Follow the Star | December 21, 2025 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton

There's a star in the east on Christmas morn

Rise up shepherd and follow

It'll lead to the place where the Savior born

Rise up shepherd and follow

Leave your ewes and leave your lambs

Rise up shepherd and follow

Leave your sheep and leave your rams

Rise up shepherd and follow…

Follow the Star of Bethlehem

Rise up shepherd and follow

If you take good heed to the Savior's words

Rise up shepherd and follow

You'll forget your flocks,

You'll forget your herds

Rise up shepherd and follow

The opening music is an African American Spiritual from around 1750-1865. The author says, leave your sheep in order to follow…follow the star in the sky that leads to the newborn baby…leave behind your current activities…activities that are most likely in the service of Empire and go by the guidance of the stars. Like most spirituals, it is most likely describing the need to escape their current enslaved condition…the baby on Christmas representing both freedom and hope. The hope found within this song may have something to do with what Howard Thurman called The Mood of Christmas. Thurman asked: The Mood of Christmas – what is it? He answered:

It is a quickening of the presence of other human beings into whose lives a precious part of one’s own has been released. It is a memory of other days when into one’s path an angel appeared spreading a halo over the ordinary moment or a commonplace event. It is an iridescence of sheer delight that bathes one’s whole being with something more wonderful than words can ever tell.

Of such is the mood of Christmas.

Thurman goes on to ask: The symbol of Christmas – what is it? He answers like this:

It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making…dead hopes stir with newness of life.

This is wonderful indeed, keeping hope alive when times are out of joint. It expands the idea of Christmas beyond the historical facts, if there are any, and certainly beyond the date on the calendar. Yet, this date on the calendar also has a broader meaning. We are celebrating Christmas at this time because of some of our ancestors who celebrated the Great Turning of the earth…the Winter Solstice. This might also be where we may experience the strength of hope in these seemingly desperate times. Another experience of this hope may come from what Thurman spoke of as a memory of other days when into one’s path an angel appeared spreading a halo over the ordinary moment or a commonplace event. Yet we need to remember our Thanksgiving call to awareness…to the welcoming of our current reality by practicing presence, attentiveness and acceptance. This is the only way we will see the angel who appears…

Floating above the weary world the angels sing…though there is sin and strife throughout these two thousand years of wrong, although people continue to fight in wars…man, at war with man, none of us hears the love-song of the angels.

We need the awareness of our current situation…described in the song as a crushing load…one that causes us to bend low with the angels, toiling along the climbing way…with painful steps and slow. This is when we notice the love-song…this is when we encounter the angels. We must listen…listen for the song…a song that generations of people have heard…a song that has guided them to that star, under which the quickening of the presence can be felt. It is the iridescence that emerges when we join in community like The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. It is there that we find some respite…some rest from our painful walk on that weary road.

We are here today for this respite…to hear the love-song that the angels are singing…the song that throws all the rest of life into a new and created relatedness. And for many of us it is also a time to welcome the arrival of Jesus…the same Jesus that Thurman wrote about in Jesus and the Disinherited. Describing Jesus’ relatedness to God that provides hope to the disinherited as a deep confidence. Thurman writes:

Fundamental to all was his deep confidence in God. This is the heart of what he gives to the disinherited. Here is no superficial optimism, but a vast faith that reaches through all the dimensions of human life, giving dignity, worth, and purpose even to the least significant. In Jesus, all people may see the illumined finger of God guiding them in the way that they should go, so that high above the clash of arms in the conflict for status, for place, for privilege, for rights, one can hear speaking distinctly and clearly to their own spirit the still small voice of God, without which nothing has real meaning, with which all the rest of the journey, however difficult, however painful, however devastating, will be filled with a music all its own and even the stars in their appointed rounds and all the wooded world of nature participate in the triumphant music of the heart.

The triumphant music of the heart. It seems that it has been here all along, we just haven’t taken the time to listen for the still small voice. It is within and beyond…it is the suffering and the respite…It is in the stars…in the woods…in the entire universe, as much it is within our hearts. It is this seeming contradiction that Thurman is pointing to. Although, or because we are all connected, we experience both light and darkness at this time of the Winter Solstice…this time of a seeming balance between light and dark. So many mystics have wrestled and continue to wrestle with this.

An illustration of this contradiction can be found in Thurman’s final poem in the section of his book The Mood of Christmas entitled, The Christmas Greeting.

Life Seems Unaware

Once again the smell of death rides on the winds

And fear lurks within the shadows of the mind.

One by one the moments tick away.

Days and nights are interludes

Between despairing hope and groping faith.

Of this bleak desolation, Life seems unaware:

Seeds still die and live again in answer to their kind;

Fledgling birds awake to life from the prison house of shell;

Flowers bloom and blossoms fall as harbingers of fruit to come;

The newborn child comes even on the wings of death;

The thoughts of people are blanketed by dreams

Of tranquil days and peaceful years,

When love unfettered will keep the heart and mind

In ways of life that crown our days with light.

The smell of death indeed rides on the winds and fear lurks in the mind. Yet life does seem unaware of our human concerns. May our coming days be full of the sound of the love-song which emanates from the world of which we are a part…the web of reality that calls to us and may they be crowned with the light of the angels.