That First Night

For many people the birth of Jesus in Luke’s gospel is probably one of the most well known stories of Jesus. We hear it here in worship every Christmas Eve. If we’ve ever seen “A Charlie Brown Christmas” we know how Linus famously reads the story in the midst of the disaster of the Christmas pageant. There are lots of movies about the birth of Jesus as well. And as I thought about how well known this story is, I began to wonder if because it was so well known, that maybe we miss some part of the story that we might otherwise gloss over. I know I do that with TV shows or movies that I know all too well. So as I looked at the story of Jesus birth I began to think about what it must have been like for everyone who shows up in the story. So this Christmas Eve, I want you to join me in using our holy imagination to consider that first night and what it must have been like.

To get us started let’s look at the holy family, Mary and Joseph. Many biblical scholars believe that it took them 4 days to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem. They would have traveled for 8 hours each day averaging about 2.5 miles each hour for a total of 90 miles to reach Bethlehem. I know that they were more accustomed to traveling by foot in those days, but I don’t care how used to it you are, traveling 90 miles in 4 days while 9 months pregnant must have been awful.

And then she gives birth to her son Jesus. They are in an unfamiliar town giving birth to their first child who happens to be, as the angel Gabriel puts it, the Son of the Most High. I can’t even imagine what must have been going through Mary and Joseph’s minds. Clearly God chose them for a good reason, but the realization that they are holding God made flesh must have worried them more than any new parent is worried about the wellbeing of their newborn child. At the same time at the end of the story we see Mary committed to memory everything that happened to her that night. The travel, the birth experience, the new parent panic, it all went aside so that she could hold onto everything that the shepherds told her that night. She must have been overwhelmed with good and powerful emotions that night. God truly picked out an incredible couple to care for and raise Jesus.

While technically the shepherds are the next mentioned I’d like for us to take a look at the angels. Angels are often seen in the Bible as messengers. And that first night this is no exception. They are the announcers of the good news of Jesus birth to the shepherds. We really don’t get a lot of insight into what it is like to be an angel, but can you imagine again with me what it must have been like for the angel God chose to share the good news of Jesus birth with people? This is the first public proclamation that the savior has been born. We have heard the news shared privately with Mary and Joseph, but this angel gets to make the news public to the world.

Then the angel is then surrounded by an assembly of angels praising God. In the Old Testament the only times we see angels praising God is when a prophet has a vision of being in the presence of God in God’s temple, like we did recently when we looked at Isaiah’s call story. Yet here we have the praising of God and worship of the angels breaking into the world to emphasize just how important the birth of the savior is. This must have been a very new experience for the angels and one that was meant to create some shock and awe in the presence of the shepherds.

I am sure seeing a single angel would have been enough to create awe in the lives of these shepherds, but then to have God’s heavenly forces appear must have terrified them as Luke tells us, and shaken the shepherds to the core. Shepherds, after all, were a lowly class and considered unclean in the eyes of temple purity. So for the angels to come to the shepherds has so many implications. God sent Jesus to the lowly, to the outcasts.

And at the same time, we have such incredible imagery of shepherds in the Bible. King David who Jesus is descended from was once a shepherd. David himself wrote Psalm 23 which famously talks about God as a shepherd, and Jesus uses several analogies in John’s gospel about being the good shepherd. Despite all the fear, panic, and uncertainty the shepherds joyfully accept the news of the angels and go and see for themselves what the angels have proclaimed to them.

Because of that announcement from the angels the shepherds are able to go and see the baby and know beyond the shadow of a doubt that what had been told them was in fact true. God had sent a savior to them and to the people. The savior that many people had been talking about and waiting for for so long. And they had been transformed from fear and trembling about what was going on into people glorifying and praising God.

Have you ever had that happen? Maybe not in a religious experience necessarily, but you have an experience that is so exciting that you just can’t stop talking about and being excited about it and telling everyone all about it? Perhaps it was an accomplishment, or a new job. Perhaps it was when you were engaged, or maybe at the birth of your child or children. There are moments in our lives when we are so overcome with emotion that we have a hard time keeping it in. If you will close your eyes and imagine with me that moment that you had and the joy that it brought to you. How it consumed your whole being and you felt like you were going to burst out of your own skin because of how overjoyed you were. You couldn’t sit still, you couldn’t keep quiet. Someone had to know what you know and it had to be said now because you needed to make it real for the world not just yourself. Perhaps you grabbed the person you were telling. Perhaps you were bouncing because the energy inside of you needed to be released.

Open your eyes if you had them closed. That is the kind of energy that was at play that first night. Despite the exhaustion of Mary she didn’t want to miss a moment of this incredible night. The angels burst out from the presence of God into the world because the good news they wanted to share couldn’t be contained. And finally the shepherds so overcome with actually seeing their savior returned to their homes praising and glorifying God. The whole night was overcome with so much excitement for those who got to experience that first night. Hopefully you still have that feeling of that exciting memory you imagined earlier. Take that feeling and place it onto this story of that first night of Jesus on this earth, so that you can experience with all these people in the Bible what it is like to know that this night, this very night, Jesus, God with us, our Emmanuel has once again entered into our world and into our lives to bring everlasting peace and everlasting joy into our lives. Amen.