Christmas Day, December 25, 2018 | 11:00 a.m.

Glory to Glory

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 97
Isaiah 9:2–7
Luke 2:8–20

You have come to us as a small child,
but you have brought us the greatest of all gifts,
the gift of eternal love. Caress us with your
tiny hands, embrace us with your tiny arms,
and pierce our hearts with your soft, sweet cries.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153)

I think if I could have been one actor in the Christmas narrative, I would have been one of the angels who showed up somewhere along the way. Maybe I would have been the angel Gabriel, who enters the biblical narrative like a person with a dramatic flair, who arrives in town unannounced and just starts in where you left off with them. You know, the one with all the updates on friends you’ve forgotten about, or family gossip, or the best tips on new restaurants or party scenes. Well, maybe the angel Gabriel wasn’t such a party guy, but he certainly arrives in the biblical drama with a lot of flair! He seems to have a direct line to the action and finds himself center stage.

The angel Gabriel showed up first in the New Testament right where some might expect him to: in the Temple. But it seems that the priest, Zachariah, didn’t expect to see him there. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that though Zachariah was a priest and should have been ready for pretty much anything in terms of the Holy One of Israel, when he entered the Holy of Holies to burn incense and the angel showed up at the altar he was shaken by the scene. Rather than the response we might expect from a holy person like Zachariah upon encountering the angel—“Oh, an angel, like, whatever”—we get a priest who must have jumped out of his skin when he lit the incense and right there, in plain daylight—well, perhaps in the shadows of the inner sanctum—he spots the angel. The text says, “an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear.” In other words, he stands there with his eyes bulging out of his head, hands trembling, heart pounding. He is old, really old. And though he may have brushed with something like angels occasionally during his long life as a priest, this fresh, soul-jarring encounter terrifies him!

Yep, I would have loved to be that angel, Gabriel, who could look into the eyes of a petrified old man and, with charged excitement, be the one who delivered news that would turn his terror into tremors of excitement and soul-charging hope; who could speak words that would turn his tears into song, his wife’s barrenness into a watermelon-sized pregnant belly, their silence into an infant’s insistent cry. Yes, to say those words: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife, Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and a delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth.” I’d take that assignment.

Or, if I were Gabriel the angel, to be able to break the dawn open with my next mission. This time I would slip unnoticed into the lofted bedroom of a young woman whose name is Mary. I would probably stand there for the longest time, because I wouldn’t want her to jump out of her precious skin when I showed up unannounced. She is just a child in a backwoods town, Nazareth; innocent, simply living out her script. I might stand there for a time, because I know the message I am carrying will disrupt everything she’s known. I think I’d be subtler than I was with the old priest because young people attend to these moments more fully than those of us who are older than time itself. Finally, when I would muster up enough courage to make my presence known, I would say to her in my most pastoral, most loving, most present voice, “Greetings”—yes, that would be it—“Greetings, you who God loves, who God knows, who is a beautiful spirit, a favored child of the Holy. Immanuel—God is with you.” Yes, she might understand that term: Immanuel—God with us. Little would she know that if she agrees to God’s request, that her womb would bulge with that very reality, God with us. And what I know is that every child, every one of us carries in us some of that reality: Immanuel, God in us, with us, God surrounding our days.

I think I would have been surprised by how unconcerned she seemed by my presence. How she seemed more bothered by what I said than the fact that I, a stranger, showed up—an angel no less. And when I gave it another thought, it might have made me wonder if someone like me had come at an earlier time. I might even think I had misread the situation because when I spoke to her I repeated the same canned line I did with Zachariah: “Do not be afraid.” Now that I think back on it, I don’t think she was afraid. She actually seemed more confused by the content of the message than she was by me, the messenger. She asked a very logical question in response to my message (that she, Mary, would be given the seed of eternity in her womb, and give birth to a son): “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” Of course, I might say. Mary sounds like one of you, in the Academy of Faith and Life. She asks great questions, doesn’t take things at face value.

If I were that angel named Gabriel—or even Gabriella—I would be so amazed that this bright, shimmering young woman, might shrug, with a kind of “I’m game,” energy, and say, “Yes, of course, I am so smitten by the One who sent you, the One who knows me, created me, awakened my deep love for life planted in my soul, that it magnifies God and God alone, that I am ready to play my part in the plan.” I would leave that scene, I suspect, glowing not of my own accord—even if that is what angels often do, having come close to the heavenly realm and then bringing that radiance into the bleakest of circumstances—but carrying away from this encounter the radiance of this young woman who glistened with light, years beyond her days.

But if I had to choose to be one angel in the Christmas narrative, I would really, really, really want to be one of the heavenly choirs that came to the shepherds on the hillside the night of the birth. Yes, I would want to be up there, one of them. Okay, I admit that I love to sing. I also confess that some of my very best moments in life have been singing in choirs, singing loud, long, and with gusto. I was not one of those kids who was tapped on the head by the children’s choir director for singing off pitch. No, I was the kid in the choir who was tapped on the head for singing too loud!

Mrs. Grundemeyer, the children’s choir director at my home church in Iowa, came over one Sunday morning as we were warming up to sing for church and tapped me on the head. “Lucy, you can’t sing so loud. You are drowning everyone else out!” But I suspect if I were up in the sky on that night—having just experienced the birth of none other than the Savior; having hightailed it from the City of David—and I spotted a cluster of shepherds in a field keeping watch over their flock, I would be quite quick with the joyful great news, and also anything but quiet about it. I could hold forth with the operatic shriek, full volume, no hushing from a well-intentioned, concerned-with-the-blend choir director. I’d be praising God in full gospel fashion: “Glory to God in the highest! Glory to GOD in the highest heaven! And peace among the people on earth on whom God’s marvelous, miraculous, most high favor rests!” I long to be in that number, yes I do.

But here I am a pastor instead of an angel. Here I am this morning with you in this room, in this sanctuary that still smells of candlelight, where only the crazy among us believes in angels, only the ones who genuinely would deconstruct any experience that might hint at angel showing up. But this morning of all mornings, at this time of year where light is creeping into the darkness a bit more than it was yesterday, there can be a momentary willingness to take off the absolutes of the Enlightenment’s vestiges that pronounce such aberrations like angels, miracles, signs, symbols, and even Messiahs categorically unsound. Maybe this day, when we all need a miracle, a small personal miracle—like a clear mind to cope with the world’s challenges that seem to shout at us at each turn—or a larger miracle—like peace on earth, goodwill to all—we can keep the door of our hearts ajar. Maybe on this day of all days we can allow our heart to wait with an insistent waiting for something amazing to emerge out of the darkness, whether we find ourselves in a temple or in a dim room or in a field tending frisky sheep.

Frederick Buechner tells of a moment when he and his grandson, Dylan, were together talking about life.

“[We] were in the hammock together, and when we finished reading Ant and Bee and the Rainbow for something like the hundred and fiftieth time, we lay there for a while just looking up through the trembling leaves to the topmost branches of the maples some sixty feet above our heads and decided that you would have to be a bird to get up there. Or an angel, Dylan said—he was four at the time—which turned our conversation in another direction. Someday he would be an angel himself, he said, and I said it would not be for a very, very long time. . . . I would get to be an angel long before he did if I got to be one at all. I told him I would wait for him and then he said, ‘When I get there I will follow you wherever you go.’” (Frederick Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace, pp. 104–105)

And Buechner’s response: “Ah-h-h.”

Not just angels, but angels playing host to their wondrous, startling, proclamation of the birth of a child; a joyful hope for a world that is so in need, so ready, so longing for love, peace, and life abundant. Amen.