ANGELS [M, 12-8-25]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life From the Years of Winter—ANGELS [M, 12-8-25]

 

Angels. There is a lot of talk about them, but not by me. There has been much thought about them and songs and sermons and stories, but not by me. [1]

I don’t know anything about them. I haven’t experienced them. There is a lot of talk about them in the Bible and in the history of the church, but to me it is just talk. It’s been easier for me simply to ignore them. I can’t recall anyone every complaining, ever saying, “Why don’t you preach about angels?”

It is only now, when I am far beyond any possibility of mounting a pulpit, that it occurs to me that I really should have tried to say something useful about angels along the way. After all, there is all that talk about them in the Bible. I’m not sure that a preacher should be allowed to get away with simply ignoring a topic like angels.

Especially in the Christmas season, when angels play a rather important part in the Christmas pageant.

I always tried to preach the whole gospel, not just my favorite topics. That’s the point of the lectionary—the listing of different scriptures for each Sunday of the church year. We preach the lections designated, rather than picking out our own, to keep us from being Johnny One Note.

In using the lectionary, I have always preached first on the Gospel reading. We are Christians, after all. We need first to hear the story of Christ.

If for some reason I felt the Gospel reading for the day was inappropriate, maybe too shop-worn, I next chose whichever of the readings was hardest for me to understand and apply. I figured if it were hard for me, it probably was hard for the rest of the congregation, too, so I should spend time on it. Most of the time the Gospel lesson was hard enough to understand that it qualified for sermon status on both counts.

There may have been lectionary readings about angels, but I don’t recall any. Sure, they appear in plenty of readings, like Christmas, where they tell the shepherds about Jesus. But they aren’t the main characters. That’s Jesus, and I was always ready to preach about Jesus.

So what now, when “I ain’t gonna need this house no longer?” One of the lines in that great Sturt Hamblen song is “I see an angel peeking through a broken window pane.”

The idea seems to be that we’re going to have to deal with angels when we die. So I’d better apologize for ignoring them all these years, both to my congregations and to the angels. I don’t want angels harping at me for eternity.

John Robert McFarland

1] I actually did write a book about angels, called “The Out of Place Angel,” about the little angel, Miranda, who was supposed to go with the heavenly host to proclaim the birth of Jesus, but she missed the flight, since she was always out of place. She went on her own to try to catch up with the heavenly host, but couldn’t remember where they were going. So she just went all over the world, proclaiming the birth of Christ wherever she saw a baby being born. It was beautifully illustrated by the late, great Shelly Rasche, but we never found a publisher for it. You can find Shelly's art on line.