"HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING"

Rev. Jim Petersen

FCUCC

12-20-09

Text: Luke 1:26-38

 

Advent, more than any other time of year, is a season of angels.  I think you would agree.  Check out the book stores.  Lots of angel books on sale pre-Christmas.  Or check out the boutiques.  Lots of angel figurines for purchase.

 

Somebody told me there was an angel Christmas stamp.  I was going to go with that, but the choice the postal clerk gave me was "play" or "pray," as he put it.  That being the snowman verses the Madonna and Child.  I went with "play."  I prefer not to be predictable.

 

However, I do like angels.  They are in the Bible.  By the way, they are in the form of men in the Bible, not women, so I am still being manly here, if that's your hang up.

 

Angels appear in the Bible as messengers.  Indeed, the word "angel" in Greek means "messenger."  So angels are messengers, more commonly guys than gals, as mentioned, delivering the word of God from on high.

 

The Middle Ages was a time of fascination with angels.  Monks speculated on how many angels could dance on the head of pin.  Jewish mystics in the 14^th century determined there were 301,655,722 angels.

 

A century earlier,St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus, c.1193-1280),

best known as the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, had an even greater

figure, proclaiming his count to be 399,920,004 angels, which tells you he

must not have had much free time between counting angels and proctoring

Aquinas.

 

Well, whether 300 million or 400 million, the good news back then was this was close to the world's population, so everybody, I'm assuming, got a "guardian angel."  I do not know whether angels have maintained the same rate of growth as have people on the planet, but I have my doubts, for as I kid I used to be able to see my guardian angel, but have not for some years, as I suspect due to a shortage my angel has been reassigned to another sinner.

 

Alas, the modern revival of interests in angels may mark the end of a strictly secular view of the universe that has characterized the western world since the Enlightenment of the 18^th   century.  The "secular view" sought to explain all things through natural laws and mathematical formulas, which tended to squeeze out surprise and wonder.

 

Now we are once again viewing the universe as more mysterious and open-ended, even in the new physics that says unpredictability and surprise are a part of the very nature of things.   Ha!  I suggest these are angels at work, as God laughs.

 

God must have been laughing as G sends a messenger to Mary. The angel

Gabriel, who looked a lot like Timothy Seery, says to Mary, "Hail, O

favored one, the Lord is with you!" Luke, who alone tells this story, says

Mary is troubled by this greeting and wonders what sort of message this

might be.

 

Which is to say, Mary is surprised by this visitation.  After all, as an unexpecting teenage peasant, she is not accustomed to being addressed by messengers of God.  So Mary is troubled, we are told.

 

Seeing that Mary is troubled, the angel says, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  You are going to have a baby," as if this news would put Mary at ease.  Now she is not only troubled, but she is confused, for she is a virgin, and she is plenty scared, for she is not yet married and the penalty for such impropriety is stoning to death.  Glad to meet you Gabriel.

 

Mary implores, "How can this be, since I have no husband?"  Gabriel responds, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overwhelm you."  Once again, if these words are intended to reassure Mary, I don't think they work.  Indeed, Gabriel must have flunked Basic Messenger Class 101.

 

Mary doesn't get it.  I don't get it.  And I don't think any of you get it.  She is still troubled and confused, wondering what this all means.

 

Then we move to the end of the scene, which begins to make some sense. 

The angel volunteers he has been to visit Elizabeth, Mary's cousin, and

Elizabeth is also pregnant.  Which is nearly as miraculous as Mary's

pregnancy, for Elizabeth is old and past the time in her life during which

she might conceive.

 

Now Mary begins to understand.  It is God at work today, as God was at work with Mary's people 1800 years before, when God entered into a covenant with her people to promise them they would be a blessed people.  God did this through another old couple like Zechariah and Eliz., named Abraham & Sarah.  Mary knew the story. Every Jew knew the story of Abraham and Sarah for they are the patriarch and matriarch of their faith. 

 

As the Genesis story tells us, Abraham and Sarah are also advanced in

years and childless, when angels appear to them and make the

announcement they are going to have a baby.  When Abraham is given this

news (17:17) he falls on his face, in supposed pious prostration in the

presence of this divine promise.  I doubt it.  Abraham is 99.  He  passes out.

This is what Abraham does.

 

Sarah, hearing the news later, laughs (18:12).  She is in the kitchen fixing tea when she overhears the news as shared by these angels unaware.  They hear her laugh, and ask Abraham, "who is that we hear laughing?"  Abraham offers cover, "I think it was the cat."  "No," the angel says, "I heard someone laugh."  Sarah, sensing this no longer a laughing matter, says, "It wasn't me."  She lies!

 

Then the angel offers the punch line.  "Why did you laugh?" he says.  "Is there anything impossible for the Lord?"

 

Which is exactly what the angel visiting Mary says to her after mentioning to her that barren Elizabeth is going to have a baby.  Gabriel says, "For nothing will be impossible with God."  Which is when Mary finally gets it.

 

Her confusion turns to amazement that this is happening to her as well. That God is present and speaking and acting in her life as well, as God did with Abraham and Sarah in the beginning, creating a new covenant and sealing it with the birth of a child. 

 

Mary, above all women, is chosen to be the mother of this child, Jesus, who is to be the first-born of the new covenant extended to all humanity, a promise given that the blessing of the Jews to be a great nation and a light to the world is now given to all the people of the earth to be a blessing and a light to the world.

 

Says the angel, "Blessed are you, Mary, among all women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus."  Mary, who still cannot possibly fully comprehend, responds with the words which make Mary the model of our faith and the mother of Christianity, when she trusts the angels message, "For nothing will be impossible with God," and says, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."

 

 

The noted UCC preacher of our Riverside Church in NYC, William Sloane Coffin, now deceased, defined faith as, "faith is not believing without evidence, but trusting without reservation."  This is the faith of Mary, and Abraham and Sarah.  Not blind faith, but a trusting faith that "nothing is impossible with God."  Which means we live with hope.  See the pink candle in the Advent wreath.  It stands for hope, one of the themes of Advent.

 

In the ancient world, the world in which the Church proclaimed the good news about Jesus Christ, it was believed the world was dominated by forces beyond our control, held in bondage to a fatalism that was immutable, unchangeable.  The stars controlled our lives and the destiny of empires and there was nothing we could do about it.

 

This was expressed in the prevailing philosophy of the day, Greek tragedy.  In Greek tragedy the hero stands up against the impossible powers, bloody but unbowed, stubbornly refusing to yield or submit, and in the end, the Greek hero dies.  That's why we call it Greek tragedy.  It is fatalistic.

 

The Christian faith eclipsed this fatalistic world.  In the Christian understanding of the world, the key word is not "fate," but "faith," which rhymes with "providence."  In our understanding it is not that the gods (small "g") are working against us, but that the God, the one God (capital G), is working for us.  This is providential.

 

As Paul put it to the Romans, "If God be for us, who can be against us?  Neither life nor death, nor principalities nor powers, neither the world above nor the world below, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (8:37-39) 

 

Therefore, the hero in a Christian world is not the person who defies and defeats the gods, but the person who relates to and trusts in God, who says, "Let it be with me according to your word."  Merry Christmas!

 

Fatalism still abounds.  Even within Christianity.  Why it wasn't but this past week that someone asked my in the Peak locker room, of all places, about predestination, which can mean a lot of different things, but what he meant was did I think we were foreordained to heaven or hell. Never mind this is not the predestination of Aquinas, Calvin and Arminius, a subject too deep for here let alone the Peak, what my inquirer meant was did I believe in fatalism.  Are we consigned to heaven or hell at birth and there is nothing we can to about it?

 

The answer: not on your life!  Nor mine!  It is not predetermined.  Therefore we have to be responsible.

 

But most of our fatalism today is not theological, nor is it cosmological, believing we are controlled by supernatural

forces.   It is tied more to forces in this world.   We are controlled by the body politic, or by economics, or by the wind and the weather, or by our health, or our DNA, or our IRA, or just plain dumb luck. 

 

But whatever it is, there is little we can do about our situation, so we are therefore, what? Victims. Right?  We are victims.  Christianity has a response to this fatalistic and presently popular viewpoint of victimhood.  A response that was present in the beginning of our story, with Mary.   To this doom and gloom Christianity says,  "For nothing will be impossible with God."  The Christian hero is not the person who defeats the gods or defies the odds.  It is the faithful disciple who "goes with God."  It is the humble person who says "yes" to God.  And when that happens, what people thought would never happen, happens.

 

We have been reading a bit about an event that happened twenty years ago.

November, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall.  From our perspective, the

symbolic end of the Cold War.  We won. 

 

From the perspective of the citizens of Eastern Europe it was not the end of a war, but the beginning of life.  What had seemed to be an impervious, permanent empire had collapsed.   What people thought would never happen, happened.

 

A part of that story, never adequately reported by the press, was the Church, and Christians.  People of faith behind the Iron Curtain, who never succumbed to Communism, church people who refused the role of victim.  Not on their life.  They waited and prayed.

 

And sang, as we do during Advent, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here..."  They knew that at some time in the future, in God's time, it would happen.  And when it did, they were ready to move into a new creation, for they said, "Yes.  Let it be to me according to your word."