Destination Bethlehem

      Daily Meditations, Prayers, and Poems to Light the Way to the Manger

      Copyright © 2015 J. Barrie Shepherd. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Wipf & Stock

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-4982-0922-9

      eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-0923-6

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Scripture quotations (unless otherwise noted) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      I dedicate this book to our neighbors and fellow residents,the staff, and the administration of Piper Shores Retirement Community,perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Scarborough, Maine,with thanks to God that they found “room at the inn”for Mhairi, Iona, and me.

      Let us now go even unto Bethlehem,and see this thing which is come to pass,which the Lord hath made known unto us.

      —Luke 2:15 (KJV)

      Permissions

      Permission to reprint the following poems has been granted.

      From The Christian Century:

      Advent Awakening, Repetition, Early Advent, Christmas Mail, Advent Haiku, Advent Saturday Morning, Trimming, Lighting the Advent Candles, The Messiah, Incarnating, The Morning After, Essence, On the 11th Day of Christmas, Hanging the Greens, The Coming of the Light

      From Presbyterian Outlook:

      Advent Invitation, Advent Opening Bell, Early Advent, Time to be Careful, Advent Candles, Advent’s Secret, Seasonal Décor, Nothing for Christmas, Minimizing Magic, December Eighteenth, Pre-Nativity, Don’t Stop Me, Nativity, On the 11th Day of Christmas

      From Weavings:

      Advent Awakening, Kaleidoscoping Christmas, The Silent Seers, The Midwife of Bethlehem

      From The Living Church:

      Advent’s Secret, Stall for Christmas, Late Call, Wish

      From The Swarthmorean:

      Trimming, The Morning After

      From Christianity Today:

      Advent Candles

      From Theology Today:

      Left Behind

      From The Cresset:

      Herod’s Dream

      Preface

      Christmas has always seemed the busiest of times; and for someone with the double-barreled name and job title I bear—Pastor Shepherd—it can seem even more so. All the normal Yuletide pressures and deadlines are topped by the one that looms at midnight or, to be more accurate, eleven p.m. on December twenty-fourth: the annual Christmas Eve sermon. And the more years spent facing this challenge, the more daunting it becomes. All the best lines have already been exhausted by the Christmas carols, and your own dwindling supply gets more and more picked over until it starts to look like the bargain basement after the January sales . . . a sock here . . . a glove there . . . and very little worth checking out at all.

      Yet another annual complication was the cherished tradition, in one college town where I served for sixteen such Christmas Eves, of having a live Santa (played by a band of high school and college lads) visit your children in their bedrooms and present them with merry “Ho Ho Hos,” plus a previously selected small gift. The youngsters loved it. But, since I was never home from the midnight service before one-thirty a.m., the Shepherd household needed to be placed at the end of the list. Consequently, those—by then not quite so merry—“Ho Ho Hos” seldom sounded at our front door before three in the morning. Only after that could “Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap” finally “settle down for an (extremely brief) winter’s nap.”

      Nowadays, with no midnight sermons to deliver, and no one left at home to wait up for Santa, I get to bed much earlier on Christmas Eve, but find myself missing some of the excitement and challenge of those earlier days. Considering all this, I realized that it has been almost twenty-five years since the publication of my Faces at the Manger, a few years longer since A Child is Born first appeared; and while these two slim volumes still seem to bear a significant message for the new reader, those who have already found them helpful across the years might appreciate the opportunity to look at something fresh and somewhat different. So I decided to look back at some of those well-worn traditions, to check over some of those carefully crafted sermons, to see if anything there might be salvaged, or better say, reclaimed, even recycled. In the thrifty spirit of my Scottish homeland, and new ideas and perspectives being scarce in any of our seasons, I began to sift through the homiletical mementos of those long and weary “nights before Christmas,” looking for tales to be retold, gems to be repolished, gifts to be reopened.

      It is my hope and prayer that, recaptured here and set within a holiday wreath of poetry and prayer, these Advent/Christmas meditations might open up a way for you, dear reader, to pause a moment in these hectic days, to reflect, perhaps, on some of your own cherished Christmases past, to find yourself a welcoming spot beneath the tree, a quiet place beside the manger.

      I have arranged these selections to follow the traditional sequence of Advent, providing a meditation, prayer, and/or poetry, for each day of the season’s four weeks. In addition there is a series of meditations and poems for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and a final selection covering the period between Christmas and