Sunday, Dec. 23 - Fourth Sunday of Advent
He is named only three times in the Bible. He may be on stage three times more when he is called only an angel. Heaven knows, he may not even be a he. Do angels come in his and hers models? We don’t know. We don’t know so many things about angels, though they seem to know a lot about us. Some say they have even been touched by one. No reports yet on whether any has joined Oprah’s Angel Network.
Do angels have wings like all the great artwork suggests? Isaiah and Ezekiel saw some with six wings and four. The painter Raphael pictured them as chubby cherubs with two wings. Most angels that appear on the scene in Bible stories are taken for human beings. When they are clearly angels and the people they encounter know it, how do they know it?
From biblical and other sources we learn that there are three archangels: Gabriel, who seems to guide the history of salvation; Michael, chief commander of the army of God; and Raphael, the divine agent of healing. But what’s the difference between an angel and an archangel? Are you just appointed to the role of archangel? Do you get promoted to it? Is there a vote of the angels? Do they rotate every three years like Baptist deacons, or is it a lifetime position—which in the case of angels would be an eternal position? Oh, and of course, how many angels can really stand on the head of a pin? Inquiring minds want to know, don’t you know?!
But inquiring hearts want to know more than angel trivia. We wonder whether angels are still at work in our lives. What would Gabriel say if he were to appear in our dreams with a message from God?
Gabriel is the Christmas angel. His name means “Master, who is of God.” The word angel comes from the Greek word angelos, which means messenger. Angels are messengers that bear the word of God to mortals. We don’t know how precise their instructions are, whether they’re following a script, or whether they get a general word and then just wing it.
Gabriel appears in the temple with a word from God to the priest, Zechariah, that his wife Elizabeth will have a son who will become John the Baptist. When Zechariah questions how this can be so, the angel says: I am Gabriel: I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. Zechariah is dumbstruck. We don’t know how much of his dumbstrickeness is that he has seen an angel or the news the angel brings. We do know that almost every time an angel appears in the Bible, the first words the angel speaks are, Fear not. Fear not, or do not be afraid: the angel says this to Zechariah; to Mary at the so-called Annunciation, when she gets the news that she will bear the Christ child; to shepherds abiding in the fields; to Joseph when he is let in on the mystery of God’s role in Mary’s expectancy; then again to Joseph when he is warned to flee to Egypt with Mary and the child, and again when he is to return with the Holy Family to Nazareth.
Our lives in the world are beset by fear day in and day out. We worry about death and taxes, about our children and our health, and about whether everyone will be happy this Christmas. If you have an existentialist bent, you might even say that whole point of salvation is to deliver us from all these fears that do nothing but masquerade for our one greatest fear, which is death.
Oliver Saks is a neurologist who writes beautiful and curious stories about the mysteries of life he has encountered in his study of the brain. In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, he tells the story of a Mrs. O’C, as he calls her. She had a dream one night at the age of 88 in her bed in a Bronx, New York, old persons’ home. She dreamed that she began to hear music: first one song, then another, and another. The music was beautiful, and though she did not know the tunes, the solo female voice was strangely familiar to her.
When she awoke, much to her surprise, the music continued. She called for the house doctor and asked him if she were mad. He assured her that mad people hear voices, not music. He called in Dr. Saks, and while interviewing her, he had to shout to be heard over the music in her head. He wondered whether she was having what is known as music seizures. So he did an EEG on her, and each time the music got louder, the part of the brain that fires when music is heard was indeed popping. He asked her if she could sound out the tunes she was hearing. It turns out they were all Irish lullabies.
He asked her about her life story, and she told him that she had been born in Ireland. Her father died before she was born, and she never knew her mother, who died when she was five. She was then sent to live with a forbidding aunt in New York. Together they wondered whether the voice she was hearing that was singing Irish lullabies to her in her sleep might have actually been the voice of her mother. She took it for gospel that that is was she and that somehow this strange occurrence was a kind of gift to her, a blessing at the end of her life that told her that she was loved from the very beginning, and that no matter what she had ever wondered or feared, she was welcome and at home in the world.
This is the Sunday in Advent on which we light the Angel Candle of Love, and it seems to me that Gabriel’s word to Mary of her having found favor with God is nothing less than the first act in the drama of God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. The gift of the Christ child is the promise of the union of God with the world—God making God’s self at home in the world and the world welcoming God at the same time. The world is now forever full of the presence of God because Christ has come to dwell among us. And that means that nowhere you go and nothing you do can be outside of the presence of God.
It’s curious to me that angels seem to show up most of the time in dreams or visions, in times when the veil between the visible and the invisible world is thinnest. When we are sleeping, our defenses are down and our anxieties are heightened, so God may be able to get through to us in ways we are deaf and blind to in our conscious daytime lives. All dreams are not angel visitations, but when a Gabriel shows up in a dream, you can bet something big is at stake.
Gabriel’s salvation mission includes more than just deliverance from our fear of death; it also includes the defeat of every enemy of life for us and for all creation. Gabriel tells Mary that her son will be great, that he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and that his kingdom shall never end. Gabriel tells the shepherds that he will be the Savior. And although he isn’t mentioned by name in Matthew’s account, we expect that it is he that tells Joseph that his boy will save his people from their sins, and that he will be in the flesh, Emmanuel, God with us.
My new favorite baseball player is the newest Texas Ranger. Josh Hamilton’s story reminds me of just how trustworthy the angel Gabriel is. Hamilton was the first pick in the 1999 Major League Baseball draft. He was a talented can’t-miss prospect who missed. Not because he failed at baseball, but because he failed at life. Hamilton became addicted to cocaine right out of high school. He wandered about from one fix to the next for several years, wasting away physically and spiritually. In and out of rehab eight times, Josh lived on the brink of death time after time. He calls his wife, Katie, an angel, for the way she kept believing in him, or rather believing in God’s love and care for him. She told him over and over that God had a special mission for him and that he would play baseball again. I have a mission now. My mission is to be the ray of hope, the guy who stands out there on that beautiful field and owns up to his mistakes and lets people know it’s never completely hopeless, no matter how bad it seems at the time. I have a platform and a message, and now I go to bed at night, sober and happy, praying I can be a good messenger.
How did he get from drug addict to the major leagues in two years’ time? Here’s what he says: Addiction is a humbling experience. Getting it under control is even more humbling. I got better for one reason: I surrendered. Instead of asking to be bailed out, instead of making deals with God by saying, ‘If you get me out of this mess, I’ll stop doing what I’m doing,’ I asked for help. I wouldn’t do that before. … I was a big, strong man, and I was supposed to be able to handle my problems myself. That didn’t work out so well.
After his first week of sobriety in 2005, Josh was visiting his grandmother’s house in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he had a terrible dream about the devil. He dreamed that he kept beating on the devil with a stick or a bat, and every time he knocked him down, the devil would pop back up. He woke in a terrified sweat and crawled into bed with his grandmother. The week he got picked up by the Cincinnati Reds and finally began to fulfill his best dreams, it happened again. Says he:
It was the same dream, with an important difference. I would hit him and he would bounce back up, the ugliest and most hideous creature you could imagine. This devil seemed unbeatable; I couldn’t knock him out. But just when I felt like giving up, I felt a presence by my side. I turned my head and saw Jesus, battling alongside me. We kept fighting, and I was filled with strength. The devil didn’t stand a chance. You can doubt me, but I swear to you I dreamed it. When I woke up, I felt at peace. I wasn’t scared. To me, the lesson was obvious: Alone, I couldn’t win this battle. With Jesus, I couldn’t lose.[1]As Gabriel said to Mary: For nothing will be impossible with God. Without God nothing much is possible.
A postscript to this story: One day Josh Hamilton was signing autographs in the ballpark parking lot. A little boy of about 9 or 10, wearing a Reds cap, handed him a pen and something to sign. Nothing unusual there, but as he was writing the boy said, Josh, you’re my savior. This stopped the baseball player. He looked the boy and said, Well, thank you. Do you know who my savior is? The lad thought for a minute. You could see the gears turning in his head. Finally, he smiled and blurted out, Jesus Christ. He said it like he’d just come up with the answer to a test. That’s exactly right, Josh said.
At the end of the day, you see, this sermon is not about the angel Gabriel; it’s about the message of the angel Gabriel, about the one who alone is the Savior of the world—Jesus Christ. Angels don’t care if you believe in them; they care if you believe them enough to believe in Jesus.
Chesterton may have been right when he penned one of my all-time favorite lines: Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. I think that may be true, because they can’t afford to carry any extra weight. They bear the weightiest word of all to us all. Fear not, for unto you is born a child, who is Christ the Lord.
[1] http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2926447
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