PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 2:8-20                                                                                                                   ANGELS !
Christmas Eve Sermon 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          Wow!  What a story!  What an experience!  What must these shepherds have thought?  How must they have felt!  The last time anything like this had happened to a shepherd was a thousand years before when God spoke to David. 

          These “heavenly hosts,” whether we understand them as a band of angels or as “the morning stars singing together,”[1] and this angel who announces the birth of the Messiah—these angels have caught the imagination of many artists and composers.  Think of all those great Renaissance paintings that feature angels, and all those carols we sing—full of angels.  You probably have at least one angel on your Christmas tree tonight, probably on the top.  Angels are featured on Christmas cards and in television productions like “The Littlest Angel” that ran for so many decades at this time of year.  The angels have just about taken over.  In the Christmas pageants we used to be in as children, remember those angels with gossamer wings and tinsel halos? 

          So:  do you believe in angels?  I mean real angels!  Our scientific age has relegated angels to the same mythological zoo that now also houses sea serpents, demons, dragons, leprechauns, fairies and trolls—“life-forms” none of us have ever seen for real.  One wag gave the angels a final boot by classifying them by scientific genus and species:  he called them “gaseous vertebrates.”  For most people today, the angels in the Christmas story give it a nice warm touch, but we don’t really believe in them. 

          But wait a minute!  These angels are not just “angels in the architecture,” as singer Paul Simon said.  On the basis of what the angel tells them, the shepherds leave their sheep and go into the town to see the new-born baby Jesus.  People actually act on what the angels said.  There’s some substance here, even though you and I have refused to listen.  What’s this substance in the angel-message, and about which the heavenly host sing?  What kind of signal is being flashed here?  If we can put our science-oriented thinking into neutral for a few minutes, we might be able to get back into the hearts and minds of these shepherds and begin to understand an important and joyful message.  The angels of Christmas signal the IN-breaking of God into our common experience.  And this is something we greatly desire.  The angels of Christmas   signal the IN-breaking of God into our common experience. 

          I suspect that what I’ve been calling our “scientific view of things” isn’t really scientific at all:  it’s just that we’ve surrounded ourselves with so many of the benefits of technology that we think we are scientific.  In your car, that “check engine” light comes on, so you take it to the mechanic; the shop works on your car for three days, but when you get in it to start it up the “check engine” light is still on.  You tell the service manager, and he said, “Oh, yeah.  We forgot to tell the computer to turn it off.”  So you wait another twenty minutes for the mechanic to talk to the computer, because you know you can’t do it!  And what about the digital clock on your microwave oven?  I don’t know about you, but ours blinks a lot.  We know how to reset it, but why!  But this is the world we live in.  A couple of weeks ago I dug into our storage boxes and brought out our old 33¹/₃ Christmas LPs; but most people around us are listening to Christmas music on their iPods or satellite radio.  Do you have GPS in your car?  You can get just as lost following GPS directions as you can following a map.  On Harriet’s new television, if I want to turn cable TV off and watch a movie on the DVD, I have to use three different remote controls:  I know they make universal remotes, but I’ve seen them, and I’d rather use three    and know what I’m doing most of the time.  This is our world.  None of these things is miraculous—just new.  And yet—we have flu viruses every winter, and people still fall in love and get married, and babies are still born the old fashioned way (most of them).  And the prejudices and the loves that your grandmother or grandfather spoke in your hearing when you were a child   still resonate in the back of your mind, even though you have other loves and have worked against prejudice.  And theft is still theft; and a good deed is still a good deed.  There are no angels here, and no devils either—just us common folks, a little bit good and a little bit bad.  And in the deepest part of our soul we secretly desire a universe bigger than Sony can produce. 

          So just maybe the Christmas angels are more important to us than we’ve thought.  If these angels are to be more than carvings in the architecture and pictures and word in songs, what might they mean to us?  They mean that God is intruding into your life, and this just might change something.  The angels mean that the grace of God is interfering with our commonness.  They mean that the in-flowing of holy power might be available to buoy up our lives.  The in-breaking of heaven transforms earth. 

          My message this Christmas Eve is the possibility of angels.  The angels of Christmas signal the IN-breaking of God into our common experience.  Okay, so where are these angels?  Where might we look to behold this in-breaking, this intrusion, this in-flowing and interference? 

          I think I’ve seen an angel fly past!  In 1948 the government of the Union of South Africa passed a law requiring the separation of races, called “apartheid.”  All non-whites in the country lost their citizenship and were forced into territories reserved for them—“bantulands”—except for those granted work permits.  Those who opposed “apartheid” were imprisoned, like Nelson Mandela.  But the pressure to end “apartheid” grew, both because of internal stresses in the country, and also external pressures—the United Nations, for one; and another was the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.  Three South African denominations of the Dutch Reformed tradition withdrew from the World Council of Churches because they were white South Africans and wanted to keep “apartheid.”  Even the Christians were caught up in the conflict.  Finally in 1992 the resistance was broken, and in 1994 the racist policy was ended.  But long before that, the Anglican Church in South Africa elevated the Rev. Desmond Mpilo Tutu, a Black man, to the position of dean of Johannesburg; and from 1978 until 1984 he served as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches.  He was then made Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, a ministry from which he retired in 1996.[2]  So here was a country that had two generations of what they termed “whites,” “coloreds” and “blacks” all carrying in their hearts the anger and the fear of a half-century of “apartheid.”  And now can they simply forget it?  What kind of society could they build if those feelings of rage persisted beneath the surface—it would have been a disaster.  In other parts of the world after wars, like in Bosnia and Iraq, the former perpetrators were put on trial, convicted and put to death.  But Archbishop Tutu saw that this would only inflame the rage, not reduce it.  Instead, through his leadership, South Africa instituted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the Archbishop as its chairman.  People who had committed crimes against other races were encouraged to come before this commission, tell in public what they had done as a clear sign of repentance; and there were no trials for these people.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission worked for seven years and resolved hundreds of conflicts between the races.  Back then and still today the secular news media report the activities of Archbishop Tutu as if he were taking a political stand for one group and against another group—most recently in the Copenhagen Environmental Conference; but Tutu stands in a completely different place—he stands for honesty and reconciliation, even in the face of hate, violence and war.  Is it possible that Desmond Mpilo Tutu is one of those angels announcing the IN-breaking of God into our common experience? 

          I think most of the angels announcing God’s interruption of the way the world is   are not famous at all:  they’re local women and men in whom the Spirit of Christ shows through, and you’ve known some of these people.  There’s a small-business owner in a Midwest community who saw the rise in the unemployment rate across the country last year, and he determined that it wouldn’t hit his employees.  He sat down with them and talked through a plan to keep everybody on the payroll and in the health insurance program:  many would keep working, but fewer hours; a few would have to stop working, but together the group would make sure they kept receiving their salary until this recession is over.  And the plan basically saved the town.  I don’t know his name, but it sounds a lot like your name.  I think I just saw an angel fly by! 

          I want us to come away from this Christmas Eve with the sense of possibility that there really are angels—the word means “messenger”:  messengers that God is interrupting us as we go about counting our sheep and chasing away wolves.

So let us leave our everyday sheep in the pasture, and go to Bethlehem, to behold the grace of God come among us again.  It’s an experience worth the effort—a journey worth the taking.

          So the angels of Christmas signal the IN-breaking of God into our common experience.  Just like the shepherds, you have seen some angels.  Maybe you paid attention:  maybe you ignored them.  This Christmas I hope you don’t ignore the angels.  I hope you open your eyes to behold, and your ears to hear their song, and your heart to receive the in-flowing of what God is up to in this, your Christmas.

AMEN