Heard Any Angels. Lately? Text: Luke 2:1-20 University Place Presbyterian Church 2000 By Robert Stephen Reid

Transcription

1 Heard Any Angels. Lately? Text: Luke 2:1-20 University Place Presbyterian Church 2000 By Robert Stephen Reid Study text for the sermon that follows: Heard Any Angels Lately: The text Lk. 2:8-20 {8} A In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, SHEPHERDS keeping watch over their flock by night. {9} B Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, WHAT SHEPHERDS SAW and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. TERROR {10} C 1 But the angel said to them, Do not be afraid; for see-- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: {11} to you is born this day in the city of David CITY OF DAVID a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. {12} 2 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. CHILD IN A MANGER {13} D And suddenly there was with the angel THE HEAVENLY HOST a multitude of the heavenly host, {14} D praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest heaven, THE TESTIMONY OF and on earth peace among those whom he favors! THE HEAVENLY HOST {15} C 1 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us. {16} 2 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, CITY OF DAVID and the child lying in the manger. CHILD IN A MANAGER {17} B When they saw this, WHAT SHEPHERDS SAW they made known what had been told them about this child; {18} and all who heard it were amazed AMAZEMENT at what the shepherds told them. {19} But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. {20} A The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God SHEPHERDS for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

2 Heard Any Angels. Lately? Text: Luke 2:1-20 Angels are big right now. B. Dalton will gladly sell you several coffee table books on Angels. You can rent last years films on videos and see John Travolta as Michael the matchmaking Archangel, or Denzel Washington in a similar role, matchmaking for The Preacher's Wife. And every week we can watch Roma Downey and Della Reese match and patch up people s lives on Touched By an Angel. All of which implies that angels are warm fuzzy beings who care deeply about our love lives and other interpersonal relationships. And then there are the Angels in the story we heard read. These Angels are messengers appointed to announce good and great things to those whom God favors. Heard any angels, lately? No not Denzel or Della. I mean real angels? messengers? the kind that bring tidings of great joy? Then there are the angels of this story. Angels come to lowly shepherds in a field and an incredible expression of heavenly splendor breaks through into this world like a palpable presence. Do you ever wonder what it would have been like? --to have been shepherds such as these? --to have been visited with such glory? And what would it have been like to hear them tell about it afterward? Its such an incredible story. What would it have been like to have heard the angels? The first time I heard the angels I was seven, less than a month away from my eighth birthday. My older brother, Joe, was eleven. Our father was in the Navy and was on the destroyer, the U.S. MacCaffrey, somewhere at sea that Christmas. Our family was living with Dad s family in Hough s Neck, Massachusetts in order to save enough money to buy our first house the following year. We had never gone to church much until we stayed with my grandparents. My father's family were all members of the Hough's Neck Congregational Church. And it was coming home from caroling with members of the Hough's Neck Congregational Church when I first heard the angel. Joe and I went together, because he was old enough to take me. Back then, the promise of hot chocolate and cookies after singing was enough to make volunteers out of almost any kid. I have fleeting memories of going to the homes of church members and singing from little 10 cent booklets of familiar Christmas carols. Mostly I remember filling my cup from that big kettle of hot chocolate and adding melting marshmallows. I don t think hot chocolate ever tastes as good as that served after coming back from caroling. I don t know how late it was when we headed home. Probably not very late since it gets dark by late afternoon in that part of the country. I just remember Joe and I crunching through the tired snow back to Grandma s house. You know the kind of snow. The stuff had been around for more than a week. We re talking the glazed over, dingy snow-- stuff

3 where its hard for a kid to find many unbroken, uncrunched areas. You had to leave the sidewalks and walk on lawns to crunch snow. So that s how we ended up on the lawn right in front of the big crèche at the Catholic Church. Suddenly right in front of us there were spotlighted, life-size mannequins of Mary and Joseph, shepherds and animals, and Jesus, too. We stopped and looked. Suddenly, in the quietness of that soundless, traffic-less night, we heard it. The sound. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. What s that? I asked my brother. Hey! He was older. He was supposed to know. He shook his head and then, with a look of horror shouted Its the angels... run for it! And we ran. We ran as if the world was about to be invaded by a heavenly host. Now I don t know about you, but if I saw the sky peel back and a host of beings break through, I think I d run even if I was 50 years old. So we ran and ran nonstop until we were all the way home. Of course we had been singing about angels most of the afternoon. Have you ever noticed how many of the classic Christmas carols are about angels. We probably had angels on the brain. Angels We have Heard on High. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. It Came Upon A Midnight Clear. All I knew was that we felt and heard the angels that night. They were like a palpable presence of God. That was my first experience with Awe. It made me wonder about God. I was just a kid whose parents didn't have much money, singing some Christmas carols when I had my first experience with the angels, my first experience of the palpable presence of God, my first experience of being visited with glory. Though I didn't recognize it at the time, it was the beginning of a quest for God. The next time I heard the angels was almost a decade later. I was in my junior year of high school. I lived in Oxnard California and the girl I was dating lived in Camarillo. It s a half an hour ride on two lane highways between these cities. I think half the fascination of seeing a girl who lived in Camarillo was how much I enjoyed riding my motorcycle between these two cities. I don't remember why I stopped. All I know is that when I turned off my engine in the silence of the breezeless summer day, I felt it again. I took off my helmet and there it was. The palpable presence? but, instead of taking off, I looked around. That s when I triangulated on the sound. It was a malfunctioning transformer, putting out enough electricity in the air to make the hair on my arms stand on end. That s when I flashed on that night before the Catholic crèche. Only, this time, the Awe was explained. No Oz like God was there to tell me to Pay no attention to that man behind

4 the curtain. Awe was suddenly ordinary. Childhood notions of God s extraordinary power and presence were dispelled. I hadn't been to church since the Hough's Neck years, so there wasn't much to dispel. But it got me to wondering. A month afterward, I asked my mother what religion I was? She announced that I was a baptized Methodist Christian. This was news to me, but as a junior in High School, I started attending the Methodist church. I went looking for something palpable. Instead of running away, I went looking for God. I'd like to say that I made that decision while sitting on the motorcycle or that I even realized the relationship between that malfunctioning transformer on a dry, hot Camarillo country road and my decision to find God. It wasn t like that. That day, on the road, I just remember feeling a little sad because something of great Awe had slipped away from my childhood. Maybe it was that sense that I had lost something that sent me on the search to find it again. I don't know. In fact, I never put the two things together my first fearful flight from the angels and my beginning to search for God until more than a decade later. I was just past 30 years of age and pastoring in Eastern Washington. Leo Moore, the head of our Yakima Valley Hispanic Ministries, told me that I had been invited by our Hispanic congregation to a pre-christmas Saturday afternoon Dinner. Leo warned my wife and me on the way out to the home of these migrant workers that we would be having a meal made from the head of a cow. All I could think of was that I would have to eat head cheese, or brain, or who knows what? All I could think of was how awkward it would be to visit these people. I didn't share their language, their culture, or their customs. When we pulled up into the driveway and got out of the car, there it was! The palpable presence of a malfunctioning transformer box. I remember stopping Leo before we went in just to stand there and listen for a minute. What's up, Bob? I smiled and just soaked it up and then said, "Nothing, Leo. It's just the angels." Of course cow's head turned out to be the various delicate facial muscles and an incredible broth. It was a joyous afternoon. Barbara and I were the equivalent of visiting royalty. I didn't understand the language or much of the many jokes and stories that were told around that table. I suspect that a few were at my expense. But not many. For I had visited them in their home. And as embarrassing as it was to me, my presence was a gift of honor for them. The passage of scripture before us today [Luke 2:8-20] was much on my mind as I sat there. I was to preach it the next day. And I was suddenly struck with the fact that if I wanted to experience the equivalent of the shepherds in Luke's story, I was in their home. I had been struggling to figure out a way to convey the idea in my sermon that shepherds weren't very reputable sources when it came to giving evidence about seeing a heavenly

5 host. Sure, shepherds were idealized in the Biblical days. Hadn't David himself, once been a shepherd. But the fact of the matter was that Shepherds were the lowest of low class folk. A sorry lot. It was the lowest paying job there was. Watching sheep... No college degree needed for this. And here I was in the home of the equivalent occupation in our country today illegal aliens who work our crops for wages we would never dream of accepting. I remember wondering that day how the folks in my congregation would respond if a group of ill-washed, illegal alien, crop-pickers showed up in the midst of one of church services to tell us that they had just seen angels who told them to come and tell us good news that one some girl from their side of the tracks was giving birth to an illegitimate child who was going to do great things in God s name. Also this mind-blowing vision they had while sitting around not doing much made them want to interrupt our worship service to let us know that the Angels said, Glory to God and Peace on earth to those whom God favors. Do you suppose the owners of the fields these people were hired to pick, the people who sat in the congregation I pastored, would have been receptive to hear such a message. So I sat at the home of this Hispanic family, listening to talk I couldn't understand and realized how offended and outraged all of us would be. How dare these people disrupt our service of worship with this nonsense. Who do these people think they are? If peace were to be proclaimed by God's angelic hosts, would we want to hear about it from the likes of these people? But, of course, it was people like this who did receive that angelic visit, who were asked to proclaim the glory, whose testimony we still read 2,000 years later. Just as it was first told to Mary and Joseph Glory to God and Peace on earth to those whom God favors. If the birth were to happen today instead of 2000 years ago. If it were to happen here instead of there, I have little question but that the angelic hosts would reveal the message to the likes of illegal aliens, crop-pickers relaxing after a grueling day in the fields. Imagine such people suddenly rushing to see the newborn child of parents huddled for shelter in an old refrigerator carton under some freeway overpass. If they interrupted us today and said Come see what we have been told. It is a message of good news with great joy. Would we go? or would we call the police? Why would Luke offer such an unlikely cast of characters to serve as witnesses to the divine interpretation of what God was up to in the world? I mean if God wanted us to trust the message of such disreputable people as the equivalent of itinerant, illegal farmworkers, God might as well tell us just to trust the message of a transformer buzzing on telephone pole... RIGHT? Hindsight is easy. Who wouldn't want to imagine that they would have believed the message of these social pariahs. I have no illusions. I would probably be blinded by class distinctions and theology that doesn t have it figured to happen this way. But I do know

6 that when I was little more than an eight year old kid someone whose testimony would have been considered equally incredible I heard the angels. And it sent me on a journey looking for God. You might say, But, Bob, it was just a malfunctioning transformer! You might say that. But the sound of those Angels that palpable presence has tumbled about in my life since I first hear it, And the experience still has about it the feel of faith. What would it take for you to believe the angels? What would it take to believe this story? Would you have believed these shepherds people probably one social step below the illiterate, homeless couple who gave birth to the promised child? Maybe if we open our hearts as well as our eyes... Maybe if we learn to listen with the Awe of an eight-year old... Maybe if we are willing to turn our notions of just who the favored ones are on their head..., then, just maybe, we'll believe enough to go searching for the angels, too. What have you heard this Advent season? What were you listening for? Heard any angels?