The darkness which has circled around us throughout the Season of Advent has now been penetrated and dispelled by the great light of Christmas. Isaiah introduces us to images of war all too familiar to those who have lived through the year 2003 in so many parts of the world: all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood. But he also gives voice, as true prophets should do, to the promise of salvation in God by God for they shall be burned as fuel for the fire. (Isaiah 9.5) In their destruction comes the dawning of a new era where cruel power is replaced by an authority built on justice and peace, ushered in by self-emptying and service. Paul’s encouragement to Titus is to continue to wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. (Titus 2.13) The mood of expectancy is not to wane once Christ Jesus is born but to grow now that the grace of God has appeared (Titus 2.11) and the light has come. And then there are Luke’s shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. (Luke 2.8) They are among the most unlikely, yet most appropriate, people to receive the guidance of the great light of Isaiah. They live on the edge of so many definitions of life. They are the first members of the human creation to meet and to greet the new-style Messiah, the child God, the servant King at the heart of the tradition which was proud to own and to proclaim King David as its king. Things are changing. The old is, at long last, rolling back the years and becoming new. This is the heart and the hearth of Christmas.

The proclamation of Good News comes in a variety of forms and our eyes and ears need to be open to such a variety if we are to make something good of it when we hear it repeated year by year. We have just heard one account of the Good News from St Luke which accompanied the birth of Jesus Christ in tonight’s Ministry of the Word. Although familiar to us from our earliest days of attending church - as also is the account from St John’s Gospel – it must challenge us profoundly, as indeed should all Good News, challenge us to go out again into the world whose course we can plot and predict all too easily. Instinctively yet incorrectly we insiders begin to think that the world dances to our ecclesiastical tune. A modern, sophisticated world cares all too little for our religious niceties. This must challenge us to seek and to find God in the world we know as well as in the church we know and to do so with new energy and fresh resolve to serve God in serving our neighbour and to listen to the voice of praise in the most unlikely of places.

The district inhabited by the Biblical shepherds is one such unlikely place. The shepherds lived in the fields a life which was both respected and despised. The wandering shepherd recalled the nomadic life which had from earliest times characterized the development of the children of Abraham as children of God. The shepherd and his sheep remained a powerful symbol – a picture and a reality - of the origins of these people in the landscape and in the hand of God. With them, as with John the Baptizer, geography and theology join forces as they still must do locally if religion is to be any more than God-babble. Our Lord referred to himself as their Good Shepherd and from the everyday work of the shepherd he repeatedly illustrated his willingness to lay down his life for the salvation of the world. But as the cult of the Temple developed and strengthened in the religion of the people there was a problem. These shepherding people lived in the half-world where the animals and the humans had to develop instincts and intimacies of survival one with another. To the Temple priests this was an impure world where the proper distinctions and hygienes could not be kept. This put them on the outside of formal religion. This made it all the more problematic for them to participate because they associated daily with animals and were ritually unclean. Not a pleasant message for anyone whose work is farming, animals and the land.

Yet it was to these good and trusting people that the angels first proclaimed what has ever since universally been hailed as The Good News: Glory to God in highest heaven, and on earth peace to all in whom he delights. But there is another, and to my mind equally inspiring, side to these earthy and worldly shepherds which strikes a chord with us. Shrewd indeed as they were, the tycoons and businessmen of their day, but they left it all behind to go straight to Bethlehem. They recognized an opportunity for good when they saw one and they took it. And we can only admire their courage and their self-respect. They may well have inherited these flocks as is the way with farming in our own land and in our own time, they tracked their breeding patterns and chronicled their preferred pasturage. They knew all about yield and the need to take good care of stock. But as people of the world they also knew that they had to take risks in a good cause. There were wolves out there in the fields and not only in the parables of Jesus. There were wolves in sheep’s clothing – bandits, pirates of the land, sheep-stealers - as there are today.

Yet these same shepherds were not dwarfed by their difference, by the social and religious inadequacies and inferiorities of which they were ever being reminded. God came to nothing grander than a village and they left everything to reach that particular village. Too often and wrongly are we dwarfed by the very religion whose purpose and whose glory is to lift our eyes to the Light of God shining in the world and to enable us to listen and to listen again to the voice of the angels and of our neighbours where others hear only noise and talk babble.

Let us carry out with us into the night air, into the darkness which does not master us, using St John’s word, the light and the song of Christmas. The Word is made flesh and dwells among us. The Word of God has become the Word of Life. Jesus Christ has come to save the world and in so doing to draw all people to himself. We live in hope and hope in life that as there is glory to God in the highest heaven there will also be on earth peace among those whom he favours (Luke 2.14)