The Shepherd’s Prayer
“The Adoration of the Shepherds,” pupil of Rembrandt (1646)
What began as an attempt to capture in concise form the experience of the shepherds in the Nativity story eventually turned into an epic prayer that looked at their experience cockeyed and saw instead the absurdly generous ways of God that rarely makes sense to the world as we know it and that shows up in our own lives only with great difficulty.
I hardly think any liturgical committee, Anglican or otherwise, would ever accept this entry into an official prayer book, but I figure that’s fine. It says what needs saying: that God’s ways are not our ways (though they should be more often than they are) and that God’s ways involve, as the ethicist and priest Samuel Wells puts it, inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, and fathomless love.
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.
Kim Hueng Jong (Korean, 1928-), “Christmas Scene.”
Dinah Roe Kendall, “The Shepherds Went to See the Baby” (1998).
Lorenzo Costa, “The Adoration of the Shepherds with Angels” (ca. 1499)
