‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise –
you know!
‘How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the
livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!’

The reclusive Emily Dickinson has a point. The embrace of anonymity may become so intriguing to others that it results in the very celebrity she is trying to eschew. ‘They’d advertise – you know!’

In barely 40 words, she has exposed the futility and the rivalry of trying to retain a place in the limelight. Compared to the creativity of the solitary poet, it is nothing less than boring. 

Her sentiments tie in very well with the ethos of the Gospel and, indeed, the Christmas Gospel – forgetting self and following Christ, concealing your spirituality, not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing. 

The first to hear the message of the Christ child’s birth are anonymous shepherds living on a hillside looking after sheep. No names identify them. They receive a sign – a baby with no name. And a clue – a manger in Bethlehem.

There was no room in the inn for the child to be born of Mary. ‘He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him’ (John 1:11). The manger was a sign of his birth but also his death.

Unlike the wooden mangers which appear in a Nativity play, the manger in which the Christ child was laid was probably made of stone, built into a wall in the Palestinian house. It looks like a sarcophagus. This was not only a cradle but a coffin. We dare not separate his birth from his death, Christmas from Easter. So we ask with Eliot’s Magi, ‘Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?’

And so, the manger is a sign of Christ’s solidarity with us. For it calls to mind the two points at which every human being is united to another – birth and death. We have all been born and we shall all die, like anonymous shepherds living on a hillside.

The manger was in Bethlehem, which means ‘house of bread’. This happened to fulfil Micah’s prophecy. The prophet goes on to say, ‘He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord’ (Micah 5:4).

An animal’s feeding trough cradles the one who was to feed the people of God. The baby born in Bethlehem, the house of bread, is given the name ‘Bread of Life’.
The one who was called to feed his flock in the strength of the Lord grows up to be a Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. And the first visitors to see this anonymous baby laid in a manger are fellow shepherds.

The message of the angels is one of peace, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favours’ (Luke 2:14). And the prophet, Micah, concludes his prophecy by declaring that, ‘He shall be the one of peace’ (Micah 5:5).

The way of peace which was born in Bethlehem and witnessed by anonymous shepherds is the fruit of that world where the last shall be first, treasure is carried in earthen vessels, the foolish are chosen to demonstrate the wisdom of God and a King washes feet.

In his autobiography, The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks writes beautifully about shepherding on his farm in the Lake District. But his sense of place and belonging to a particular geographical location is contrasted with his marvellous observation, ‘Landscapes like ours were created by, and survive through, the efforts of nobodies…’
The names which people associate with the Lake District are people like William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter. They do not remember the shepherds nor the sheep. But that is not the point. ‘This is a landscape of modest, hard-working people,’ he says. ‘The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.’

All those who are called to be shepherds and to shepherd other people, to be there, to commit ourselves to a people and a place, to go the extra mile, travel far to find the lost, live a life which brings stability to our communities. After the Christmas event, the shepherds return to the hillside glorifying and praising God for the Christ child’s affirmation and solidarity:
‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – Too?’