Sermon for Christmas Morn
“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people”
So the Angel says unto the shepherds. Two things stand out for us on Christmas morn, the words, “fear not” and “good tidings of great joy”. We are much in need of both, to be not fearful and to hear good news. This is Christmas.
In the lovely quiet of Christmas morning, we hear the classic and familiar Christmas story about Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem. The details are intriguing. In the turn and churn of worldly powers, of Joseph taking Mary being great with child to Bethlehem in obedience to the civil powers of that day to be numbered, enrolled, taxed, something else of greater meaning is accomplished. “She brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. The story touches us with the realities of the poor and the displaced in our own times, of those who are caught in the machinations of our global world. And yet, that sad commonplace of human hardship and suffering is eclipsed by a sense of wonder. Something else is being set in motion and among the little ones of our world and day, the shepherds.
They are not the great ones in executive power and will. Indeed, the shepherds contrast completely with the elites of every age. They care for the sheep, “keeping watch over their flock by night”, we are told. It is an image of care and one with a deep resonance of meaning about the real nature of political leadership. Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, argues that justice is only “the interest of the stronger”, that might equals right because they can get away with it, that shepherds are really only business men driven solely by profit, only in it for themselves. But Socrates points out that no leader can simply be in it for himself, that political order radically depends upon the common good, that justice is for all and not simply for the few. This ancient insight and idea continues to challenge us in our own world and day. The care of the sheep is the shepherd’s primary and defining task or vocation to which everything else is but secondary.
And so it is fitting, if I may use a term beloved by medieval theologians, that the news of Christ’s holy birth, the birth of Mary’s son, should be made known to the little ones of the world and not to the magnificoes, the great ones. The shepherds are a standing criticism of political misrule and injustice by leaders in every age. They are especially receptive, we might say, to the higher form of justice that Christ’s birth portends and establishes. Such is the wonder of the Gloria which the angels sing and teach to the shepherds and through them to us. Peace on earth and good will toward men is the opposite of a world of abusive power and the domination of the few over the many.
