Faith Daily for Christmas: A Shepherd’s Faith
This year, as I’ve been reflecting on the nativity story, I’ve found myself drawn to the shepherds. Not because they are heroic, or virtuous, or especially insightful—but because they feel recognisably human. They are simply people doing what needs to be done: keeping watch through the night, alert to danger, tired, responsible for lives entrusted to them. And then—without warning—the sky opens and the heavens erupt with a world-changing message.
What strikes me most is that after the angels have sung, after the child has been found, nothing about their world is suddenly “fixed.” The night remains the night. The political realities remain unchanged. The work will still be there in the morning. And yet, somehow, everything is different.
In a year that has held profound grief and violence—close to home and across the world—I notice how much I want my faith to resolve things at Christmas. To tidy the edges. To offer certainty or closure. But Luke’s story resists that temptation.
The shepherds are not given explanations. They are given presence. A word spoken into fear: “Do not be afraid.” A sign small enough to be missed. A child whose birth does not deny the darkness, but enters it.
Perhaps this is what it means to stay human at Christmas.
The birth of Christ does not lift us out of darkness; it draws God into it. God does not meet humanity at its most polished or resolved, but at its most exposed — born into night, into uncertainty, into a world already shaped by fear and loss. In doing so, Christ does not bypass our humanity; he inhabits it fully.
To stay human, then, is not to rush toward easy answers or harden ourselves against pain. It is to remain attentive and open—to tenderness, to compassion, to wonder. Christmas does not ask us to be stronger or more certain than we are. It asks us to be present.
And perhaps that is how peace begins—not as something imposed from above, but as something born quietly within us, as we stay human together.
God of the night and the manger,
you come to us not in power but in nearness.
When the world feels fractured and unfinished,
help us to stay human—attentive and tender.
Give us courage to carry hope into the darkness,
and trust that your peace is being born among us;
through Jesus Christ. AMEN.