Sore Afraid
Christmas Eve, 2008
Luke 1
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”
Terrified. Scared witless. Filled with fear.
I sometimes think that they’d feel right at home in our age.
I was sitting over at Murky one day this week, listening to peppy music on the sound system, looking around at folks sipping warm drinks on a sunny, cold afternoon. The place certainly did not seem filled with fear.
And yet, we are a society permeated by a fear that has crept in like a cold mist and settled quietly around us. This fear goes usually unremarked upon, so unquestioned has it become in recent years. It is simply the wallpaper of our collective house.
It’s like the grass in a field of sheep: spotty in places, nothing much to look upon.
I suspect that shepherds in Luke’s story would have understood. While there were not two wars being fought around them, they lived under the tyranny of an oppressive empire governed through violence such that the cross which we think of as singular and unique was actually ubiquitous. Mary and Joseph quite likely passed quite a few of them on their trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
The economy they lived in was probably less functional than our own – if you can imagine. It was certainly less equitable than ours even though we live with the most inequitable economy in the developed world and one with a larger gap between rich and poor than at any time since the Gilded Age.
And we are sore afraid.
We probably don’t put it quite like that: we are worried, concerned, perhaps. But on this cold, dark night, if we are honest, we’ll acknowledge that there is so much quiet fearfulness around us.
Thus these days the word of the Lord to Isaiah strikes me as most wonderfully comforting:
“the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness,
on them light has shined.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness.”
We are that people, and this promise is for us.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it, John promised. Darkness comes in various hues in our lives but we all experience it.
When the light shines, however, people tend to react in different ways. The shepherds saw the light and were sore afraid. The wise men saw the light and chose to travel toward it.
Preaching in the middle of another era of great fear, the 1930s, the Harry Emerson Fosdick said, "In these visitors two basic human characteristics are portrayed. In the shepherds we see fear in motion, and in fact, we are all at times compelled to act in response to fear. But it offers us no enduring benefit.”
Fosdick’s defense of liberal theology against the straightjacket of fundamentalism cost him his pastorate in a New York City Presbyterian church, and his steadfast commitment to nonviolence cost him as well. In the midst of the Great Depression he wrote one of my favorite hymns, God of Grace and God of Glory, which prays, “grand us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.”
But he understood that such a gift must be received and used if it is to have any meaning in our lives, if it is to make any difference, if it is to move us beyond fear. As he put it, “For strength that endures we must seek to be like the wise men, guided in the dark times of life by the light of love in motion. This is the key characteristic to a successful spiritual journey."
Love in motion. That is what the Christmas story is all about. Into the midst of darkness and fear, God sets love in motion. The question is, what shall we do in response? Turn away in fear? Or open our lives to live lovingly in response.
As John’s gospel famously reminds us, “for God so loved the world” – the cosmos, in the Greek, all of creation, not just the rich and the powerful and the religiously proper, but each and every one of us – for God so loves the world that God sets love in motion again and again and again.
We are invited this Holy Night, to open our lives to God’s creative love and find in it the deep reservoir of hope, faith and love that is fundamentally necessary for the living of these days.
Luke 1
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”
Terrified. Scared witless. Filled with fear.
I sometimes think that they’d feel right at home in our age.
I was sitting over at Murky one day this week, listening to peppy music on the sound system, looking around at folks sipping warm drinks on a sunny, cold afternoon. The place certainly did not seem filled with fear.
And yet, we are a society permeated by a fear that has crept in like a cold mist and settled quietly around us. This fear goes usually unremarked upon, so unquestioned has it become in recent years. It is simply the wallpaper of our collective house.
It’s like the grass in a field of sheep: spotty in places, nothing much to look upon.
I suspect that shepherds in Luke’s story would have understood. While there were not two wars being fought around them, they lived under the tyranny of an oppressive empire governed through violence such that the cross which we think of as singular and unique was actually ubiquitous. Mary and Joseph quite likely passed quite a few of them on their trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
The economy they lived in was probably less functional than our own – if you can imagine. It was certainly less equitable than ours even though we live with the most inequitable economy in the developed world and one with a larger gap between rich and poor than at any time since the Gilded Age.
And we are sore afraid.
We probably don’t put it quite like that: we are worried, concerned, perhaps. But on this cold, dark night, if we are honest, we’ll acknowledge that there is so much quiet fearfulness around us.
Thus these days the word of the Lord to Isaiah strikes me as most wonderfully comforting:
“the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness,
on them light has shined.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness.”
We are that people, and this promise is for us.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it, John promised. Darkness comes in various hues in our lives but we all experience it.
When the light shines, however, people tend to react in different ways. The shepherds saw the light and were sore afraid. The wise men saw the light and chose to travel toward it.
Preaching in the middle of another era of great fear, the 1930s, the Harry Emerson Fosdick said, "In these visitors two basic human characteristics are portrayed. In the shepherds we see fear in motion, and in fact, we are all at times compelled to act in response to fear. But it offers us no enduring benefit.”
Fosdick’s defense of liberal theology against the straightjacket of fundamentalism cost him his pastorate in a New York City Presbyterian church, and his steadfast commitment to nonviolence cost him as well. In the midst of the Great Depression he wrote one of my favorite hymns, God of Grace and God of Glory, which prays, “grand us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.”
But he understood that such a gift must be received and used if it is to have any meaning in our lives, if it is to make any difference, if it is to move us beyond fear. As he put it, “For strength that endures we must seek to be like the wise men, guided in the dark times of life by the light of love in motion. This is the key characteristic to a successful spiritual journey."
Love in motion. That is what the Christmas story is all about. Into the midst of darkness and fear, God sets love in motion. The question is, what shall we do in response? Turn away in fear? Or open our lives to live lovingly in response.
As John’s gospel famously reminds us, “for God so loved the world” – the cosmos, in the Greek, all of creation, not just the rich and the powerful and the religiously proper, but each and every one of us – for God so loves the world that God sets love in motion again and again and again.
We are invited this Holy Night, to open our lives to God’s creative love and find in it the deep reservoir of hope, faith and love that is fundamentally necessary for the living of these days.
posted by David Ensign at
7:06 AM
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