“Do Not Be Afraid”
by David Baer | published: Thursday, December 12, 2013, 3:04 PM
“Do not be afraid.” These are the first words that the angel spoke to the shepherds on that first Christmas, when God’s glory shone all around them. Someone told me once—and I don’t know whether it’s true, but it certainly could be—that this is the most common phrase in the Bible. “Do not be afraid.” God, or God’s messengers speak these words again and again, whenever God is about to do something new and surprising. In the story of Jesus’ birth, we hear these words addressed to shepherds staying out in the fields with their flocks, maybe because they needed to be on hand in case the ewes gave birth. Perhaps they had gathered around a fire to keep warm, their ears listening for birthing cries, and for other things that go bump in the night.
What kinds of things were these shepherds were accustomed to being afraid of? What might they do to protect themselves about the things that they feared?
A Lamb was being born that night all right. Only the news of this birth didn’t come from the bleating of their sheep, but from a heavenly messenger, who was suddenly standing in front of them. The story says that the glory of God shone around them. In the Hebrew Scriptures whose stories these shepherds had heard since childhood, Moses goes up a great mountain to receive the stone tablets with God’s Teaching, and the mountain is enveloped in smoke and fire, with a loud trumpet sound that causes the people to tremble. God is so good, so big, so holy, so utterly unlike anything that exists, that God’s presence makes people afraid for their lives. This is only an angel, but the angel comes with joyful, holy, and awesome words from God that smoke and sputter with glory, and so the shepherds are terrified. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy...”
What are the things that make God so different from us? Why do these things so often inspire fear?
The angel sent those shepherds down from the mountain, where a whole army of angels set the hills ringing with songs of praise. It wasn’t up in this high and lofty place that the shepherds needed to search for the Lord, but down off the mountain, in the town. And it wasn’t just anywhere in the town, not in the finest or biggest house, but in an overlooked place beside the inn, in a place where animals were fed and sheltered. There they found a family of travelers that had been cast aside and forgotten by the good people of the town, even as the mother must have been beginning her labor. These were people to be pitied, if not scorned. And yet the angel was quite specific: “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” The God who sets the heavens ablaze with fire and shakes the earth, the God who inspires awe and fear, had come to live with the people of God’s world in this child, tiny and fragile and quite probably cold and afraid himself.
“Do not be afraid.” That’s the message of this child’s birth and life, isn’t it? The God who is over and above us wants to be with us and beside us and, what’s more, wants to go beneath us, to the lowliest places, so that no one need any longer be afraid.
What parts of you, what situations in your life, need to hear those words, “Do not be afraid”?
O God, in Jesus Christ, born to a poor and homeless family,
lying in a manger so weak and helpless, you speak to our fears.
We are frightened of the things that tempt us—
you came to share temptation with us.
We are anxious about meeting our bodily needs,
what we will wear, what we will eat and drink—
you taught us to live by every word that comes from God’s mouth,
to seek God’s kingdom first and always,
and that all these things will be added to us.
We are frightened of death, of what awaits us when this life is past—
but death took you, and you conquered it.
We are frightened, Lord, of you,
of your great and terrible goodness standing in judgment over us—
but you have given all your power to this same Jesus Christ, the child of Bethlehem,
the man who out of great love for us laid down his own life to save us.
Let your Son be born today for each of us
to conquer our fear and bring us abundant life with you. Amen.