Soft is Loud

Welcome to the last Sunday in our upside down Christmas series. I want to point something out about Christmas. About the birth of Jesus—it was the complete opposite of what everybody was expecting in that time and day. It was unexpected. It was upside down in the way it undermined the sociological and political system of the first century. The Israelites were waiting for a savior. They were waiting for a savior that should have looked like Julius Caesar. They were looking for somebody born in a palace, with armed guards. They were looking for a king whose very birth would have been heralded by a throng of trumpeters and kings. But they didn’t get that. They got Luke 2. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born,7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them. 8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” – Luke 2:6-14 You see, in the first century, they got a baby born in a manger. I explained this to the kids this morning. God, when he took the form of a man, didn’t come from the East, with a vast army conquering the Western world, no, he was born in the family of an artisan, 86 miles removed from anything useful in a colony that people thought was no more useful than a pitstop in between places. He was born in somebody’s shed. He wasn’t born in the privacy of a room or even behind closed doors; he was born on the side of some hillbillie’s home along a well beaten highway. This was the birth of the savior. Our savior had no inheritance. He was born out of wedlock. He wasn’t born as a king who would bring together a kingdom. In fact, you may postulate that he was born in the same conditions as a shepherd, thus signifying his role in our lives, not as a king who is tyrant over our lives, but as a shepherd, guiding us along life. This is what Luke was saying here. Do you see this announcement here in Luke? Good news isn’t meant to be spoken so softly. Not at all. The angels didn’t go to King Herod, nor did they go to the Persian kings or even the Roman Emperor—they went to a bunch of gypsies. What the Bible doesn’t tell you exactly about the “shepherds” was not that they took care of sheep, but that they were in our socio-economic realm of life considered no better than day laborers. They often worked for other people and almost never went into a town for any reason because they weren’t well liked or appreciated. The angels of God told these outsiders, these outcasts, these people who seemingly had no ability to influence and change society in the least bit. Yet God chose these people to be the first to know that there is good news. Look at the sign that the angels pointed to: the savior’s going to look like any other baby born laying in a feeding troth. The arrival of a savior was spoken softly to a bunch of people whose eye witness accounts did nothing in their worlds. There would be no parade, nor would there be a banquet. In fact, the end of his life would be marked by suffering and death undeserved for a life he worthily lived. This is not the West African proverb that said, “speak softly and carry a big stick.” it is not the proverb that one of my childhood heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, made famous in the Monroe Doctrine. No, speak softly, is how God uses the most unexpecting, the most understated things and people in this world to undermine the culture in this day and age to affect the world in a very loud way. But let’s look at the response of these shepherds: 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” 16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. – Luke 2:15-20 Let’s look at verse 15, the shepherds responded to the soft message of God, and the reason I call it soft was that there was no ultimatum, there was no instruction, there was nothing more than a message to be heard; and they listened, and in their listening, they moved. They acted. The shepherds took the soft message of God and it spoke loudly in their lives and in the lives of Mary and Joseph whom they visited that day. Do you not thing Joseph and Mary were encouraged and changed by that visit in addition to the Magi? Of course they were. Do you think that the townspeople of Bethlehem were not curious to see what the fuss was all about outside the side of a poor person’s home—of course they were! The Bible clearly says that they “hurried off.” And then after they experienced what was so softly witnessed to them, they had “spread the word.” I want us to think about the top trending news stories from yesterday. I would say this week, but there was so much morbid stuff this week that I’d rather not think about it in any great length or detail.

• Funerals for the Newtown massacre victims/Americans buying more assault rifles
• Fiscal cliff/ Gallon of milk to rise to $7
• Syria gathers chemical arms
• Iowa court saying you can fire somebody for being “irresistibly attractive”
• Are Asians too smart for their Own Good?

Why am I telling you this? It’s simple: something is wrong with the world as we know and if we don’t do anything about our reality, I’m hoping the Mayans just miscounted by a few days on their calendar and the world ends pretty quickly. Yeah, I know, pretty morbid, but you and I both know that there is something terribly wrong going on and we just sit in our homes allowing this loud nonsense define the norm of our lives. They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the Lord to cherish whoredom, wine, and new wine, which take away the understanding. My people inquire of a piece of wood, and their walking staff gives them oracles. For a spirit of whoredom has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the whore. (Hosea 4:10-12 ESV) You see all these things didn’t have us do anything for anybody except for ourselves. I bet even hearing these things, none of us cared enough, nor were affected enough to pause like the shepherds did and look into it at all. Let’s forget about looking into it, none of us heard these things and cared enough to stop and even whisper a prayer—we’re too concerned about what Christmas break has in store for us. All these loud events did nothing for us, to change life as we know it. Let me give you an example: the Newtown massacre, it gave pause for a split second in the American public, but you know what the real aftermath and tragedy is from that—assault rifle sales have doubled, if not tripled in the days since. You want to talk about the fiscal cliff and how people want to point fingers left and right and what not, well everybody cried wolf and there is still no deal. Let’s talk about Syria and their chemical weapons shopping spree, nothing still. It’s the loudness in life that causes us to become deaf and callous. We need to change that. God spoke softly with the arrival of his son on this earth, but it shook the foundation of how the world operated. This Christmas Sunday, I want to invite you all to challenge yourself to speak softly when everything gets loud and see what kind of effect that has on the world around you. If we spoke softly, that is to say, if we would simply speak in little ways, doing small things, and stepping into places and relationships and interactions that seem too small to make a difference, you would be speaking more loudly than you ever imagined and have more people responding to your soft voice. Which is exactly what the birth of Jesus in the middle of irrelevancy, witnessed by a bunch of nobodies did for the world. Which is not to say that loud things don’t get things done, but I am saying if we spoke softly and did things, wouldn’t we move and shake things like God shook things? Malala Yousafzai, if you don’t know that name, it just proves my point about how our lives need to be flipped upside down. She is 15 years old and has a titanium plate in her head. The reason she has a titanium plate in her head was because a Taliban assassin shot her in the head and she didn’t die and the only way to keep her alive was to remove a part of her skull to allow her brain to swell. All she wanted was to go to school. She spoke softly, “All I want is an education… and I am afraid of no one.” IT was her softness in voice that silenced the loud misguided Taliban noise in Swat, Pakistan. Honestly her soft voice probably changed the future of exploited children, whom instead of school would have become prostitutes, soldiers or laborers. Perhaps, you’re not there yet. But you know you want to, let me tell you how our church did something softly. Just last week, I know almost none of you know about this, but our church helped about 100 kids have a Christmas this year. It was because of that, we got matching funds to help an additional 100 kids for Christmas. This didn’t happen because we loudly or crassly advertised; it happened because we decided that even doing something small, would be multiplied by God and make it bigger and louder than what we thought. People are always asking me, while why don’t we take pictures and get the news there to shed light on that? But you see, when you speak softly, you get the job done by speaking to the people you need to speak to for the purposes of the job. We shook the worlds of these kids, who to the rest of the world, are like the shepherds of the first century—neglected by society. We spoke softly into their lives for the glory of God and I guarantee you that their lives were changed and will continue to be changed this Christmas, the same way Jesus’ insertion into the world was spoken softly that snowballed into an unstoppable movement. A lot of think that this kind of stuff has no place and that it is ineffective in a world where our news is dictated by the loudest noises; where people who shout the loudest get their way and ahead in life. Where people whose actions are made loud by the array of violence that they leave in their wake, are the dictators of culture and society and that is the notion I want to challenge this week. That is absolutely incorrect and the greatest story and act of all was soft. You see, when we speak softly and act softly, people have to lean in to look at us, the world around us becomes stiller, and they will want to listen. The misconception is that people who speak louder get listened to, but they only have an audience that is unfocused. When we speak soft, we are being loud because the world will pick up on our cues. We can stand in one place, look people in the eye, and speak to them in a soft voice. Tell them exactly what you want. And they’ll give it to you. Lets pray.