To read the ancient biblical story about the birth of Jesus is to enter into a story the characters and scenes of which are intimately familiar. Joseph and Mary, Herod and Wise Men from the East, visions of angels and words from even more ancient prophets: this is the stuff of which Christmas is made. There is more, of course. Mention that word "Christmas" to most any modern American, and instantly dozens of images flood the mind: Christmas trees and Christmas presents, Christmas cards and Christmas parties, Santa and his reindeer, Frosty and his stovepipe hat, frosted sugar cookies cut out to look like bells and stars, and, we must not fail to mention, the ever-popular fruitcake. You and I could sit for hours around a crackling fireplace with the requisite stockings hung from the mantle, listening to our favorite Christmas carols, sipping eggnog, and reminiscing about all of our fond memories of Christmas. I would hazard the guess, though, that there is one major element of the Christmas scene that we would never mention, nor even remember.

If you read carefully the few pages from Matthew and Luke that serve as the basis for everything we now call "Christmas," you will discover that one of the repeated themes of each individual scene is the theme of fear. No one I know of thinks of fear when they think of Christmas. We like to think of love and peace and joy and hope, but not fear. Yet, fear is very much part of what was going on when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Matthew reports that the angels said to Joseph, "do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife." And Matthew reports that when the Wise Men asked King Herod about Jesus' whereabouts, Herod "was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him." Turning to Luke, we read that as Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, offered incense in the temple in Jerusalem, an angel appeared, and Zechariah "was terrified, and fear overwhelmed him." When Gabriel appeared to Mary, she must have been afraid, for Gabriel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary." And we mustn't forget the shepherds, all alone in the fields, surrounded by darkness, when suddenly, "the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angels said to them, 'Do not be afraid.'"

The feeling of fear is hardly limited in its occurrence to the stories about Jesus' birth. One can argue that fear is present throughout the scriptural record. As early as the third chapter of Genesis, we read that Adam and Eve "heard the sound of the Lord God in the garden and the man and the woman hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, 'Where are you?' He said, 'I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid "

What is fear? It is that emotion we feel when we are aware of some sort of threat. Closely related to fear is anxiety. Where fear is what we feel toward something we can identify, anxiety is unfocused, a sense of general apprehension about something that resists identification. Fear and anxiety hardly need further definition, because you and I well know what they are from personal experience. Early in life, we may have been afraid of monsters hiding under our beds. As life went on, we learned to fear many things, both real and imagined. September 11 will always be remembered as the day that a new kind of fear was introduced to our nation. To be honest with ourselves, never do we totally escape our fear. The Bible reflects the entire range of human fears and anxieties, and we really should not be so surprised, then, to find that fear plays a major part in the story of Jesus' birth.

First, let's talk about the fears of Herod. We like to think of Herod being afraid, because we know that Herod is the villain in the story, the "bad guy" whom we all love to hate. Herod had been king over Israel for several decades by the time Jesus appeared on the scene. Essentially, he was a pretty good king, but he had a terrible temper. Normally, he tried to take care of his people, but when he suffered one of his frequent fits of rage, he would do horrible things. Especially, he was jealous of his power, and any threat to that power met his full wrath. Historians document that once, when he suspected his wife and two sons of plotting his downfall, he had them killed, which was only one time among many that he resorted to murder to maintain his power.

Herod did not take kindly, then, to the foreign dignitaries who visited his court one day, asking for the address of the new king of the Jews. He was afraid. And so was the entire capital city of Jerusalem. But afraid of what? For Herod, that's easy to guess: he was afraid of losing his throne! No more political power, no more privilege and wealth, no more unbridled outbursts of bloody rage, no more status. For Jerusalem, the fear was perhaps secondary, but still very much justified. Without Herod in power, the whole structure of government would likely change. When the top man goes, everyone underneath goes with him. Remember, there was no civil service in that day! Or maybe, Jerusalem feared what Herod might do to try to retain his power: a civil war perhaps, with Herod's armies pitted against the forces of the new pretender to the throne?

The story is told about Nikita Khrushchev of a speech he was delivering that was highly critical of his predecessor, Josef Stalin. In the middle of his diatribe against Stalin, someone from the audience shouted, "You were one of Stalin's colleagues. Why didn't you stop him?" Khrushchev roared, "Who said that?" And nobody said a word. An agonizing silence filled the room. Nobody dared move a muscle. Then, in a quiet voice, Khrushchev said, "Now you know why."

Herod commanded the same absolute power of a Khrushchev or a Stalin, and he ruled through the force of fear. But Herod himself was filled with fear at the thought of losing his power. And so was the entire royal city.

The "good guys" in the Christmas story were also afraid, but we have the sense that their fear was of a different kind from Herod's and Jerusalem's. Joseph, Mary, Zechariah, and the shepherds were all afraid as they found themselves confronted with angels. Now, very often, the Bible tells us someone was visited by an angel, when it really means to say they were visited by God. But since God had never been seen, and since the Jews were very hesitant to talk directly about God himself, they found it easier to think of a visitation from God as a visitation from an angel. The upshot of this, whether Joseph and Mary and the others were seeing an angel or seeing God, is that they were in the presence of the divine, and that is no small thing!

Let's imagine that one day I invite you to come to see me in my office, and just before we walk in, I tell you that sitting in my office, waiting to meet you, is the President of the United States. I think most of us would be a bit unnerved by the prospect of simply marching in and meeting the President, wouldn't we? Think of how much more unsettling it would be, suddenly to discover that you were in the presence of the President of the Universe, the Creator of All That Is, the Lord God Almighty?

There is a kind of fear the human being feels when it finds itself face to face with its Maker, a fear that speaks of reverence, wonder, awe. We human beings feel this way because we sense that, in the presence of God, we are in the presence of Someone so much more powerful, so much more wise, just so much more of everything than we are. And we are taken aback. We feel insufficient, incomplete, unworthy. Especially, think of the shepherds, those outcasts of society who were given little more consideration by society than the sheep for which they cared, as they found themselves surrounded by the the glory of the Lord. What a wakeup call! What a tremendous, awesome, fearsome thing!

It is almost certain that the fear Joseph and Mary and the others felt had much to do with this reverential kind of fear, but there is another kind that we feel when confronted with the presence of God. Closely related to our sense of awe and wonder is also a sense of absolute dread. Herod had good reason to fear a new king who might remove him from power by having him assassinated, but even more so does the ordinary person have much to fear from God.. If God is perfect holiness, absolute goodness, utter righteousness, then what should be the response of a mere creature, so full of imperfection, so tainted by contradiction, so utterly sinful? The Jewish people were so reluctant even to speak of God directly precisely because of their profound sense of unworthiness. Indeed, they believed that no mere human could withstand the presence of God, because absolute holiness can do nothing but obliterate sinfulness. In other words, the presence of God engenders the fear of punishment and even death.

For Joseph and Mary, though, the fear of death seemed of less concern than the fear of what life held for them, especially in the immediate future. Here was a young couple, who, by all rights, should not have been having a baby, not just yet. To both of them, the angel says, "Don't be afraid." But why trust an angel? They had every right to be afraid! As if having a child isn't fearsome enough, having one before the final act of marriage was an affront to polite society and a rebellion against the laws of religion. But even more than these complicating factors was the fact that Joseph and Mary really had no earthly idea of how this baby was conceived in the first place. Matthew tells us that Joseph was ready to do the prudent thing: a quiet divorce. Mary, often seen as the picture of faithfulness, simply acquiesces to what is really the inevitable: she will go ahead and have the baby. But the angel tells of a different plan. "Do not be afraid, Joseph. Trust what I have said, and take Mary as your wife." "Do not be afraid, Mary. Accept this miracle of God into your life." Mary and Joseph had much to fear, but especially, I think, they feared what would happen in their lives when they turned over their futures to God, knowing that God's plan for them was quite unlike anything they themselves had planned.

And so there you have it. The first Christmas was filled with fear. Do you see the fear now? Do you recognize how it feels? Herod feared losing his power, his wealth, his prestige, his position. To rephrase Herod's problem, we could say that Herod was worried about losing his job, being publicly disgraced, and going bankrupt. Have any of you ever had those fears? The shepherds, Zechariah, Joseph and Mary felt a different fear. Part of their fear signaled their sense of profound awe from being in the presence of God. They felt small, insignificant, of no consequence. In modern language, we would perhaps say they struggled with their self-esteem compared to God, that they felt outclassed, and they were! Perhaps in all of them there was a twinge of the fear of punishment, even the fear of death. If you had been Zechariah, merely doing your job as a priest, or one of the shepherds, minding your own business on a hillside in the middle of the night, and suddenly an angel of God appeared, wouldn't you think that perhaps your time had come, and now it was time to reckon with your heavenly Judge? How do you think you will feel when it comes time for you to be face-to-face with God's messenger? Will you be confident of your impeccable record, or will you remember a few times that you slipped, a few transgressions that deserve eternal punishment? Joseph and Mary found that when the angel came calling, they weren't so much afraid of what would happen when they died as they were afraid of what would happen with their lives. Has God ever come into your life and announced that, from now on, you would be going a different direction? Has God ever challenged you to do something for him that might get you into trouble, or embarrass you, or make you uncomfortable, or just rearrange your carefully laid plans?

The fears of the first Christmas are not limited to Christmas. They are fears that you and I know every day of our lives. Herod and Joseph, Mary and Zechariah, even the shepherds, were, after all, just people. Their fears were human fears. And we humans haven't changed so much, not deep inside. That first Christmas was filled with fear because it was filled with people, normal people who found themselves confronted with the Living God. And to almost everyone, that God had a message: Do not be afraid.

Herod was the only one who didn't get that message, because, in fact, God was telling him the opposite. You had better be afraid when God comes around, if you are interested in holding on to your power, hoarding your wealth, maintaining your privilege and rank. The God-child Jesus had a way of twisting power from the hands of those who grasp it for their own selfish reasons, a way of exposing the misuse of wealth by those who will not share, a way of eliminating all systems of rank and privilege. If your god is any of these things, then, yes, you have something to fear from the true God, for he will challenge you to give up your idols of power and wealth and position.

To all the others, however, God said, "Do not be afraid. Even though I seem so remote, so powerful, so incredibly awesome as to be totally distinct and different from you, do not be afraid, because I have come to you as a little child. Even though I am holy and just, absolutely righteous and good in all I do, and you are a pitiful sinner, corrupt in every aspect of your life, do not be afraid, because I have come to you as a forgiving Savior. Even though I reveal to you my plans for your life that seem so far-fetched, so impossible, so difficult to achieve, do not be afraid, because I have come to you as a faithful Friend and a wise Master."

This Christmas season, as you enjoy the food, the friends, the fun of it all, and as you remember a warm and cuddly little baby and his proud parents, and as you feel all the wonderful feelings of hope and love and pace, let me encourage you also to recognize the fears that Christmas came to answer. The fears of Joseph and Mary and all the rest are your fears, and mine, too. But our fears do not have the final word. The final word of Christmas about our fears is spoken to us, perhaps, in some of the familiar lines we sing every year: "Come, thou long-expected Jesus, Born to set thy people fee; From our fears and sins release us; Let us find our rest in Thee." "Good Christian friends, rejoice, with heart, and soul, and voice; Now ye need not fear the grave: Jesus Christ was born to save!" "O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie! The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." Listen to yourself as you sing this Christmas, and be not afraid.

Amen.

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