Rise up, shepherds
A Restful Christmastide Pageant, Scene 2
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the child lying in the manger.
—Luke 2:15-16 (NRSVue)
There's a star in the East on Christmas morn
1 There’s a star in the East on Christmas morn;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
It will lead to the place where the Christ was born;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
Refrain:
Follow, follow;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
Follow the Star of Bethlehem;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
2 Leave your sheep, leave your sheep, and leave your lambs;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
Leave your ewes and your rams, leave your ewes and rams;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow. [Refrain]
3 If you take good heed to the angel’s words;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herds;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow. [Refrain]
Enjoy one of my favorite versions of this carol and 100+ others on my Restful Christmastide playlist!
THE SHEPHERD’S PRAYER
O Lord, You who delight to announce the birth of Jesus, not to professional heralds of the empire, capable of successfully spreading the news to the biggest number of people, persons of influence, men and women of sophistication, who would know how to get things done, in order to produce maximally effective results, generating in that way the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people; but rather—but rather! to a paltry number of shepherds, “nobodies” in the world, rude, rough and easily forgettable, to whom a needlessly excessive host of angels sing an exquisite anthem in the lower atmosphere—a Fanfare for the Common Man, they called it—who spread the news throughout the all-too little town of Bethlehem (not one of those “cities of the future”), stirring the hearts of a few souls, astonishing a handful of night owls, then returning to their day jobs, near dawn, back to the grind of their small, unsophisticated lives. May we, like you, delight to give extravagantly of ourselves and of our goods to the least and to the lost—lost to their own selves, lost on the way to who knows what anymore, but not lost to You—to these and to others like them, may we give even to those who may not fully appreciate what we have given, but who nonetheless deserve the best and the finest, so that we might acquire a heart of generosity that knows no bounds, that gives without expectation of return, that offers the entire pantry of our lives in joy because we know to whom belong: to a gracious Father in heaven who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, whose Son generates an excess of wine and a surfeit of bread, exceeding all requirements of necessity, and who gives us his Spirit without measure, flooding our hearts with the love of the Eternal Godhead, thereby enabling us to become emissaries of divine bounty in a world that dares us to believe otherwise and tempts us to live in any other way but generous-without-strings. We pray this in the name of the One who makes us rich by becoming poor for our sake. Amen.
—"The Shepherds Prayer,” W. David O. Taylor
Happy Christmas from our home to yours!
