Advent Angels

What’s your favourite carol? I have two. Is that allowed? My congregations know I always pick Cradled in a manger meanly on Christmas morning. Well I’m on Holy Island on Christmas morning so we’ll sing it in a bit. Here’s  a poem by Edmund Hamilton Sears.

Calm on the listening ear of night
Come heaven's melodious strains,
Where wild Judea stretches far
Her silver-mantled plains;
Celestial choirs from courts above
Shed sacred glories there;
And angels with their sparkling lyres
Make music on the air.

The answering hills of Palestine
Send back the glad reply,
And greet from all their holy heights
The day-spring from on high:
O'er the blue depths of Galilee
There comes a holier calm,
And Sharon waves, in solemn praise,
Her silent groves of palm.

"Glory to God!" The lofty strain
The realm of ether fills:
How sweeps the song of solemn joy
O'er Judah's sacred hills!
"Glory to God!" The sounding skies
Loud with their anthems ring;
"Peace on the earth; good-will to men,
From heaven's eternal King!"

Light on thy hills, Jerusalem!
The Saviour now is born:
More bright on Bethlehem's joyous plains
Breaks the first Christmas morn;
And brighter on Moriah's brow,
Crowned with her temple-spires,
Which first proclaim the new-born light,
Clothed with its Orient fires.

This day shall Christian lips be mute,
And Christian hearts be cold?
Oh, catch the anthem that from heaven
O'er Judah's mountains rolled!
When nightly burst from seraph-harps
The high and solemn lay,--
"Glory to God! on earth be peace;
Salvation comes to-day!"

He also wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” in 1849.

Sears was the minister of the small congregation in Wayland, Massachusetts, in the late 1830s, but went to Lancaster, Massachusetts, to serve a larger congregation. After seven years of hard work, he suffered a breakdown and returned to Wayland. He wrote his famous carol while serving as a part-time preacher in Wayland, which called him back to full-time service in 1850. (He retired in 1865.) Some people suggest  the carol was first performed by parishioners gathered in his home on Christmas Eve. 

Sears’s words are both beautiful and powerful. The message is grounded in the first verse in the biblical past. 

It becomes prophetic in the last verse, which raises yet again the hope of a time to come of peace on earth. But it is most strikingly put in his third verse:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife

   the world has suffered long;

Beneath the angel strain have rolled

   two thousand years of wrong;And man, at war with man, hears not

the love song which they bring;

O hush the noise, ye men of strife and hear the angels sing.

Sears’s carol is remarkable for its focus not on Bethlehem, but on his own time, and on the ever-contemporary issue of war and peace. Probably more than any other Christmas carol, it talks about today — his day or our day. It says that the call to peace and goodwill to all is as loud on any other day as it was on that midnight of old, if we would but listen “in solemn stillness.”

Which leads me to think about angels and angel song in Advent. 

A lady said to me one Christmas, struggling with it being everywhere, and the noise of it, “I just want some time to hear the angels sing.”  

We need something to break into our world – a new song, a heavenly host to bring us good news – glory to God in the highest and on earth, goodwill to all people. “I just want some time to hear the angels sing.”

In a world of pain and sorrow and not a lot to celebrate we need a new song. In a General Election week, we need a new song in our nation, however we choose to vote. We need to heal division, challenge poverty, support the weak, uphold the fainthearted and remember the most vulnerable. We need God’s Kingdom Jesus brought to birth amongst us again. We need angels to announce radical change. Don’t we? 

Typing ‘angels’ into the search box on Amazon, and limiting the results only to books, yields over 50,000 titles. Angels are big business. 

Delve further and you will find courses on angel therapy and angel healing, workshops on how make your angel be more productive for you. They are there to help: indeed as one book puts it, once you’re aware of your angels, you just can’t stop asking them for help all the time. They like nothing better than to help you find your keys, or get you to an appointment on time.

 The contemporary view of angels is about as far removed from the biblical conception of angels as it’s possible to be. Angels are not our servants or fairy godmothers, ready to respond to our every whim. And they have better things to do than find our lost keys. Contemporary beliefs about angels tend to reveal the human tendency to make everything all about us. The biblical depiction of angels shows us something quite different. ‘You have made them little lower than the angels’, says the Psalmist of human beings. Right at the start, that puts us in our place. Angels are not there to serve us; they’re there to serve God, and they were created higher than us because they’re closer to him: they minister in heaven. The story of incarnation is all about confrontation with the divine; the divine stronger than the human, the angel’s song louder then Christmas

The angels come to bring news to our world. Someone wrote “they roll back the curtain of the real world and open the eyes of people working on earth to a vision of heaven.” Is that our  mission – giving people a vision of heaven? 

Angels are referred to in the book of Job as “the sons of God”, in that God is their creator and they were the first beings to be created. Because the angels live in heaven with God, His glory pours out of them.  

They are described as the heavenly host – the word “host” meaning an army.  Their appearance as mighty warriors armed with God’s glory frightens the living daylights out of anyone to whom they appear.  This is a far cry from the angels we see in nativity plays!

Consider angels in the Christmas biblical accounts. 

Consider Gabriel’s visit to Mary. 

Mary said yes to God's astonishing proposition that God the Son should be born into this world, and that she should risk stoning to become his mother. Sometimes God's ways of doing things are way beyond anything that any sensible human could think up, and perhaps we need to keep that in mind when we wonder what on earth God is up to.

 ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.' Mary’s response is really quite staggering: we are not told that she asks for time to think it all over, or talk to her parents or fiancé about it, as would be the cultural norm; instead this 12 or 13 year old girl from a backwater village in a small part of the Roman empire quite simply says ‘yes' to God and risks all the consequences.

Gabriel and all the angels “are in the service of your salvation,” wrote Origen, a third-century teacher of the church. In one homily, he imagines them in heaven, embracing this role at the moment of Jesus’ birth: “They say among themselves, ‘If he has put on mortal flesh, how can we remain doing nothing? Come, angels, let us all descend from heaven!’”

Gabriel isn’t named in the story of the Bethlehem shepherds who saw the angels descend in a blaze of light and sing out the “good news of great joy.” But it’s reasonable to suppose that he is “the angel of the Lord” who speaks the message and leads the chorus.  The  shepherds put aside fear and open their hearts to joy. Then they imitate the angels in two ways: They praise God, repeating the “glory!” of the heavenly choir and they spread the news of Jesus’ birth.

 Together with the angels, the most unlikely  become the first evangelists in Luke’s Gospel.

Christmas is all about the bad news of today’s experience, no matter how bad, soon, unexpectedly giving birth to good news for the world. The angels bring us the news, open our eyes, have a party and then clear off – they do – read the story! They leave us then to work out where we go from here. What difference does this story make to us?

I encountered Christmas  spirit in Sainsbury’s in March the other day .

“Santa Baby” by Kylie was  blasting out. A woman came dancing and singing down the aisle.

“Sorry,” she said, “I love this one!”

“It’s the one’s you don’t love that drive you mad.” said I. 

“I love them all. I love Christmas!”she replied. 

I guess I want to say do we know the angel song glory to God in the highest and on earth peace goodwill to all people that we can anticipate it, worship it and then be excited to sing it ourselves. 

I read this article in the week:

“Luke takes the trouble to tell us about the Roman emperor Augustus, and his desire to take a census of more or less the whole known world. This isn’t just background information, or local colour to spice up the story. Empires, censuses and taxes were hot topics in the Middle East in the first century. When we have a census, we just fill in a boring form and send it off. They’re going to tax us anyway. Every time they had a census there were riots and people got killed: censuses then raised the sharp and dangerous questions of who runs the world, how it’s run, who profits by it all, who gets crushed in the process, and, perhaps above all, when is it all going to change? And what should we be doing about it? Luke has placed his story of Jesus’ birth and the angels’ song within this everyday story of Imperial behaviour because he wants us to know that Jesus’ birth is not an invitation to a private religion into which we can escape and feel cosy, but a summons to us, as it was to his first followers, to sign on under his authority, to celebrate the birth of the Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, and to work under that authority for the growth of his promised kingdom of endless peace, of justice and righteousness.” There’s a message a few days before an election.

Hear the angel song: not just good news but fear not, do not be afraid for the Christ is come, and will come.  There is a Christmas anthem, there is a new song, we need it to be noisy and out there and we need to get on with singing it. Maybe we need to return to Sears great carol which speaks to today as powerfully as it did to his context 160 years ago. Maybe we need the missing verse:

O ye, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low

Who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow

Look now for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing

O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

Then we sing this: 

For lo the days are hastening on, by prophets seen of old

When with the ever circling years shall come the time foretold

When the new heaven and earth shall own the prince of peace their King

And the whole world send back the song which now the angels sing.