Sermon by Mark Wakefield on 25th December 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14 

“While shepherds washed their socks by night,
And hung them on the line,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And said 'Those socks are mine!’

It may be many years since I was a schoolboy but I can still remember the innocent glee with which my friends and I sang lines like that at school Christmas assemblies. In fact I still can’t hear the organ strike up the familiar tune of “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” without wanting to sing those gently subversive lines.

The image of the shepherds seated on the ground under a brilliant blue, starlit sky watching and listening in wonder as the heavenly host sing hymns of praise to the new born king is one of the most arresting and familiar images of the Christmas story.  And yet, as ever in the New Testament, the gospel writers have messages for us that we can so easily miss on a quick reading. 

For instance, it is significant that the heavenly host appears to poor shepherds and not to the rich and powerful or, more particularly, the overtly religious.  In Jesus's day shepherds were despised by the priesthood because their occupation meant that they couldn't attend synagogue and perform all the religious duties required of them.  Yet in Luke's gospel they are the very first to hear the good news of Jesus's birth.  It's his way of saying that in Jesus God was doing something wonderfully new and in his life and ministry it was, of course, the poor and the outcast whose cause he championed above all else. 

But there's something else in this familiar story that is easy to miss and it's this that I want to talk to you about this morning.  I wonder how many of you noticed that the very first reaction of the shepherds to the appearance of an angel wasn't joy, or wonder, or even puzzlement but pure, blind terror:

"Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified".

The experience of terror in the face of what is in fact good news is actually rather common in the New Testament.  Take the resurrection.  In Mark's gospel three women - Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, go to Jesus's tomb to anoint the body.  Instead they find it gone and an angel sitting there.  He tells them that Jesus has risen from the dead and that they shouldn't be afraid but instead go to the other disciples and tell them the good news.  So what do they do?  In the words of the gospel:

"...they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid".

So why is it that good news and fear - terror, even - can so conspicuously go hand in hand in the bible?  I think it's because it very often takes something that we find profoundly shocking, something that turns our world and all our assumptions upside down, to make us see truths that we badly need to see.

A few years ago I decided on a major mid-life career change and swapped my life as a TV producer for that of a management consultant.  To begin with all went well, although as any of you who have ever tried a big career change will know,  it's far from easy.  But then disaster struck - the stock market took a nosedive and my new company's fortunes plummeted with it.  For the last 6 months of my time with them it was pretty obvious what was going to happen as the company progressively made more and more people redundant.  Finally it was my turn, which coincided with the whole company going bankrupt.

Those six months were, as you'd imagine, pretty awful.  The job market was in a terrible state and just 18 months or so into a career change at a relatively late age I was hardly a great prospect.  How, I fretted, were we going to manage without any money?  Almost as bad, how would I deal with the humiliation of redundancy and loss of status and position?

Then, to my amazement, something wonderful happened.  With no job in prospect I resigned myself to working from home and using all my old contacts to drum up bits of work as best I could.   There's no doubt that we were much poorer than we had been and I had no grand job title or swanky office to go to but I was much, much happier than I had been for years.  The reason?  I now had time for my wife and family that I'd never enjoyed before.  I had time for dear friends I hadn't had before.  I also had time for myself - for playing tennis and running and meditation and prayer -  all things that I had previously squeezed to the margins or forgotten altogether.

But the really interesting thing - and the reason why I'm telling you all this - is that it was only then that I realised that I had so far lived my life on the false assumption that material wealth and status were of great importance to me and that I'd allowed them to crowd out the things I cared about far more.

I'm very much back in the world of work now with a full time job but I still look back on that time as one of the great turning points of my life.  Frightening - yes?  Necessary - absolutely and I thank God for it.

Now of course, it goes without saying that bad news is far from always a blessing in disguise - and certainly not the loss of a job, in most circumstances.  We all of us have to put up with things that we fear in some measure - sickness, bereavement, disappointment, betrayal, anxiety.  This, after all, is the stuff of human life and there's no easy means of smoothing out these jagged edges.  But faith really can make a big difference to how we deal with them.

Years ago in what was his last sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie made an observation that has stuck with me ever since.  Reflecting on how the people of Eastern Europe - many of them Christians - had recently managed to topple the Communist regimes that had oppressed them for so long, he said this:

"In the gospels, faith is never set over against unbelief.  It is always set over against fear.  ‘Why are you afraid?' our Lord says, ‘have you no faith?'"

The point he was making was that it makes all the difference in the world if you believe in a power outside yourself upon which you can draw and on which you can trust.   Because a belief in a loving God provides that inner sense of security that frees us to take risks, confident that despite appearances to the contrary despair really doesn't have the last word.

By contrast, if you believe that all there is to life is what you see in front of your nose and that there is no meaning or purpose to it, then you really are on your own and as such an easy prisoner of fear - fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, fear of what others think, fear of death. 

So faith is not an end in itself so much as a means to an end - and that end is to live the creative, courageous, fulfilled lives that God wants us to lead.  And it is the life, death and above all, resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate today that enables us to have precisely this kind of liberating faith. 

For many of us 2009 is a profoundly worrying prospect.  The collapse of the world's financial system is something that will affect us all, though as yet in ways we most likely do not know.  

So let's pray that we'll find the courage and the faith to face whatever the coming year holds in store for us, remembering as we do those shepherds seated on the ground on that starry night 2,000 years ago, whose worst fears gave way to rejoicing at the news of a baby, born to a young girl not yet married, in a lowly cattle shed.

Amen