During this Advent season, I invite you to encounter the familiar Christmas story in a fresh way—through the eyes of those actually on the scene, the angels. The angels are in every episode of the story, although often in the background. This year, let’s bring them to the fore-front!
We can start here: people are fascinated by angels today! Amazon.com lists over 150,000 books about angels. Searching more specifically, I found over 4,600 books about the topic “guardian angels” including these two examples:
- Calling all Angels—57 ways to Invite an Angel into your Life. From the Amazon description: “Her 57 channeled mantras cover nearly every situation in which the reader might need angelic help: finding a soulmate, guaranteeing success in a business venture, overcoming depression, increasing self-confidence, improving health and aiding weight loss, and many more.”
- The Romance Angels: How to work with the Angels to Manifest Great Love From a reader review: “Would you like to attract just the right person into your life for romance? Why not call on God’s angels to do the work for you? All you need to do is listen, relax and enjoy—the angels will handle the rest.”
We use technology every day to calculate better, work harder, travel farther, communicate faster, even look better than we actually look. A multitude of angelic self-help books invite us to add the supernatural world to our technology. Having trouble in your romantic life? Ask an angel! Feeling at a dead-end in your job? Call an angel!
But here’s the question I want to ask—why is it so easy to yank angels out of their true biblical soil and transplant them into self-help books as “heavenly helpers” ready to serve all our needs? What does this say about our society and this cultural moment in America?
On the other hand, the biblical angels we will meet these next weeks in the Christmas narratives are the opposite of self-help. They are beings of pure spirit, yet with a will just like us to make choices that have consequences. As we will discover these next weeks, they live in a world of incredible, all-out warfare that makes all human wars look like playground confrontations by comparison.
These angels inhabit a supernatural world that overlaps the physical world we know, and the membrane between the two is thinner and far more permeable than we may have imagined. In fact, rather than two worlds, it’s more accurate to see two dimensions of the same world, in the way a person born blind would have different experiences than a person with sight, yet both inhabit the same world.
God is unimaginably holy, and God’s angels reflect that holiness! Angels are not heavenly buddies. Angels are not divine social workers. They are mighty and awesome supernatural beings who live in the presence of a holy God. When angels come into contact with human beings, the Bible shows us that it’s always at God’s initiative…never at our initiative. No one in Scripture invites an angelic encounter!
As we will see in my next post, the first person in the Christmas narrative to be “touched by an angel” is the priest Zechariah. Zechariah’s response to his angelic visit is terror! He is “filled with fear.” Mary reacts the same way…as later do the shepherds watching their flocks. We’ll look at them all in the weeks ahead.
For now, fair warning! These are not your Christmas pageant angels in white bedsheets and coat hanger halos. In these weeks ahead, I invite to meet the real Christmas angels.
Absolutely wonderful, enriching and timely, Rich. All the best, Joe