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Also by J. Barrie Shepherd
Between Mirage and Miracle: Selected Poems for Seasons, Festivals, and the Occasional Revelation
Faces by the Wayside: Persons Who Encountered Jesus on the Road
Whatever Happened To Delight? Preaching the Gospel in Poetry and Parables
Aspects of Love: An Exploration of 1 Corinthians 13
Faces at the Cross: A Lent and Easter Collection of Poetry and Prose
Faces at the Manger: An Advent-Christmas Sampler of Poems, Prayers, and Meditations
Seeing With the Soul: Daily Meditations on the Parables of Jesus in Luke
The Moveable Feast: Selected Poems for the Christian Year and Beyond
A Pilgrim’s Way: Meditations for Lent and Easter
A Child Is Born: Meditations for Advent and Christmas
Praying the Psalms: Daily Meditations on Cherished Psalms
Prayers from the Mount: Daily Meditations on the Sermon on the Mount
Encounters: Poetic Meditations on the Old Testament
A Diary of Prayer: Daily Meditations on the Parables of Jesus
Diary of Daily Prayer
Destination Bethlehem
Daily Meditations, Prayers, and Poems to Light the Way to the Manger
J. Barrie Shepherd
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
