It is said that they were “keeping watch” over their flocks by night. But you and I know that most of them were dozing off when the great angelic disruption occurred.
Why else would they have to begin with “Do not be afraid.” I mean, you and I would be afraid too if we were about to nod off and a host of folks arrived in a blaze of blinding light. Heck, it would have taken me minutes just for my eyes to adjust to the scene.
And why all the spectacle anyway? Joseph and Mary were visited in their dreams, why not these folks too? Weren’t they also worth the creative effort of a little subconscious conversation? Or is that too complicated to be accomplished in a group?
And then they are supposed to travel to see the one whose birth is “good news and great joy for all the people.” Who’s supposed to watch the sheep then? Take them with them? Clearly the angels know nothing about tending livestock.
The question is whether we still need a story of divine disruption, or whether there is another way to honor the presence of the holy in, through, and between us all? Maybe we need to make room for both.
Some say the holy comes like a sudden blaze—
a sky split open, angels spilling light,
a message so startling it rearranges the night.
A God who breaks in, uninvited and unstoppable,
interrupting shepherds, interrupting history,
interrupting the long ache of a world waiting for rescue.
This is the Christmas of trumpets and trembling,
of a universe tilted by a single birth,
of a holiness that descends like a meteor
and lands in a manger.
But there is another way the story might be told.
A holiness that does not shatter the sky
but rises quietly from the ground.
A presence that grows the way courage grows—
slowly, secretly, cell by cell,
in the warm dark of a human heart.
No rupture, no thunder,
just the steady widening of compassion
until it spills over the edges of a life.
In one telling, God arrives like a storm.
In another, the sacred gathers like dawn.
One is a divine interruption—
a love that breaks the world open.
The other is a divine emergence—
a love that grows the world from within.
And maybe both are true in their own way.
Maybe the holy sometimes startles us awake,
and sometimes waits patiently
for us to notice the light already kindling
behind our own ribs.
For the holy still emerges today—
in the parent who keeps showing up
even when the world feels heavy,
in the teenager who dares to speak truth
in a room that prefers silence,
in the neighbor who knocks on the door
with soup and a listening ear,
in the stranger who chooses kindness
with nothing to gain.
It rises in the quiet decisions
that no one applauds—
the forgiveness offered,
the boundary honored,
the grief tended gently,
the hope kept alive
for one more day.
It grows in communities
that refuse to let anyone be forgotten,
in movements that insist
another world is possible,
in the fragile, persistent belief
that love is still worth practicing.
The holy emerges
whenever we choose to be present
to one another’s humanity,
whenever we let compassion
take root in the soil of our ordinary days.
On this night of candles and story,
we stand between the two:
the God who bursts in,
and the presence that has been here all along—
the holy that descends,
and the holy that rises.
And perhaps the miracle of this night
is not only that the holy arrived once,
but that it keeps arriving—
in us, through us,
among us still.