Do not be afraid

Do not be afraid

Ser­mon preached at Enmore, Christ­mas Eve 2017

Read­ing: Luke 2. 8–20

I sus­pect that for most of us fear is not an emo­tion we nor­mally asso­ci­ate with Christ­mas: mild dread per­haps at the thought of the cred­it card bill that will arrive at the end of Janu­ary, or slight appre­hen­sion at the pro­spect of the big fam­ily Christ­mas party but not fear. Fear is a strong emo­tion that we asso­ci­ate with bad news from the doc­tor, or the loss of our job or some oth­er cata­strophe. So we may find it sur­pris­ing that the first words to the startled shep­herds on that first Christ­mas night were, “Do not be afraid.” Their fear was induced by the appear­ance of an angel of the Lord and angel­ic appear­ances weren’t part of their usu­al evening’s enter­tain­ment. In fact, in first cen­tury Palestine, shep­herds were among the poorest in the land and were not regarded very highly. Liv­ing in the open most of the time meant that they couldn’t keep the ritu­al pur­ity laws and they didn’t turn up to the syn­agogue too fre­quently. Fur­ther­more they had a repu­ta­tion for dis­hon­esty and thiev­ing and their testi­mony was not recog­nised in court. These were about the last people on earth to expect a heav­enly vis­it­a­tion so nat­ur­ally they were afraid.

But the shep­herds were not the only ones who were giv­en the mes­sage, ‘Do not be afraid’. In the pre­vi­ous chapter of Luke’s Gos­pel we have the story of the Angel Gabriel’s appear­ance to Mary with the aston­ish­ing news that she is to be the moth­er of the Mes­si­ah. Mary’s ini­tial response is fear and per­plex­ity and she is told, “Do not be afraid Mary for you have found favour with God.” A quick sur­vey of divine encoun­ters in the Scrip­tures will reveal that the most typ­ic­al response is one of fear. It starts way back in Gen­es­is. In Gen­es­is chapter 3, Adam and Eve have just eaten the fruit from the tree of the know­ledge of good and evil – the only tree in their rich and abund­ant garden that they were spe­cific­ally com­manded not to eat. For the first time they are exper­i­en­cing guilt. At that moment they hear a voice call­ing them and they recog­nise it is God’s voice. They are afraid and they hide them­selves. The Adam and Eve story in Gen­es­is gives us a pic­ture of what is wrong with our rela­tion­ship with God. When we encounter God we expect judge­ment and con­dem­na­tion because we are aware that in the words of the old Pray­er Book ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep…we have left undone those things that we ought to have done and have done those things that we ought not to have done and there is no health in us.’

God’s desire is that we should not live with fear. Through­out the Bible the words, ‘Do not be afraid’ occur 365 times- one for every day of the year. His desire is that we should enjoy friend­ship with him. The story of the Bible is the story of God’s troubled rela­tion­ship with his cre­ation. Human­ity was cre­ated in order to enjoy a har­mo­ni­ous rela­tion­ship with the cre­at­or. We were cre­ated in God’s image. Our prob­lem has been that we insist on liv­ing life on our terms and not God’s. Through­out the Old Test­a­ment God sent proph­ets to bring his wan­der­ing people back to him but too often God’s mes­sen­gers were either politely ignored or openly res­isted. In the face of this res­ist­ance God showed extraordin­ary per­sist­ence. He refused to give up on his stub­born people. In one of the most power­ful images in the Hebrew Scrip­tures, God declared that he had ‘branded’ or ‘engraved’ them on the palms of his hands. Finally, God had only one option left, he decided to join us, to come among us in the per­son of his Son, Jesus.

So that brings us back to the shep­herds. The angel told them not to be afraid because he was bring­ing them good news of great joy to all people – “to you is born this day in the city of Dav­id a Saviour, who is the Mes­si­ah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” This angel had done her home­work. The mes­sage echoes the lan­guage the Roman assembly had used to cel­eb­rate the birth­day of Caesar Augus­tus. The Romans had greeted ‘the most divine Caesar’ with ‘good tid­ings for the whole world’. Romans called Caesar ‘a saviour who put an end to war’, born for the com­mon good of all. The angel gives the new­born cradled in a manger in Beth­le­hem on the fringes of the Roman Empire, a birth announce­ment to rival the emper­or. Unlike the Roman Emper­or, this child born in the humblest cir­cum­stances, would nev­er carry a sword or lead an army yet today mil­lions through­out the world cel­eb­rate his birth and call him Lord.

In the mes­sage of the angel we see three reas­ons why we and the shep­herds should not be afraid. First the mes­sage was for all people. The world of the first cen­tury was a world of deep divi­sions: divi­sions of race, gender and class. Every­one belonged in a great pro­ces­sion: the most hon­oured at the top and the least hon­oured at the bot­tom. One’s place in that pro­ces­sion was determ­ined almost exclus­ively by the status of your fath­er and the status of your tribe and fam­ily. Each per­son was expec­ted to act in ways appro­pri­ate to their status. Shep­herds as we have already noted were pretty low on the list so it was no acci­dent that the news of the birth of the Mes­si­ah should be giv­en to them first. The mes­sage that Jesus pro­claimed chal­lenged the whole struc­ture of that soci­ety. So the Apostle Paul could write: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” — an incred­ibly rad­ic­al state­ment, the implic­a­tions of which the Church has not always lived up to. But the record of the early church was pretty good, so that Celsus, the 2^nd Cen­tury crit­ic of Chris­tian­ity could exclaim, ‘Why would you wish to join an organ­isa­tion that wel­comes women and slaves?’  Dur­ing his earthly min­istry Jesus showed his will­ing­ness to embrace all people irre­spect­ive of their status in soci­ety and in defi­ance of the pur­ity laws. He reached out lit­er­ally and touched the unclean, the lep­rous and the rejec­ted. So, in a world which still has many divi­sions based on gender, race, and eco­nom­ic status it is good to be reminded that the com­ing of the Christ child was for the bless­ing of all people every­where without distinction.

Secondly, we like the shep­herds, should not be afraid for the com­ing of the Saviour tells us that we are loved. In John’s Gos­pel we read that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that every­one who believes in him may not per­ish but may have etern­al life.” The birth of Jesus was God’s greatest sign of his love and his determ­in­a­tion to restore the broken rela­tion­ship between God and human­ity. The inclus­ive nature of God’s love was, and con­tin­ues to be, a stum­bling block for some. We would per­haps be more com­fort­able with a God who only loved people like us- but that is not the God revealed in the per­son of Jesus. Jesus’ love was shown to penny-less beg­gars, rich tax col­lect­ors, self-right­eous reli­gious lead­ers and grumpy dis­ciples. None are excluded from God’s embrace — each one of us here this night from the young­est to the old­est is val­ued and loved by God.

The final reas­on we should not be afraid is that in the com­ing of the Saviour God has giv­en us hope for the future. With the birth of Jesus, God and human­ity became etern­ally linked. In what we call the incarn­a­tion, i.e. God tak­ing on human flesh, God has shown that he will not be without us. In the words of Row­an Wil­li­ams, “he binds his divine life to human nature.” We live in a world of great uncer­tain­ties- the sci­ent­ists tell us that our plan­et is endangered, the eco­nom­ists tell us that the world could be facing anoth­er fin­an­cial crisis, and we nev­er know what a new year will bring. The story of the Nativ­ity is not just about an event which took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire some 2000 years ago but rather it declares that God is present in his world today and he invites us into rela­tion­ship with him and to trust him as our Lord and Saviour. If God is with us we can face whatever the future holds with con­fid­ence. May each one of us exper­i­ence God’s love this Christmas.

Philip Brad­ford