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I do hope you have had a really happy Christmas. You may have had visitors. You may have been visitors to other people’s homes.

This morning has the story of the first, and very early, visitors to the Holy Family in some sort of outhouse or stable. Later, as we know, there were further visitors from the east, the magi, or wise men. But the magis’ visit may have been up to two years later, taking into account Herod’s order to kill children up to two years old. The shepherds took priority.

This morning’s gospel is the second half of the story of the angels and the shepherds in the fields, a magnificent story, full of delicate but communicative imagery. We have both ‘the glory of the Lord shone around them’, and a humble baby in a rustic manger. Imagery that speaks of the unimaginable greatness of God, but also the intimacy of God’s presence with us. The theological jargon is God’s transcendence and God’s immanence. That’s not imminence, in the sense of ‘about to happen’, but immanence, in the sense of ‘being present with us’. God utterly unknowable on the one hand, and God revealed to us and with us on the other hand.

The shepherds were ordinary blokes, going about their night-time work of guarding their flocks, ready to stand up against marauders of every human and animal kind. Rough and tough, possibly unkempt, bawdy, irreligious. You’ll remember the old children’s version of a carol: ‘While shepherds washed their socks by night, all seated round the tub’. Perhaps not so very wide of the mark, with their makeshift lives on the hillside. With or without clean socks, their attire might not have been up to the mark for ordinary society visiting. But it wouldn’t have been so out of place for visiting a baby and his parents in the outhouse of an inn.

These shepherds, probably with only the simplest of religious beliefs, not given to theological exposition: these humble shepherds demonstrated the profound insights open to all people, children and adults alike, people of every level of sophistication and intelligence. In comparison with the astrological magi who came later, the shepherds represent the unsophisticated part of any populace, unencumbered by clever analysis, but recognising good and evil when they see them, and with the potential to see God in all things. The shepherds, full of heavenly inspiration and insight, recognised the goodness and the divinity of the baby in a manger. They saw God in a baby, and, the narrative tells us, ‘they made known what they had been told about this child’. The simplest of people can have the profoundest of understanding and faith.

But let’s be under no illusions. The shepherds represent all of humanity. All of us, everyone one of us: we’re all mixtures of intellect and simple emotion, with a potential for spiritual insight. Even if some people feel they should be classed as intellectuals, no-one can’t afford to take the high ground when it comes to insight and faith. The magi or astrologers were the academics, the intellectuals, who read it all up first and they set out to prove their thesis. They too came to visit, but they came later. In the Church’s calendar, they’ll be coming next Saturday for the Epiphany. But it was the uneducated night-shift workers who came first, on Christmas night, with insight and faith at least equal to the magis’. It was the shepherds who had priority.

Now, two little stories. They relate to the Liverpool overspill estate on the other side of the Mersey, where we lived and I worked some years ago.

On the edge of the estate, there was a hostel for young adults with serious learning difficulties, many of them with a high degree of down’s syndrome. A group of them made their way to the church for socials and dances, and to the Eucharist each Sunday morning. They made a huge, positive contribution with their vivacity and spontaneity, and everyone loved them coming. But you had to be careful when preaching: if you asked a rhetorical question, you tended to get an answer! There was one man called Leslie who occasionally stunned the children during the service, when he apparently took his hair off to scratch his bald head, and then put it back again sometimes a bit skewwiff. It was of course an itchy wig. It was the same chap who averted a serious accident. He had little language, but, with an urgent ‘Ugh, ugh’ from the congregation one Christmas, he alerted us that one of the young magi in a live Nativity tableau had stood too near an altar candle and set the tinsel on the top of his headgear on fire, and was the hero of the moment. For a while, a group of these young men and women came to our house once a week for confirmation preparation on their way back from the Adult Training Centre. These were really happy occasions. The teaching was simple, but they took it seriously and the bishop delighted in confirming them when he came. Their intellectual understanding may have been limited, but their faith, as far as I could detect, was as real anyone’s. The shepherds would have been proud of them.

My second story from this parish is about a children’s confirmation group. I asked the youngsters to draw a picture of Pentecost, when a tongue of fire is reported to have settled on each of the apostles. Most of the children drew what you would expect, like the ancient pictures with little flames on heads. But one girl put blank spaces where the apostles’ hearts would be, and put the flames in there. She wasn’t the brightest of children, but it was she who had got the message about the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. When children were brought to Jesus, if you remember, he said that it was ‘to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’. The shepherds would have been proud of her, too.

Now, why is Christmas important? Christmas matters, because without the birth, there would have been no teaching, no example, no Cross and no Resurrection. These are the reasons why Christmas matters. The simple shepherds were moved by the birth. So were the magi. The significance is the amalgam of God’s transcendence, God too great to be described, and God’s immanence, God with us, which is what Emmanuel means. The Christmas stories make these concepts real for all of us, the simple, the clever and the mixture that we all are.

For all the mess that human kind is making of the earth, there is glory to behold. The glory of nature, the glory of humanity at our best, the glory in every new-born child, and not least the glory of the new-born babe of Bethlehem. The power of scriptural imagery, not least the imagery of Christmas, makes divine truth available at least as much to the shepherds as to the magi, at least as much to the simple as to complex and wise. Let’s all be humble visitors to the humble stable, and be constantly open to the wonder and eternal significance of the Christmas story.

Whether visiting or being visited or not, have a happy and peaceful New Year into 2024.