Christmas Day 2021

 Luke 2:15 - 20

There are still shepherds. As a teenager in Montana I worked in a grocery store. There were shepherds tending flocks of sheep up in the hills on land belonging to the government. There’s a lot more of that in Montana than in Massachusetts. Shepherds would now and then come to the grocery store to stock up on supplies. I doubt they’ve changed much since Jesus; time; they smelled bad, they wore ragged clothes, they didn’t say much more than they had to; they were mostly people who couldn’t speak much English -- the ones around my home town were from the Basque region of Spain.

In Jesus’ time as in ours shepherds lived on the edge of society, literally as well as figuratively. Because they had to watch the sheep 24 hrs a day 7 days a week, they did not take part in the religious life of the community. For the same reason they did little socializing; and even out on the hills where they worked, they had little contact with each other. Even today in the middle east shepherds only get together at night so they can take turns watching each other’s sheep. Now you can imagine this kind of life doesn’t suit everyone and you’d be right. Studies have shown that people who spend their lives being shepherds are antisocial, introverted, and many have mental disorders.

So why did God send his angels to announce the birth of the Messiah to shepherds? Maybe Jesus would have been more successful if the angels had appeared to the High Priest or the rulers of threJewish People. That’s a question that many people have tried to answer down through the ages.

When you look at many events in Jesus' life, you can find prophecies in the Old Testament that point to them. There’s nothing in the bible predicting that shepherds would be the first to know about the Messiah, unlike the prophecy that Jesus would be born of a virgin, or kings would come from the east bearing gifts. So it seems peculiar that shepherds were first.

The shepherds weren’t very religious, at least in any conventional sense. They weren’t chosen for their holiness -- and they reacted to the angels with fear and trembling, so much so that the angel had to tell them not to fear.

The conventional answer is that God wanted to show the world that he was on the side of the lowly, the outcast, the poor, all of which described the shepherds. And that’s probably a good answer.

But there are two other possibilities that God chose the shepherds to be the heralds of the birth of his Son.

First, God knows, as you and I know, that if he had made the announcement to the leaders of the people, they would have tried to find a way to use the knowledge to gain power or riches. The same with the religious authorities -- they would find a way to exploit the situation. That’s not such a bad thing, by the way. We do that in our church all the time. We like to publicize those among us who serve the church in a special way -- hoping that it will bring others to do the same. But the danger to us as to the religious authorities at that time is that we lose sight of what we are celebrating and what it means to me personally. The shepherds are not in a position to exploit the information they have received; they are empty and God seems to like to manifest himself in those who are empty, those who have been crushed by life’s burdens. The ones who are empty are the ones who have the capacity to receive the message God wants to give them

But another is that the angels are there all along. Through a special grace the shepherds had a glimpse of true reality and that changed them so much that they became messengers -- the first apostles, as it were. You and I have had moments, I am sure, when we have caught a glimpse of the deeper reality that surrounds us. It might have been on a mountain top or at the seashore, or on a pilgrimage or a retreat. As one poet exclaimed, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”.

So think about the shepherds; ponder these things in your hearts, as Mary did. How can we become empty so that God will speak more clearly to us, maybe through an angel, maybe directly? How can we become more sensitive to the marvelous reality around us that we almost never notice? Jesus coming has changed everything. God has taken on our humanity and offers us his divinity. Pray that we will have the grace to accept what he offers.