“I Believe in Angels” and the peace they urge upon us--based on a reading from Isaiah 9.2-7. On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, the reading urges us never to stop yearning for the peace we need and to listen for the divine messengers, angels, who bear messages hope for those willing to listen. If you don't believe in angels, this sermon may invite you to consider their reality even in this scientific age.“
1.
Angels are a big deal at Christmas. There’s the angel that appears to Mary. Another appears to Joseph. A host of angels appear to the shepherds. And our choir has just sung to us of angels. “Within each lifetime,” they sang, “an angel’s voice is heard.”
“Within each lifetime.” Have you heard an angel’s voice?
The word, “angel,” in the Bible doesn’t necessarily refer to a supernatural being who looks very much like a human being but with a glow and wings and the prettiest voice you’ve ever heard. We’ve fashioned that image of angels through long years of the imagination, artists trying to convey what cannot be put into words.
There certainly are reasons artists have rendered angels as supernatural human-like beings with astonishing voices and vast wings, all aglow with divine light. But you’ll not find such a description in the Bible. The word, “angel” in the Bible simply refers to an agent of divine revelation. They are messengers, sacred intermediaries, ineffable presences who play a special role in opening human beings to the reality of God. To literalize the symbol is to make it possible to miss the truth the symbol is meant to convey. If we take it literally, we may think that angels are uncommon and only appear in the holiest of moments to the most worthy of persons.
But the theological, spiritual, and mystical truth the biblical word “angel” symbolizes is this—
God is as close to us as our next breath, near as the beating of our hearts; God is communicating with us in every moment, for God is everywhere, at all times, inside us and outside us. There is never a time we are outside of or away from the presence of God. But that doesn’t mean we are awake to God’s presence or conscious of God’s communication to us.
2.
My father used to read the newspaper at the breakfast table. He’d get so engrossed in an article that if my mother asked him a question he’d respond with an absent-minded, “Uh huh,” no matter what the question was. My brother and I would ask him crazy things while he was in his newspaper-trance just to hear him say, “Uh huh.” Then we’d laugh hysterically until he’d put the paper down and say, “Whaaaat?”
An angel, then, can be anything that breaks through our distraction and opens us up to hear, feel, or experience a communication from the divine. And by anything, I mean an inner nudge, an idea that comes as an epiphany, a person, an insight from something you’ve read that penetrates with such depth it feels like a word from God; and I’m not ruling out mystical encounters with presences that seem to transcend what’s natural—those things are possible too. The point is, when the Bible uses the term, “angel,” it’s trying to help us notice that something of the divine has broken into someone’s life to wake them up to God and what God is doing in, around, and through their lives.
Our choir preached the truth, then, when they sang, “Within each lifetime, an angel’s voice is heard.” An angel is a mythic symbol used to express the truth that God is always trying to communicate with us, but we need help listening.
Angels are more real than we’ve believed them to be, or maybe it’s better to say they’re more important to us now than we’ve thought them to be.
3.
Our reading today is about this kind of breakthrough. The reading wants us to picture a person named Isaiah, living 2800 years ago, who became acutely aware that he was hearing things, he was picking up on what he came to call “the voice of the Lord.” Another way to say this is to use the language our choir used when they sang, “Within each lifetime, an angel’s voice is heard.” Something awakened Isaiah. At a particularly needful time in his life, Isaiah received personal communication from the divine. Maybe he was distracted with so many important things, but something broke into his consciousness and caused him to hear something important, to hear and feel and experience what the divine was up to in those turbulent days long ago.
“Within each lifetime, an angel’s voice is heard.”
God got through to Isaiah and this is what Isaiah heard:
“Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Today we think this is all about Jesus. It’s not. The event of Jesus Christ wouldn’t occur for another 700 years. The Isaiah event is about another time of intense turmoil. Nations are in an uproar. Chaos looms. War threatens. And with an eerie connection to the present, the text just prior to our reading today tells us that the people are perpetuating conspiracy theories and shaking in their shoes (Is. 8.12). Politicians are spineless or corrupt (8.14). There’s little to hope for in the nation’s political, religious, or commercial leadership. The people “see only distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish” says the Bible (8.22).
4.
It’s into all this that a message from Beyond breaks into Isaiah’s consciousness. Into the gloom and doom of the age, Isaiah’s angel whispers to him of hope when all seems hopeless. The voice in his head speaks about the birth of a child when all that people around him see is death. Isaiah’s personal angel utters news of a new king arising, when the people have had enough of kings but can’t imagine any other form of governance. Isaiah is helped to perceive a new era, inaugurated by a very different kind of ruler than anyone has ever known—a ruler who bears in himself the characteristics of the divine Ruler, a regent who rules on behalf of the Regent of the World.
And this ruler shall be: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
These are the characteristics of a new era, spoken against the bankrupt practices of an old, dying and deadly era—the kings and rulers people have grown tired of.
Rather than a regime of “Despicable Despots,” the vision comes to Isaiah of a “Wonderful Counselor.”
Rather than “Purveyors of Falsehoods,” Isaiah imagines an experience of the “Mighty God.”
Rather than kings who are nothing more than “Megalomaniacs in Chief,” Isaiah is told of one who will be “Everlasting Father.”
Rather than tyrants who are “Creators of Chaos,” God is moving to bring to the people a “Prince of Peace.”
Instead of the failed politics of the past, against the despair of the people, God imparts to Isaiah a vision of a new political order emerging, a new way forward as a human community: “And there shall be,” says the Bible, “endless peace, justice, and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore.”
5.
The vision that comes to Isaiah names the hopes of humanity in dire times, the kind of leadership we need if the peace we really need as a people is to come.
But the truth is, such a peace never did come. Not entirely. Why?
Because it’s still coming. God’s peaceable kingdom (or let’s say kin-dom because it’s not about a king as much as it’s about us all as kin working to bring it about)—God’s peaceable kin-dom is something that grows continually through fits and starts; two steps forward, one step back; one step right and two steps left. It moves but slowly, almost imperceptibly. But it grows. For “within each lifetime, [a new] angel’s voice is heard” calling a new generation to embody God’s peaceable kin-dom even in times of turmoil. “Within each lifetime, a new angel” whispers to those living under tyranny and chaos, amidst conflict and fear. “Within each lifetime, a new angel” imparts to human hearts a new vision of what human life can be, calling a new people to make peace possible in their day.
It may seem utopian, unattainable. But what happens if we don’t listen for the angels today? What happens if we give up on our dreams for peace, for a better world? What happens if we stay stuck in our cynicism and pessimism, our fear and despair? Hope lost, may be the greatest calamity of them all.
And so this is what the imagery of the Christ Child is all about—for those who will listen to the angels. A child is about something new coming into our lives. A child is about us tending to that birth. And the Christ Child is about God coming into our lives. Christmas is about us tending to what is being born here and now among us and through us.
And the truth of Christmas, the truth the angels sing, is that the birth of Jesus Christ so long ago has no effect on our world today unless something divine is born in us, unless something sacred comes into the world because of us.
6.
There is always something divine waiting to be born. But God needs us, the womb of our humanity, to bring it into being.
Long ago, Isaiah heard his angel say, “For unto us a child is born.” Something new and holy was coming.
Today the Christmas angels say, “For into us a child is born.” Something new and holy is emerging now, here, even in the most desperate of times—especially in these, most desperate times—through the womb of our humanity:
Angels imparting divine wisdom to scientists cooperating on vaccines;
angels keeping hope alive in hospitals and agencies;
angels shaping new public policies;
angels whispering in ways that keep democracy alive;
angels advancing a new reckoning on racial injustice;
angels inspiring stunning acts of benevolence;
angels guiding innovation;
angels healing divisions and ending animosities;
angels imagining ways human beings can live sustainably on the earth;
angels keeping hope alive;
angels making peace;
angels working for wellbeing.
What is your angel whispering to you?
What is it you may be called to contribute to the birthing of God’s peaceable kin-dom in our world today?
What might stand in the way of you doing what you sense is yours to do or be today?
What do you need in order to take the next step?
“Within each lifetime, an angel’s voice is heard.”
Let us listen . . .