Angels are big business, these days. Barnes & Noble has a whole angel section. More importantly, it’s a big week coming up for angels generally, the message of the angels to the shepherds that will make us smile, as it should, when we hear it on Tuesday night, and of course today’s angel appearing to Mary. Yet despite all these books and gorgeous paintings and Christmas cards, we live pretty angel-free lives, and this last Sunday of Advent is a time to think about why.
Angels are in fact a perfect sign of what this week asks us to remember. Because there is a thread that runs through today, and really this coming week, and it is this: Angels remind us that we have an incarnate God, a God that has a deep and ongoing involvement here on earth with all his people. That’s good news, but not only that. It is a message that changes our whole understanding of who we are. It is news that reminds us yet again how noble our own birth is, and news that comes with a whole new sense of God’s closeness. That is quite a message. So angels bring news. They also bring change. Perhaps that is why we see so few of them.
In the first reading we have no angel but something almost as good, a dream. Here is David, our patron, who was finally settled in his success as Israel’s great king, and he decides it’s time for what every successful man wants: a building program, a monument perhaps as much to himself as to the God he served. God is there in the form of the prophet Nathan and his dream to say — not so fast. The real climax of your life is not now, not this building, but later, with people and generations who will come generations after you. How did it feel to David to have God, once again, turn his plans upside down, remind the king that he was not quite in charge? Even more to the point, here is Mary, the great fulfillment of what Nathan told David to expect from his descendants. We all know about her “obedience” — yet we also mostly romanticize it and distance ourselves from it, and forget how this angel with “glad tidings” changed her life her marriage, her future, everything about her, subjected her to danger and sadness and death. Everything she expected about what her life would be, changed, by a messenger who left as quickly as he appeared.
It seems like a simple message, that God’s plans for us might have the effect of changing the pattern of our lives. But there are few things that are more contrary to the way we actually live. We all have plans in life, ambitions, ways we think things are headed in our lives. In fact, what we can easily take away from all the talk shows and the self-help books is that we work out our own identity — that we look inside ourselves and meditate on what we like, what we’re good at, what we don’t like, what’s fun, and based on what we find we make plans for our lives. That’s a step ahead, I guess, of people who make their plans based on what their parents expected, or what the world rewards, so maybe it’s better than spending your life being miserable.
But both those ways of living our lives, doing what everyone else expects and doing what we think is right for us, can ignore the real story of Christmas: that God has interaction with the world, and with us, constant interaction that isn’t over. Who we are is to be shaped and changed and occasionally turned upside down by signs and people and strangers and messages and dreams. Our lives are to important, too royal, to be off on our own. We need God to remind us who we really are, descendants of David, people who are here to do whatever God puts in front of us. The message of the angel is one of happiness, but if it doesn’t somehow make you drop what you’re doing, then perhaps the message is still unopened.
This week, give your own identity and planning and goals a rest. Advent and Christmas and salvation history is about God’s initiative with us, his messenger standing right in front of us as he did with Mary as he did with David. That angel may come just at the wrong time — just when we’ve pulled it all together, finally, or just when we think we can’t possibly cope with one more message from anyone. But the messenger is here this week with good news, a light that will shine bright and perhaps show us something that we have never seen before.