And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear……
 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God….

Luke 2: 8-9, 13

This is a favorite passage in Theology of Work circles because the shepherds encounter heavenly reality in their place of work. This is a correction to the compartmentalization that so many experience between their work lives and their spiritual lives. Heavy emphasis is placed on how this annoucement did not take place in the Temple but was given to common, low level laborers in the midst of their everyday work lives. The message is that God wants to meet people in and on their jobs, not just in church settings.

This is an advent message, so why am I writing about it two days after Christmas? Because I want to focus on what it would have been like for the shepherds to return to those fields the following day after visiting the baby Jesus. Did they experience their mundane world of work differently after being visited by angels? I imagine that they had heard stories of heaven and angels, but I wonder how much they really believed in their existence before that night. Prior to this experience of glory, did they live their lives with a sense of an unseen heavenly reality? Or was that reality much more of an idea that was irrevelant to their day to day existence? I suspect it was the latter.

But that night must have changed how they came to work the following day. They must have engaged their work with a new awareness of the reality of spiritual truths that they might have claimed to believe in before, but now knew to be true at a whole new level.

In The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, a London cabby is accidentally transported out of our world and witnesses the creation of Narnia. I thought of his response to this experience. “‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’”

This is how I imagine the experience of the angels would have impacted the shepherds as they returned to their fields. But would it have been for all their lives? Or would it have faded over time?

When we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating God entering into our world and becoming a part of everyday life on earth. And even though Jesus ascended back to heaven, we now have the Holy Spirit as part of our lives. Every Christian would claim to believe this truth, but do we live our lives as if this is a reality? More importantly, how would we live our lives if we did truly believe in this reality?

Jerram Barrs identifies a challenge to integrating our faith and our work. “One of the great difficulties we face is the pressure of the secular society in which we live. The very air we breathe teaches us that we are living in a universe in which God is inactive. Yet the Scripture teaches us that we live in a universe in which God is constantly at work.“

How will the reality of Jesus Christ and His presence and purposes impact how we engage our work lives this year? May you have a fresh awareness of God’s presence at your work and may you you find new ways to be mindful of that reality as you go about your day.