I have always thought it worth noting the people who came to worship Our Lord. \u00a0First there were angels. \u00a0They told the world that He was born, but who did they tell? \u00a0They told shepherds. \u00a0Shepherds were considered little more than criminals. \u00a0They were unappreciated and extremely poor and thought to have deserved the lowly estate in which they lived their lives; \u00a0yet the angels of the Lord “encamped around them” and announced to them, of all people, that the Christ was born! \u00a0Not the priests of the temple, not the powerful. \u00a0Shepherds. \u00a0Dirty, smelly, humble shepherds. \u00a0Our Lord loved shepherds. \u00a0So much so that He calls Himself the Good Shepherd.<\/p>\n
Also, the Wise Men were there. \u00a0These were the astrologers of the day. \u00a0They were also very rich. \u00a0They studied the prophesies and knew how to discern the signs of the times and the signs in the sky. \u00a0So we have the very poor and simple and the very rich and intelligent at the manger. \u00a0What we don’t have are bureaucrats. \u00a0We don’t have middle management. \u00a0We don’t have the clergy. \u00a0We have those who knew they were nothing and needed God to step in and tell them what was going on, and we have those smart enough to know that they needed to act upon their knowledge. \u00a0It’s the ones in the middle that have trouble seeing what’s important.\u00a0However, they are not to be blamed. \u00a0It’s just that those of us in the middle are working so hard that we find it difficult knowing what’s really important. \u00a0There is one thing that the shepherds and the Wise Men had in common. \u00a0They both looked up- \u00a0literally. \u00a0That’s what we need to do. \u00a0Look up. \u00a0You will never stumble with your eyes on heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have always thought it worth noting the people who came to worship Our Lord. \u00a0First there were angels. \u00a0They told the world that He was born, but who did they tell? \u00a0They told shepherds. \u00a0Shepherds were considered little more than criminals. \u00a0They were unappreciated and extremely poor and thought to have deserved the lowly estate in which they lived… (more…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[195,194],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-good-shepherd","tag-wise-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":564,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamiestanthony.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}