids about our great idea and they weren’t super excited about it, but they went along. So that Christmas morning, after we looked in our stockings to see what Santa gave us, we loaded into our car, still in our Christmas pajamas, and bought 12 sausage egg McMuffin meals to pass out to people in need. We bought 12 partly because it was the number that Andrew wore in high school sports, and partly because that was all we could afford. When we set out we had no idea how long the kids would last or how long it would take us to find people, homeless or not, who wanted a hot warm meal. Any hesitation we had, again this was Becca’s idea and I was just a long for the ride, went out the window with the first bag of food that we passed out. Who knew that love could come in the form of a hot meal?

That first Christmas it took us just over an hour and a half to pass out those 12 meals and afterwards we went home and started our Christmas. What started as 12 meals has quickly grown into 40 hot meals on Christmas morning. For our kids, Christmas doesn’t start when we get home from delivering food, delivering food is part of Christmas. In Michael W. Smith’s song “Give it Away” he sings, “We can entertain compassion for a world in need of care, but the road of good intentions doesn't lead to anywhere. ‘Cause love isn't love ‘till you give it away. You gotta give it away.”

We can get caught up in things like Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas or why Starbucks is bad, not really, for only having red cups with no Christmas design, but in the end that doesn’t really matter. We live in a world of hurt and pain that now, maybe more than ever, needs to experience the love of God first hand. This Advent season, as we prepare to celebrate God’s love for us in the birth of Jesus, I encourage you to find some way or someone that you or your family can help experience God’s love first hand by giving it away.

We would love to hear how you experienced God’s love this Christmas, simply by giving it away.