It may be that this year during your Christmas shopping or on the radio, you heard a less familiar song ring out.
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.
Follow, follow; Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
Follow the Star of Bethlehem;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
It goes on:
Leave your sheep, and leave your lambs;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
Leave your ewes and leave your rams;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.
And it concludes:
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.
On the surface, these words are a beloved African American spiritual, composed and sung by enslaved Africans as they longed for freedom. But below the surface, there’s something more. Below the surface, like many of these spirituals, there’s a coded language. Those on the outside didn’t know this code, but those on the inside knew exactly what it meant. They were sound theologians, too.
Enslaved persons understood the code because they never forgot that God had freed the Israelites from Egypt. They understood that bodies of water were associated with deliverance. They knew that although the Promised Land often seemed like a pipedream in the wilderness, God didn’t forsake the promise to bring the Israelites to their true home.
So, when the spiritual says, Rise up, shepherds, and follow, it could be that the real message was for enslaved persons to shake off the shackles of bondage and escape, following the star to freedom. It could be that leaving the sheep and the ewes and the rams meant leaving the labor of oppression to discover a new home of emancipation. That freedom was well worth forgetting the flocks and the herds.
The genius of such spirituals was that on the surface, the language was straightforward theology. But for those who knew Christ, for those who knew what God had done and could do, the language was so much more. It was both a practical summons to freedom and to believe that freedom was possible.
Because we’ve heard the Christmas story so often and because well-meaning but simplistic Christmas pageants have shaped our understanding of this story, we have become immune to its depth. We know the surface of it, but according to St. Luke, there is more than meets the eye. A careful reader of Luke’s birth narrative will soon realize that this is a story that is told in code.
It’s a different kind of code than that found in African American spirituals. But there is an implied message in Luke’s Gospel to the underdogs of the ancient Roman empire. There’s a proclamation to the poor and the meek and the lowly that a King has come who is far greater than any emperor. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.
Our first clue is that the story features characters who often fly below the radar. An unwed mother and her betrothed from a peasant village journey not to Jerusalem for a birth but to the hamlet of Bethlehem. This is the city of David, that fallible, unpredictable king of old. And besides all this, the Savior, the Messiah, will be adopted into his lineage of all kinds of surprising and questionable characters.
But it keeps going. The angels appear to shepherds, poor field laborers who are on the outskirts of the village. The glory of the Lord shines around them. Wouldn’t those poor Jewish shepherds, despite their lack of education, have known that God’s glory led the Israelites through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? Wouldn’t they have remembered that God’s glory was always filling the Temple in ancient times? So, the message from the angels ensconced in a surrounding cloud of glory was no mere accident. And what about a child, a Savior, being born of a virgin? Didn’t the prophet Isaiah have something to say about this so many years before? There seem to be many clues in this story, a story that appears to be written in code. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.
With no offense to Christmas pageants and the Hallmark channel, if we scratch the Christmas story a bit more, we are neck deep in irony. God takes on human flesh under the auspices of an imperial edict but flying well below the radar of that census. The God who can’t be contained within human time or thought is part of a worldwide registration, and yet this God can’t be imprisoned within numbers and data.
It’s as if in this marvelous and familiar story, there’s a code for those with ears to hear. For the lowly and downtrodden, like the shepherds and the Holy Family, the code makes sense. They know that God has a rich history of rescuing the oppressed. God has a long, storied history of standing up for the underdog. And so, when the lowly shepherds hear the chorus of angels, they immediately head to Bethlehem to see the thing that has taken place. They believe it’s possible. They believe it has happened, and they want to behold this mystery. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.
And when Mary hears what has happened to the shepherds, she, too, understands the code. God’s words announced to her by the angel Gabriel have come true. She has been pondering them in her heart. She continues to treasure these words, cogitating on them. The mystery will live on.
We might very well ask, though, why a God who comes in Christ to reveal himself would do so in code. Why would God come among us furtively and unpredictably? But maybe that’s the point. For enslaved people of the nineteenth century, a coded spiritual was both practically necessary for their own safety and theologically necessary for their hope. But for the meek of Jesus’s day, it may have been a bit different. They, too, were sound theologians. They knew what God could do because of what God had already done. They were expectant and ready for God to do a new thing. And this made them especially receptive to God’s good news proclaimed in this surprising birth of the Messiah. The lowly were the ones who could crack the code. Among what better persons could God come to dwell?
But this is not how the story ends, for if this were all there were to it, the story would be no more than a vindictive slap in the face of oppressive powers, and God’s revelation is never vengeful. It can never remain secret and hidden like a gnostic prophecy. God’s pronouncements and good news are always meant to be shared and proclaimed to the ends of the earth, to all people, oppressed and oppressors alike. And so, the shepherds run to Bethlehem to share their encounter with the angels. And then, having seen the Christ child face to face, they go forth yet again, glorifying and praising God. The message may come in code, but it never stays hidden. It cannot remain hidden. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.
Even in our own day, the code is waiting to be cracked. For those of us who know the whole story, the bands of cloth shrouding the infant Child are also his grave clothes. There's much more to this story than a historical account of our Savior’s birth. If we remember the history of our God’s many deeds of old, we can break the code in our own day.
When Christ appears to us, in the poor, in the suffering, in the oppressed, in the lonely, and in our own impoverished hearts, we must rise up and follow the Star of Bethlehem to make these things known to a world that is oblivious to the code. Although God’s good news may need a code to sneak in through the chokeholds of the ungodly powers of our own day, the good news can never survive only in cryptic prophecies. It must be shared to the ends of the earth.
Those who know the scriptures will know that this Savior really is the One long expected who still comes among us and who could only come among us as one who is poor, homeless, and meek. But those in imperial power, those with armies of military might, will miss who the Savior is precisely because of his gentleness, precisely because of his poverty, precisely because he came in such an unpredicted way. It remains for those of us who know the astounding possibilities of God to break the code and tell the good news.
Which is why we might take comfort in yet one more Christmas spiritual. Go, go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere; go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born! Down in a lowly manger the humble Christ was born, and God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn! Go and tell it, everywhere, that the humble Savior who came to us in code has been decoded by our joyful proclamation. And this Savior who has come, still comes among us, and he always comes to save!
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2025