Do Not Be Afraid
Luke 2:1-20
By my calculations tonight is my 15th Christmas Eve as an ordained pastor. While that’s something to celebrate I have to tell you that it’s also a major challenge. See, every year we fill the church with people who all know the same story, who have this text memorized (even if they only remember it from Linus reciting it on the stage in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special).
It’s a challenge to find something new to say every year and, quite frankly, there’s a lot of pressure on all of us pastors tonight. Christmas Eve is kind of like our Super Bowl. That’s why I lifted weights this morning and got pumped up, had my pregame meal, chest bumped a few ushers on the way in. Heck, most of us secretly hope the choir will give us a Gatorade bath when the whole thing is over.
But the text is still the same. Usually I try to come up with some gimmick or image to put a different spin on it, but that just didn’t feel right this year. I decided instead to just spend some time reading the text over and over again to see what emerged. That’s a technique called “Lectio Divina” or divine reading. Letting the text set the agenda.
So I drove up to the Trappist monastery in Huntsville last week for a couple of days of just sitting with the text and doing some praying with the monks, listening to them chant parts of it during their Advent season. The monks have a way of doing things that has a tendency to slow things down. I’ve never seen a monk be in a hurry and their reading of Scripture reflects that.
As I read through the texts there was something that jumped out at me that I’d never really noticed before, and that is how many times in those first couple of chapters of Luke that “fear” is addressed. A form of the Greek word “phobos”, translated as “fear” or “afraid” appears seven times in Luke 1 and 2. Year after year we latch on to the familiar images of adoring parents, a cooing baby and humble shepherds, but this year I was struck by the fact that this story is also full of anxiety.
The first century, much like the 21st, was a time of uncertainty. Israel was an occupied nation under the domination of Rome. Augustus Caesar ruled most of the known world with a powerful hand and taxed the people heavily as a way of assuring Roman peace. The gap between rich and poor was exceptionally wide. Life expectancy was short, particularly among the majority poor. Even the Empire would struggle economically. In the year 33, for example, shortly after the death of Jesus, Augustus’ successor Tiberias would be forced to give out the modern equivalent of millions of dollars of government money to businesses in order to keep the empire solvent—a Roman bailout package, if you will. Already at the time of Jesus’ birth there were signs of difficulty ahead. Times were tough everywhere.
History has a way of cycling through times of prosperity and poverty and we’re in one of those down cycles right now. We may not be quite as bad off as the people of first century Palestine, but we feel the same human fears and uncertainty about the future that they felt. Fear becomes our lens for viewing the world.
Maybe I noticed the thread of fear through these passages especially this year because I have been sensing that fear in our own congregation and community. So, in preparation for tonight, I asked the congregation through an email to tell me some of their stories of what they’re afraid of right now. Chances are, many if not most of the people in the room tonight are feeling the same fear.
One person wrote me about his company losing several major clients and 40% of his revenue in the last 60 days because of the downturn. He’s afraid of losing his number one client, of not being able to meet his obligations to his family with two kids in college and not being able to be the person that everyone else relies upon. Fear of losing what you’ve worked so hard to achieve—that’s real fear.
I talked to a retired couple who have lost two-thirds of their retirement fund in the last three months. They now have to think about selling their home in a down market, getting some part-time jobs, moving someplace less expensive. They fear the uncertainty of having to make such major changes late in life.
Another person wrote about lingering grief on the 40th anniversary of her brother’s death in a plane crash and the pain of that loss. I met with another man desperately awaiting a heart transplant. The doctors have done all that they can do and the transplant is the only option left to save his life. Fear? Anxiety? Yes, in spades.
And then this from a mother in the midst of a long-term battle with cancer: “My biggest fear is how many more Christmases I’ll have with my family. My oncologist told me last month that I have 2-3 years as a “ballpark” guess for my life. As I look forward, I fear missing events in my children’s lives and feel panicked to leave them LOTS of information, so that they don’t struggle with not having a mother. I struggle with assessing who I am and if my life has meaning. I fear not feeling well because I’ve always been a “healthy” person. I fear the separation that seems to come with people not knowing what to say/do and therefore withdrawing from me…My problem is I fear not being up to the task of dying and showing to others that God’s grace and love are with me. It’s one thing to say you have no fear because God is with you, but it’s another to live it...”
The question I found myself wrestling with in the silence of the monastery was this: What kind of message will speak to that kind of fear?
Well, I noticed something else as I read these familiar words. In the first two chapters of Luke there is a prominent role for the angel Gabriel, who is God’s messenger (that’s what the word angellos means in Greek). Gabriel shows up three times in the opening part of the Gospel and each time he speaks he begins with the words, “Do not be afraid.”
Now, part of the reason he says that may be that the people to whom he appears are not used to seeing angels. We most often picture them as cherubic creatures or like Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life”—friendly and somewhat benign. Clearly, Gabriel was somewhat more imposing.
But I think there’s another reason why Luke offers this three-fold repetition—“Do not be afraid.” I think that it functions as a kind of thesis statement for the Gospel story that will follow—the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is because of the newborn King that the people of Israel and, consequently, us need no longer be afraid.
The people of Israel had long been expecting a Messiah, a deliverer, who would free them from Roman domination and restore them as a separate people. In a very real sense, they seemed to be expecting a kind of divine bailout plan—that God would somehow make everything right according to their expectations. The first time Gabriel appears it is to the old priest Zechariah, whom Luke uses as a kind of link to the Old Testament and the Temple system. The angel says to the old man, “Do not be afraid because your prayers have been answered.” They were going to be answered in a personal sense because Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were going to have a son, who would become John the Baptist, but also in a larger sense—God was going to do something about the plight of his people.
Wouldn’t we all like to hear that our prayers have been answered? We’d like for God to send Gabriel to tell us that our business is going to be prosperous again, that the pain of our grief will subside, that a cure will be found for us before it’s too late. We pray for the miracle, the sense of well-being.
But God’s way of answering our prayers is often by doing something beyond our hopes and expectations. Yes, sometimes our prayers are answered in ways that we want, but more often we see God at work in giving us what we really need when we need it. In Israel’s case, God’s Messiah comes as a tiny, helpless baby instead of a conquering hero. Instead of taking on the Romans with military might, he would suffer and die at the hands of the Empire. This is how God chooses to save the whole world—by participating in human suffering and taking it on—not by bailing himself, or us, out of it.
God knows our grief, our sorrow, our pain because God has experienced it and come through it in the person of Jesus. We don’t have a God who acts like a cosmic Santa Claus—making his list, checking it twice, distributing his grace, mercy and miracles to a deserving few and not to others. In Jesus, God proves that he is in the world for all of us.
That’s the message of Gabriel’s second visit, which comes to Mary. “Do not be afraid,” he says to her, “for you have found favor with God.” It wasn’t that Mary was especially wonderful or perfect. God chooses her because God chooses to favor the unlikely, the obscure, the innocent—even the mistake-prone--to do his most important work. Like Zechariah, like so many others in Scripture, Mary is offered an opportunity—she will be blessed in bringing God into the world, but as always seems to be the case that blessing would cost her something, too. As Simeon will tell her when she brings Jesus to be dedicated in the Temple—“a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” I imagine she remembered those words when she saw her son, God’s son, hanging on a Roman cross.
Do not be afraid—you have found favor with God. I think that’s the second message we need to hear tonight in the midst of our fear. God favors each of us, loves us with an everlasting love, loves us enough to come as one of us, die for us, live with us and in us. It’s not favor that we earn—it is the ultimate gift. We call that gift “grace”—and God offers it to us lavishly. God doesn’t promise us a pain-free life—he didn’t endure one himself—but he does promise to be with us every step of the way.
The reality of grace is that it always comes to us on the way to someone else. When we have experienced the love and grace of God, we cannot help but share it. God offers us grace in the midst of our fear—the knowledge that no matter what happens, we are beloved. The promise of new life is always there, even in the midst of hard times. The angel’s word to Mary is a word to us tonight—“Nothing will be impossible with God.” God turned the Roman cross from an symbol of death to a symbol of triumph. Imagine what he can do for you if you’re open to the possibilities of his grace!
The third angel announcement takes place out there in the fields beyond Bethlehem. Shepherds, who are poorest of the poor, are watching over their flocks when the angel appears and, as the King James Bible says, they were “sore afraid.” “Do not be afraid,” says the angel a third time, “for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”
The good news was not a bailout plan for the world, a simple propping up of the human system with enough of God’s grace as capital to give people a little bit of hope. Instead, the angels announce that the birth of the Savior was going to usher in a completely different spiritual economy—a program that Jesus himself would use as the basis of most of his preaching. The Kingdom of God was coming, a reversal of fortune for the whole world and the turning upside down of all that humans value. Luke gives us a clue of this kind of economy when we puts a song in Mary’s heart in chapter 1—she sings of God: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Jesus would preach the Kingdom as an economy where the last became first, where the sick, the lame, the poor, and the grieving were the most valued, where money is valued less than love, where even death is turned to life. That Kingdom would be ushered in through his own ministry of healing, made real in his sacrificial death, and lifted up for the whole world in his resurrection from the dead.
Notice the angel song: Glory to God in heaven and on earth peace. Peace. Not despair, not fear. It is good news for all the people—not just for some.
Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is at hand. It is a present reality, of which we see glimpses, but also a future promise. The Kingdom will be fully realized in that Second Advent, when Jesus claims the throne once and for all. This is the grounds for hope tonight—that no matter what happens in the present, in Christ God promises set the world to rights once and for all.
In the meantime we hear the angel voice—Do not be afraid. Money will come and go—still God is with us. Our health may fail—still God is with us. Our lives may be broken by sin and our past mistakes. But still God is with us. That is the good news for all of us—good news that lasts forever. Our failures are not final, our infirmities are not ultimately fatal, and our death will not be the last word.
If you get nothing else from tonight’s message, may you leave here knowing that you are loved in ways you cannot even imagine. All of you. And the writer of I John says this: “There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out fear.” (1 John 4:18)
How deep is that love? Hear the words of Paul from Romans: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (5:8). God comes to us, lives with us, suffers with us, dies for us. That is perfect, redemptive, life-giving love.
I pray that tonight you will hear this familiar story and the good news in a different way. The baby whose birth we celebrate this night was born for you and for me so that we might no longer be afraid.
That’s good news you can take to the bank.
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