When I was teaching Sunday School I rather dreaded the lessons in the run-up to Christmas. For one thing, I had been teaching the same class for nearly 10 years, and it was tough not to repeat what I had said for the last six, seven, or eight years. After all, everybody knew the story and how it came out.

The second reason may have been more limited to people with strange and twisted senses of humor. Like mine. Somewhere in the three or four weeks before Christmas we almost always encountered Luke 2. In case age has left a vacancy where you have always stored this particular passage, I’ll remind you: it’s the narrative of the birth of Christ. I always did fine down through verse 7, but by the time we hit verse 8, I was having trouble keeping a straight face.

I certainly didn’t want the class to think that I was finding something funny in the birth of the Savior. However, it does conjure up some strange mental images. Here the story turns from Mary, Joseph, and Jesus and focusses on some shepherds.

I’ve never met a shepherd, but I can imagine that these were not white collar, executive types. In fact, they worked nights. They were, as the KJV says, “abiding in the field” keeping an eye out on their flock. This is probably something they had done before, and except for the appearance of the odd lion or other scavenger, it probably wasn’t very exciting.

“What did you do last night, Daddy?”

“Not much. Just sat in the field and watched the flock.”

However, this was a very different night. All of a sudden, there’s an angel and what is generally interpreted as a very bright light. Their reaction was predictable. The KJV says that they were “sore afraid.” No kidding.

If I were a shepherd sitting on a Galilean hillside minding my own business and somebody else’s sheep, and a bright light and an angel appeared, I think I would have been more than “sore afraid.” (But even that depicts it better than the more modern translations’ “terrified.”)

And this is the part where I have difficulty holding it together. I have this mental image of these shepherds, pushing backwards so hard they’re making a hole in the ground, their eyes about the size of saucers, and wondering if they’ve just met their maker. Abject terror. Real sore afraidness.

And the angel says, “Fear not.”

In my mind the bravest of the shepherds looks at him and says, “Say what?”

When suddenly your familiar world is made totally unfamiliar, and you’re seeing things that you’ve not only never seen before, but never really imagined, do you really believe you could just decide to “fear not.”

However, the Bible says they did. When the angel had delivered his message, they got up and ran into Bethlehem where they found Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. Then they went out and told everybody.

The fact that I find the mental image funny doesn’t mean that I don’t take the message seriously. Probably more seriously now than I ever have in my life. Like the shepherds, my familiar world has become much less familiar.

Fifty or sixty years ago there was no such thing as road rage. It’s true that you could get your nose broken if you used a term denigrating somebody’s mother or called them a liar, but you probably wouldn’t get shot.

And people usually, to use my mother’s words, “kept a civil tongue in their head,” even if they didn’t like somebody. And if you were a gentlemen you didn’t use bad language in front of ladies. But all of that has changed. Civil tongues have become rare, and even people of the female persuasion use bad language, very casually.

But probably the worst thing is that people try to control us using fear. We’ve gone from “fear not” to “be afraid, very afraid.” They tell us that they’ll save us from the bad people who are trying to kill us and take what we have from us. All we have to do is give up some of our liberties, sign on to draconian laws, and take out our anger on whole groups of people.

At the moment, Muslims are the target. Last month it was refugees. A couple of months ago it was immigrants. You could build a case against pro-lifers, pro-choicers, the mentally ill, the estranged, and the deranged. It seems that most or all of our politicians want to bomb indiscriminately. Some of our politicians enlist in the 800-year-old strategy of the Abbot of Citeaux, a Papal legate. His army was out hunting heretics (mostly Cathars), and when he was told that his soldiers couldn’t really tell the good guys (Catholics) from the bad guys (Carthars), his reported response was (translated from the Latin), “Kill them all, and let God sort them out.”  

Tis the season to revisit Luke 2:8 and to take that lesson seriously. It’s hard to have the joy of the season when we’re looking over our shoulder and trying to decide whom to hate or even kill. We need to take a page out of the shepherds’ book and actually fear not. Then go and tell everyone.

My resolutions for what should be the most joyous of seasons are that I will keep a civil tongue in my head; I will watch my language around everybody; and I will value all innocent life as Christ commanded. Or at least I’ll do my best.

May each of you have a merry Christmas full of joy and peace.