Something About The Joy

We were on our way to the Christmas morning worship service and I was not in the mood to worship. I could trace the problem to its source. The grumpiness had started on December 22nd, when I first heard a Christmas song on the radio that had the Baby Jesus saying “Ho, ho, ho.” Bah, humbug. The racoon who ate the pumpkin pie off my back deck during the Christmas Eve service didn’t help any. Nor did the discovery, later in the evening, that my jar of poultry seasoning was empty. It could have been on my fruitless pilgrimage around town that night, looking for an open grocery store, that I lost the right front hubcap off my new volkswagon. So, driving to church on Christmas morning, listening to my husband’s idle musings about which of the three curbs I had bumped in the last four days might have dealt the death knell to my hubcap, I was in full grinch form. “Merry Christmas,” I said (pointedly) to him in the middle of his one-sided discussion of the missing hubcap. Bei...

When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written: “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.'" Matthew 2:3-6 A bit of shepherd trivia. Shepherds, in Jesus' day, were considered one of the lowest classes of people. They were so suspect as liars and thieves that their testimonies were not accepted in a court of law. Yet they were the ones to whom the angels first announced the birth of Jesus, and were probably the first to begin spreading the word to others. Shepherding was the chief industry of the little town of Bethlehem. The animals were raised to be sold in Jerusalem, to pilgrims who needed them for sacrifices in their religious ceremonies. Lambs were killed to atone for the s...