Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.

     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, struck anew, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

     God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

     Christmas calls for humility.  It reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about thankfulness and gratitude, humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.  Christmas calls us to consider what we can do to express our gratitude for the humility of being alive, for the opportunity, one we did not create, to partake in the wondrous sentience we all share.

     To give.  For that is what God, all those centuries ago, did.  In the humility of the Christ child, the baby born in a manger, his birth announced to marginalized shepherds, we see the true nature of God:  love.  Love of gratitude, love of humility.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and forgotten about him.

     Merry Christmas!