And the angel said unto them, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings…” Luke 2:10

We live in a generation beset with fear where security has assumed a greater value than freedom. We want secure stocks, secure airports, and secure streets. We seek out secure jobs, secure families, and homes so secure that no one can get in or out.  The same bars that lock burglars out, entrap residents in the even of a fire. We are obsessed with safety, security, and fear.

 It was an uneventful night when an angel invaded the darkness of complacency, security, and safety that defined the shepherds’ existence, Explosive light called them to attention. A voice they had never heard summoned them with these words, “Fear not!” Their restless contentment had for too longed masked their anxious resignation that things would always continue as they had been. They rested secure in the routine existence to which they believed they had been assigned until they were disturbed by a great light and an authoritative voice that called them to revive their expectations and renew their hope.

 Life would become delightfully dangerous and spontaneous again as they redefined peace and realigned their hopes with a promise they could neither control nor verify. They were being called to a new kind of life where they would sneer at fear and move out in faith to a place they could never find on their own. In a few moments, they would receive all of the evidence they needed to say, “Let us go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.”

 And so, they would move out with a new kind of urgent haste – unlike the haste of other days. This urgency would have no root in fear or distress. It would be the haste of child to the Christmas tree on Christmas morning, the hurried pace of a soldier returning home from battle to his loved ones, the sprint of an athlete in the last lap of a race for Olympic gold. It would be the end of fear for the shepherds and for all who would embrace the promise given to them and to us that night: “Behold!”