Angels and Shepherds

December 17, 1965

Jocie here reporting from Hollyhill. It’s almost Christmas time. Yay! I love Christmas. Don’t you? We get off school. For two weeks!! Yay, again. And while we’re out of school, we get to do some fun things like haul a tree in the house and decorate it with sparkling things.

We did that this afternoon. We got the tree off Miss Sally’s farm yesterday after church. I love going to Miss Sally’s for dinner after church. She’s so good to everybody she knows that sometimes I wonder if she’s an angel. I don’t ask her though. She’d laugh at that idea and tell me she was just a regular person like anybody else. But I never knew anybody else that could love everybody the way she does.

Dad says sometimes angels must have looked like regular people when they show up in Bible stories. That’s how the two men were that told Abraham and Sarah they were going to have a baby even though Sarah was too old.

But at Christmas we think about angels with wings and halos. At least, that’s how we fix up the angels in our Christmas plays at church. That’s how we imagine them looking as they sang to the shepherds. The Bible says the angels were praising God, but it doesn’t exactly say singing. But we hear singing when we read about those angels. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward me.” And then they went on back to heaven.

The Bible says that these shepherds were out there on the hill watching their sheep when all of the sudden an angel stood before them. with the glory of the Lord shining all around them. Can you imagine how bright that must have been and how afraid those shepherds had to be. It says in the Bible they were sore afraid? Dad says that means they were scared to death. I’m guessing they were trembling and shaking. Maybe they couldn’t talk. Could be they had to shield their eyes from that bright shining glory. Or they could have been looking at each other to see if the others saw what they were seeing.  Then the angel tells them not to be afraid. That might have been easier said than done with an angel right there in front of you. Maybe the angel waved some peace over them and somehow made them stop trembling. I wonder if just being there in all that glory changed them forever.

I like thinking about those shepherds seeing the angels. They didn’t just sit out there on their hill thinking about it either. They got up and heading down to the town to check out what the angel told them about finding the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger. That had to sound a little strange to them. Babies weren’t supposed to be in mangers. Hay to feed stock was in mangers. Not exactly where you’d expect to find a baby. Especially one that angels told you about. Still, you wouldn’t doubt an angel telling you the truth. So off they went and found things just the way the angels said. There was baby Jesus in that manger.

So what did they do then? They told everybody they saw. I asked Dad if he thought people believed them or if they thought the shepherds had maybe slept one night too many out under the stars watching sheep. He told me to read the Bible story again, and right there after the verse about the shepherds telling everybody, the Bible says that those who heard the shepherds’ story marveled at what they said. I like that word marveled. I think that means people may have had a hard time imagining exactly what the shepherds had seen, but they wanted to. They wanted to marvel at the thought of an angel bringing such good news. The Bible says glad tidings. And then they thought of the angels appearing in the sky. A sky full of angels praising God. But maybe the most marvelous thing might have been how the shepherds felt when they saw baby Jesus and just seeing him filled their hearts with joy and made their faces glow. It doesn’t say that in the Bible. It just says they found the babe lying in a manger and when they had seen him, they went out telling everybody. That sounds like they were rejoicing to me.

I like thinking about the Christmas story and imagining how it was, don’t you? Dad says you shouldn’t add things to the Scripture, but that it’s okay to imagine how the people in the Bible might have felt.

I hope you have a merry, merry Christmas and that you have a heart full of joy just like the shepherds as you think about that baby in a manger.