“Angel Talk”
Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On December 24, 2000
Jesus has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.
I Peter 3:22
Do you believe in angels? Well if you don’t, you should have been at one of the living Nativity presentations on Thursday or Friday night, because they were there in pretty strong numbers, flitting and floating around the Nativity scene, with beautiful halos and cherub wings, some of the children and young people of this congregation taking part in four presentations. My favorite scene is at that point where the angel host prepares to come out. This year, because the playground has had to be moved over to this side of the church, the angels were all being lodged there in the playground. On cue, they were to come out with the big gate rolling open, so that they might become the heavenly hosts. You could see them at every presentation, pulling the gate just a little, peeking out – about four faces -- one on top of another, waiting for their heavenly cue. Except for the seven o’clock showing on Friday night, and then, when it was time for the angels to come forth, the narrator said, “And suddenly there was a heavenly host…” but there wasn’t. The gate wouldn’t role. You could see people straining on the other side of it, tugging and pulling, but the gate wouldn’t come open. Finally, in the awkwardness and the anxiety, Yolinda Glogli ran up to the gate and put her shoulder on it and rolled it open. Then the heavenly hosts came tumbling out into their places. She looked like Michael, one of the warrior angels. Somebody hollered out from the crowd, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against her!” And they didn’t.
Do you believe in angels? My illustrations don’t answer the question at all, do they. It’s a neat dodge. It’s what we typically do when we have to talk about angels in one way or another. We tell a story, maybe about the living Nativity, that moves us to the realm of anecdote and sentimentality. Everyone knows about angels. At least, at the level of sentiment in greeting cards and songs and poems or ornaments on the tree. But are angels real?
Do you believe in angels? The Bible believes in angels. The Bible is full of angels and reports to us that Abraham and Jacob and Moses and Elijah and Gideon and David and Zechariah and Joseph and Mary and Peter, that they all knew and they saw angels. Three angels are actually mentioned in the Bible by name: Michael and Rafael and Gabriel.
From the Bible, just a sampling. From the book of Numbers: “And we cried to the Lord for help, and he listened. And he sent us an angel.” Jesus, in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, “The son of man will come and will send out his angels.” And from the twenty-sixth chapter, when he says to those in the garden, “Do you not suppose that I could not appeal to my heavenly Father and he would send a legion of angels to come and defend me now. Twelve legions of angels.” Or from the thirteenth chapter of the letter to the Hebrews: “Remember to show hospitality, for there are some who by doing so have entertained angels unawares.” Then from the Psalms: “For he has charged his angels to guard you. Wherever you go, to lift up their hands, for fear that you might strike your foot against a rock.” Or Psalm 103: “Bless the Lord, all his angels, creatures of might who do his bidding.” And in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Acts, when Paul is in jail, “All at once an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the cell was filled with a blazing light.”
This is just a sampling. The Bible is full of angels.
In time passing, the history of the Church has built up extra biblical traditions around the accounts of the angels. No one knows definitively how angels look, I guess, but by the fourth century artists were uniformly painting them with wings and halos.
Are angels male or female? This has been, interestingly, a much debated question across the early centuries of the church. In 1272, that great thinker Thomas Aquinas settled it by reasoning that angels could, at God’s direction, assume whatever shape they desire, or whatever shape God desired. So they could be both male and female, or beyond.
Sometimes we think of angels as people, as humans, who have died and gone to heaven, and we say, “She’s gone to be an angel.” But that’s not the biblical witness at all. In the Bible, angels are not resurrected humans. Angels in the Bible are completely other form of created being. Something altogether different that God has created, as a part of the full creation of the universe.
For the longest part of the Church’s history, angels were simple intellectually embraced as real. Then in the post-Enlightenment period, angels lost some of their hold on the public imagination. Science and reason and belief in natural progress became the marching orders of the day. Anyone who then began to say that they had seen an angel might have been considered mentally deranged and perhaps placed in some kind of care.
Anyone who saw an angel today might also be considered deranged, although angels seem to be coming back into popular acceptance. But I report to you that over the last twenty years of my pastorate on a number of occasions, in my study, people have come and shared with me intimate and powerful stories of encounters. Treasuring them in their hearts like Mary, pondering them in their hearts and wondering what does this mean.
Do you believe in angels? Our secular age, interestingly enough, is mystified by angels. Perhaps we are inclined to put them in the categories of fairies and elves and leprechauns. This is a mistake. The Bible and religious tradition at least, take angels very seriously.
There’s something about angels that sinks deep into the human psyche. I think fundamentally, angels speak to God’s desire to communicate to us and our desire to hear and to communicate with God. Angels help. It’s hard for us, you see, to understand how we can communicate with God, or how God’s word can get through to us. It’s difficult for us to discern or be aware of, and angels help in that work. They are a part of the means by which the word of the Lord gets to us. We hear that word.
For me, this has been an especially difficult sermon to write, even to think about, over the last week, focusing on angels. Because I fancy myself a person of the Enlightenment, above superstition. Angels seem so… what… unscientific. I’ve worried about examining angels in a public sermon and seeming, well, I don’t know, even superstitious.
Where did I come by this concern? Where did I get this fear within me about my own reputation or appearance that is so different than the biblical narrative? I think about it, and I’m pretty sure that a big hunk of it comes from my early upbringing. I grew up heavily influenced by my mother who believed and believes firmly in angels, and was and is convinced of their effectiveness. I was also heavily influenced by my father, who taught me, without his realizing it, maybe, that angels were in the realm of the feminine. Oh yes, he taught me through clear cues early on that when females started this talk about angels, the appropriate response for males was to stand somewhat behind them and to quietly role their eyes. That’s what I learned. This, of course, doesn’t really deal with the question, but for forty-four years it’s been a fairly effective male strategy for keeping the mystery at bay.
But today I want to say to you, as I’ve said to myself this season of December, “I believe in angels.”
I believe in angels. And I’m not the only one. Consider the record of the great Christian thinkers across the centuries, as I have read them over this last week. The angels of God are our angels as Christ is God’s and also ours (St. Augustine). Each person has an angel appointed to him (Thomas Aquinas). And lest you think that it is only the Catholic theologians, Luther prayed that God would not allow the angels to visit him while he was sleeping, because he found them so disruptive it was hard for him to get a good night’s rest. Even Calvin…. It was shaky for me to run into Calvin’s commentaries this week and see Calvin saying about angels, God employs angels to manifest himself in humanity. Calvin said, I don’t believe in guardian angels, not because he didn’t believe in angels but because he didn’t believe in the notion that there was just one. He said, rather, that there is a whole host of angels that God uses to help us and to communicate to us all the time.
Maybe it’s just ancient people, or pre-Enlightenment people, from this century. Consider this: Carl Barthe, perhaps the greatest theologian of the last hundred years. We cannot deny that angels exist. All right. I give up. I take it back. All of the eye-rolling and the feet-shuffling. Angels are heavenly beings, scripture-bound, bona fide, messengers of God. Jesus speaks of them as if they are the guardians of little children, saying, “Remember that in heaven, the angels of these children look upon their father’s face.” The Bible, and the church’s tradition and the human experience, take angels very seriously. And there is something about angels that sinks deep into the human heart and psyche. They depict God’s great desire to communicate to us. God’s presence is very real, but it’s hard for us to depict it or to discern it. It’s hard for us to imagine. Angels help.
So in this season of angels, this season of Christmas when perhaps if anything we are in danger of trivializing angels to be ornaments and in greeting cards. I want to leave you with three words about angels out of the biblical tradition, out of the theological reflection. Three points to remember. The first is this: Angels help us to know that God’s good news is always a revelation. It’s always a surprise. It’s always from outside of ourselves. So often we are tempted, as modern competent people, to believe that the good news is something that we work up, something that we have, something that we have figured out, something that we possess, that we know and are to share (when we are willing) with others.
That’s why I’m skeptical of evangelists who speak of a number of people that they have saved. The Bible teaches us that we don’t save anyone. God saves people. So we know that the angels remind us that it’s always God’s revelation, that it comes from outside. It’s not our works, but God’s works. And very often, it’s a surprise.
Two: Wonder is a part of the faith. Angels help us to remember that the revelation always comes from outside us, and two, they help us to remember in their images and their appearances that wonder is a critical part of the Christian faith. Mystery does not mean the end of faith. Mystery may mean the beginning of faith. Angels are a mystery, and Barth said, “A theology that does not have any mystery is a godless theology.”
Angels are a part of the wonder of faith, and perhaps they are a correction to all of those, including those who wear black robes, who would too quickly move to an explanation. Theology which does not have any mystery is an arrogant and empty theology. Angels remind us of the mystery and the wonder.
Three: Angels are a reminder to us that the revelation always comes from beyond us. Angels remind us that wonder is inherent in the Christian faith. And angels are God’s ambassadors. God’s messengers. I think that’s the right metaphor, the biblical metaphor. Therefore there is no need for an angel-ology. I think we are wise to avoid trying to set up a hierarchy of angels or an accounting for which angel is which, and which work one angel is about.
I have intentionally used no illustrations about angels from popular culture here today because it looks to me like our tendency is to become so fixated on them. So fixated that we are inclined to pursue the stories and neglect the central message.
The letters of Peter make as many references to angels as any of the epistles. But the references are always to help us understand the message of the Good News of God. Angels are to be understood solely and exclusively for their function and their activity, which is to bring God’s message. And it cannot, it never is, a message different than the Good News.
The message of the angels is “Fear not, for behold I bring you tidings of great joy. For unto you a Savior is born: Jesus.” That is the message of the angels. Look at Jesus. Look at Jesus. The message of the angels is the message of God’s Good News. We cannot deny that they exist, but we can affirm that they exist only in the function and activity of their office, which is to serve God and to glorify God, and to act as God’s messenger.
I’ve never seen an angel, and I’m coming to the point where I believe that those who may have had that encounter are wise to follow the example of Mary, simply to ponder it quietly in your heart. We do not need to see an angel in order to be close to God, but it does seem to me that the Bible reports that God speaks to us in many different ways. The Christian community has reported across the centuries that angels as ambassadors is one of the means by which the word of God has come to us.
A couple of years ago I went to a conference on Calvin studies. The chief lecturer there was a German theologian named Einrich Obermann from the University of Berlin. That’s a great name for a theologian, isn’t it! Einrich Obermann. And he looked the part, too. Sort of a tweed-dressed fellow with a big pipe. As he gave his last lecture, he was talking about the gospel of Luke, in the second chapter, particularly when the angels appeared to the shepherds.
Somebody asked him from the audience, “Dr. Obermann, should we believe in angels? Should we preach belief in angels to our congregations?” He leaned over and he said, “Well, it seems to me from the Bible that the question is not Has God used angels? but rather Have angels appeared? Because it seems to me that the Christian witness across the community and in the Bible is clear. Clearly, yes to that. The question for us,” he said, “is, Is there still a time for angels today? Is today still a time when God may use angels? My judgment,” he said, “is that that is an impertinent question for us to answer. That is a question that only God can answer. But this much seems clear to me,” said Dr. Obermann as he puffed on his pipe once more, “whether or not God sends angels to us today, the lines that the angels have in the second chapter of Luke are the lines that God intends for us to have in this Christmas story. And when we wonder what role we are to have in the Christmas story, we can look to the angels, because their part is to be our part. We are to be proclaimers of the Good News! Heavenly heralds, to us, as like the angels have been entrusted, these lines in the Christmas story: Fear not, for behold I bring you tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For to you is born a Savior, Christ the Lord.”
Those are your lines, in the congregation. In this Christmas story that we are playing out in the community amongst us, your lines are these, the angels’ lines: Fear not! Fear not, to a fearsome world, for behold, Good News, great joy! A Savior has been born to us. Christ the Lord.
You know what I think the best interpretation of angels can be? Maybe this is a good reason to not have ever preached on angels in about nineteen years of preaching, because the carols do such a great job of interpreting the angels. I want to close by inviting you to sing with me the second and third verses of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”
© John T. DeBevoise, 2000
