christmas is for shepherds and moabites

Looking back on this blog, I can spot times where I’ve written angsty at the church or when I’ve made the gospel seem as though it was only for the elite. I’ve written from places of hurt and sadness. There are some lighthearted posts here and there and a whole lot of essays of encouragement. On balance, I’d much rather write about a gospel that is true and gracious. And accessible.

If you drew a line from previous posts that sounded more preachy to where I’ve been ruminating in recent years you’d discover that line marks precisely when Graham passed too soon from this world. He’s my reason for this “new season” of softening.

His story has taken the edge off. How God handled Graham has taught my fingers to dance across the keyboard. I’m not spending as much time these days wringing my hands over the condition of the church, and overly obsessed with matters of who’s in who’s out. I’m still savoring the awe that my boy is with Jesus…and waking up to a gospel of attraction rather than subtraction.

As Christmas approaches I find myself thinking about the key players in the nativity story once again. I suppose it’s because our son was taken eight Decembers ago I’ve been more drawn to the people who shouldn’t be in the cast of Advent but are. People like those shepherds abiding. Imagine these guys making up the first worship team!

These were not a romanticized version of herdsman but a rough-and-tumble group of guys. Today, they would be more suited for a biker’s bar than a synagogue. Gamey and course, their arms would sport a collision of tattoos and hard lines from hard lives would crease their faces.

And yet, and yet.

Heaven sang like a choir to this audience of irregulars. Religious folk labeled them unclean. They were unwelcome in their churches because their line of work with sacrificial lambs connected them to manure and flies and death. They had one job: tend the temple sheep until they were needed to spill blood for the people’s sin. This bunch were tough.

And yet…the Light of Christmas Glory built a tabernacle around them.

A friend and I shared breakfast last week and conversation turned to, as it always does, the gospel. I mentioned I was in Isaiah in my daily reading and referenced the prophet’s hard words about an ancient people, the Moabites. But then I discovered something.

A very cool gospel something.

Virtually nowhere in scripture are the Moabites mentioned with any degree of favor. They are the sworn enemies of God’s people from the beginning. So repugnant are they, God makes them pariah in his own sanctuary.

No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever,

Deuteronomy 23:3

You’d be hard-pressed to find anything anywhere in the Bible remotely nice about Moabites. Even Isaiah, the “Christmas” prophet (Isa 7:14, 9:2, 9:6, 11:1) piled on with a plethora of judgments regarding Moab, not mincing words.

And yet. And yet.
[Here’s the very cool gospel part]

I found a lone verse where Moab is given a good ending, just like my boy. Plugging the word “Moab” into my Bible app’s search engine, this text bubbled up:

“Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab

in days to come,”

declares the Lord.

Here ends the judgment on Moab.

Jeremiah 48:47

Don’t miss that last sentence. “Here ends…judgment.” Precisely because Jesus died for Moabites too is why that promise holds. What was announced to baseborn shepherds on the night of Advent — “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” — applied to a congregation of misfits.

Oh, don’t you remember? Ruth….the Moabite? Right there in Jesus’s genealogy? Jesus Messiah came into this cold earth with some Moabite blood!

Jesus is heir of a line in which flows the blood of the harlot Rahab, and of the rustic Ruth; he is akin to the fallen and to the lowly, and he will show his love even to the poorest and most obscure. I, too, may have a part and lot in him.

Charles Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom

Shepherds and Moabites, prodigals and lost causes. Christmas is good news for people without a country. The only ones left in the dark are those who ignore the Main Character. He, who was born in a feeding trough, lived homeless, and was buried in a donated grave, came not for the tidied-up but for the beat-down.

I’m weak
fragile
gone in a strong gust
or wave
my bones and soul
break
like dry twigs.

It is possible to lose all

except

the love of God.

The gospel is for the unheard, the counted-out, the ones from whom friends hide their face, the shamed, the losers.

It’s “good news to the poor…liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind”

the disadvantaged
the incarcerated
the disabled

Jesus draws near.

–Quina Aragon, Spoken Word Artist

This post is for anyone out there who has a “Moabite” in their life. Some unlikely candidate for gospel change. You hope, you actually hurt, for their salvation. This could be their last shot and that pains you.

Don’t give up, beloved. Pray that some heavenly visitor, or a choir of singing angels, finds them in some forgotten field on a night they least suspect and draws them in to “join the triumph of the skies.”

God can meet them in their isolated bulwarks of hardened flesh. He came all the way from Glory to raid the devil’s domain after all.

Selah, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!