Christmas Angels -- Day 25

Have you noticed?

In the Bible stories,
Angels are never still.
Going up and down ladders to heaven,
Wrestling with Jacob until dawn,
Popping in for a bite at Abraham’s tent,
Bringing food for Elijah in the desert,
Then disappearing again.

There are lots of angels,
In the Gospel stories
About Jesus’ birth.
An angel appeared to the priest,
Zechariah,
Told him he would have a son.
And then the angel left –
Leaving Zechariah speech-less –
For nine months.

An angel appeared to Mary
And told her she would bear a son.
And then the angel left –
Leaving an unwed teenage girl
To face her family and community.

An angel appeared to Joseph too,
In a dream,
And told him not to disown Mary.
And then the angel left,
Leaving Joseph in a strange new world.
And then the shepherds.
There they were,
Minding their own business,
Living in the fields,
Keeping watch over their flock by night.
An angel visited them as well,
Only this time, he brought his friends,
So a whole host of angels filled the night sky
With angelic light and heavenly song.
And then they left –
The sky once again was black,
The only sounds the bleating of the sheep,
And gentle rustle of wind in the trees.
Everything back to normal, and yet
everything had changed.

Angels always leave,
Don’t they?
They come,
Uninvited, unexpected,
Sometimes unwelcome,
Bursting into our world
Interrupting the comfortable
Ebb and flow of our lives
with their supposedly Good News.
They always say, “Do not be afraid,”
Knowing that, of course, we are.
After all,
For just a moment,
we catch a glimpse
of the holy, the divine,
of something beyond ourselves
beyond the ordinary
beyond what we can explain
with graphs or charts
or even words.

Angels come,
But then they seem to leave,
The heavenly light is gone,
Along with the angel choir.

It’s like Christmas,
You know?
There’s the wonder of Christmas Eve,
And the joy of Christmas Day,
But then it’s over.
The lights and decorations come down,
Family goes back home,
And sometimes it seems that all that remains
Are mounds of wrapping paper,
Left-overs in the fridge,
And presents that need to be exchanged for
A better size.

Whatever magic made Christmas feel special
Is gone, vanished
And it’s back to our ordinary lives,
In our ordinary world.
Back to
What some would call reality,
Where there’s no place
For angels.

It seems like
Angels always leave,
Or do they?

Perhaps it’s just that
Without the Christmas music
in the background
we don’t notice,
we don’t see
the angels we meet every day,
on the bus,
and in the grocery store,
and walking down the street.
I saw one yesterday in a Santa suit.

Some are helpers, care takers,
Or Guardians,
Like the angels in a small Connecticut town,
Who protected children, and
Helped deal with the aftermath of tragedy.
Others are harder to recognize at first
And sometimes,
it takes a while to understand
why the angel’s message
is such Good News.
Like the funky angel on my office wall,
That says,
“Most people don’t know
that there are angels
whose only job
is to make sure
that you don’t get too comfortable,
and fall asleep,
and miss your life.”

It seems to me
That the angels
in the Gospel
Stories of Jesus’ birth
Are more like those.
And after they appeared,
Nothing was the same,
For Zechariah, for Mary,
For Joseph, for the shepherds.

So, maybe what’s important
Isn’t whether angels leave,
But what we do after.
After we’ve heard the Good News,
After we’ve caught a glimpse
of something special,
something holy,
something beyond ourselves.

Do we go back to business as usual?
Pretend we never heard the angel choir?
After all, there are sheep to tend,
And appearances to maintain.
Do we put it all away
with the Christmas decorations,
until next year?

Or do we realize that
now
it’s up to us
to find a way to live
in an altered reality,
One with angels.

This year,
Will we let the angels’ song transform us?
Send us searching
For where Christ is being born
In our world?
Let the good news change
The way we look at our lives,
How we behave,
Who we are,
How we understand reality,
And what is possible – with God?

Will we let the glimpse of the holy
We get this Christmas,
However brief,
Open our eyes to look
For the angels all around us,
On the move, but never far away,
Until one day,
We look in the mirror,
And realize that one of them,
Is us.
Merry Christmas.
Amen.