Biography
George A. Reinke is Senior Pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Wheaton, Illinois. He is widely known for his innovative and creative preaching. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"A Christmas Encounter" 
If Charles Dickens had included me in his Christmas Carol, I would probably be known as the Shepherd of Christmas Past.

I was on the hillside that night so many years ago when Christmas happened. You remember how St. Luke begins the story, “Out in that region there were shepherds in the fields.”

Yes, we were out there as we had been on so many other nights, and that night seemed no different than all the rest — until we had that encounter with the Heavenly Host.

Christmas was really a series of encounters. Encounters when some messenger of God broke into the lives of ordinary men and women and brought them into the Christmas story. You know those folks. People like Zacharias, who in the midst of his temple duties, discovers there is an angel standing at his side. Or his wife, Elizabeth, who in her very old age gives birth to a son that we come to know as John the Baptist.

Or Mary, chosen to be the mother of the Savior. Or Joseph, needing the help of an angel in his dreams to understand how he fits into the Christmas story.

Encounters — unexpected, unannounced — and with each encounter lives were changed. And that’s really the purpose of Christmas for all of us that we might encounter the love and presence of God and have our lives changed. And perhaps my encounter will help that happen to you.

I must warn you, first of all, that encounters can be frightening. St. Luke noticed that. He describes us as being full of fear, and he’s right. Fear was our first reaction to this encounter.

I remember that night as being unusually dark and it was a rather quiet one. The only sound was that of the sheep as they moved about and our own voices as we talked a bit. And then, we became aware of another sound, a kind of a rushing or a rustling sound, and it seemed to be all around us. And the sky began to grow bright in the middle of the night. And then we saw a form or a figure, brighter than the background, and it was moving toward us. And then it began to speak and we were filled with fear.

I don’t know if you can understand that kind of fear. News always comes to you in such a safe way, at a distance. You can hear the worst possible news but it’s always in the comfort and the security of your living room, through your television or your radio.

You never really encounter news the way we did. We had no telephones, no radios, no newspapers, no television. How did news come to us? It always came in person. And we called those people “heralds”. And whenever a herald arrived, there was fear, especially among the poor and the powerless because the news was usually bad, and there was nothing we could do to change it. Some new tax being levied, or perhaps more soldiers quartered in our village, or grain rationing again, or some unbelievable hardship like the taking of a census.

Do you see why we were frightened? Our first thought was what new burden is being laid on our shoulders? And then we caught some of the words, “Good news”, “Great joy”, “All people”. We could hardly believe what we were hearing, but we listened. And we learned that from this encounter we had nothing to fear. For once in our lives the news was good.

I want you to have that same “Good news” in your life, and so there is something else I must say about this encounter. It was real. It was absolutely real. And I say that because I’m not sure it is for you.

These Christian encounters happened so long ago, way back then in a culture that you can scarcely imagine. And I’m afraid that for you Christmas might seem like a once-upon-a-time story, and those stories are never rooted in real life. But this encounter was real. And words of the angel tie it into history, “this day in the city of David — a baby.”

This day was an actual day in history that happened in my lifetime. This night when the news was announced was a night as real as tonight is for you. The City of David — that’s Bethlehem. And Bethlehem still stands on that same hillside. You can walk through its streets as I did. Bethlehem is as real as your hometown.

And a baby — yes, a tiny, vulnerable, beautiful little baby. Just like the ones that you have perhaps held in your arms at one time or another.

Sometimes I wish that Christmas could happen all over again so that you could encounter it as we did. So that you could experience that range of thoughts and feelings that went through our hearts and minds.

You see, if Christmas is just a story to you then it can never be more than entertainment, and God is not in the entertainment business. He’s interested in real people and situations, as real as shepherds at work, or motels full of travelers, or proud new mothers, or rather helpless new fathers. People as real as you are with situations just like yours.

If you can understand the reality of this encounter, then I think you will understand the most personal thing I want to say to you. It was wonderful!

You see, shepherds are a strange group. We don’t have a very high opinion of ourselves, and nobody else does either. Shepherds are really outcasts, much like the gypsies are in your day. We aren’t very successful at life. We have a job, yes — but it’s a job nobody else wants. And so shepherds are a rough, uneducated bunch. We smell of mutton, and barnyards, and damp clothing, and unwashed bodies. We live with our sheep on the fringe of society, shut out from most of the life of the community.

It happened to us. The angel did not bring that news to the merchants or the town people or even the mayor. The good news came to that hillside where we alone received it. And we brought it to the rest of Bethlehem.

“Unto you,” the angel said, and he said it to the likes of me. How can I tell you what that meant to someone usually shut out from the important things of life? On the outskirts of town, the good news came to us on the outskirts of life.

Tonight while I was waiting to talk with you, I was paging through a church magazine, and I came across a story about two little boys who live in a country called Wisconsin. They’re twins — Nolan and Nathan — and one of them has cancer. Nolan is struggling with leukemia and his treatments of chemotherapy have caused all of his hair to fall out. He’s completely bald, and the kids at school tease Nolan. They call him names like “Baldy”, “Chrome-dome”, and it hurts him very much. And his brother Nathan knew that. One day Nathan came to his mother and told her he wanted to have all the hair cut off of his head so that he could be just like Nolan. He thought then maybe the teasing would stop.

So the family talked it over and they gave their consent. They borrowed the tools they needed and one night they gathered in the living room, and Nathan gave the tools to his brother Nolan and asked him to cut off all his hair. And as the family watched, and they wept a bit, as Nathan’s blond hair fell to the floor.

A few nights later, it was the Christmas Sunday School program at their church, and all the kids were gathered at the front of the church singing Christmas hymns about a God who loved us so much that he came down here to be just like us. And there in the front row was Nolan and his brother Nathan who loved him so much that he deliberately chose to be just like him.

I would call that a Christmas kind of encounter. Nathan gave his brother the same kind of love and concern that the angel announced to me.

You see, encounters don’t have to be with angels. They don’t have to be at Christmastime. They can happen whenever the love and concern of God break in and become real in someone’s life.

They can happen to you. Or they can happen through you. But they all begin with that first Christmas — Christmas-past — when we encountered the presence of God in a way we had never known before.

“You will find the baby lying in a manger.” It was wonderful, and it still is.

So this year even if you don’t see any angels in the heavens or any shepherds on the hillside, Christmas can still be for you everything that it has been for me. And I pray that it will be.

Shalom.