One of my favourite Christmas songs is “O holy night” I remember a few years ago hearing a teenage girl singing the song and she was pitch perfect, (as far as I could tell) it was a thing of beauty, and I can still remember feeling shivers in my spin as she sung so beautifully. I have a couple of different tracks on my Christmas playlist and while I love the song, neither quite live up to the young girl in Church. Whenever I listen to the song my thoughts are taken back to a group of rough and ready shepherds, sitting on a hillside somewhere in Palestine not far away from Bethlehem, when their night watch is broken by the bright light in the sky and the choir of angels heralding the birth of the Messiah. It is amazing what music can do to our senses.
A couple of years ago, people in our churches got knitting and churned out a variety of knitted angels to use as a means of outreach at Christmas. The idea was that we flood Ipswich and the surrounding towns and villages with these little knitted angels to spread the good news of the Gospel message. We put a pile of angels on our garden wall and invited the doggie walking folk of Ipswich to help themselves.
We will never know who took them, but day by day they disappeared, and I hope that they brought joy to their new owners. For some reason, I give very little thought to angels through most of the year, then suddenly during the season of Advent, they come centre stage, whether it is sitting on top of Christmas trees, or angelic children in school and church nativities topped with tinsel halos, the range of songs and carols that we hear or sing about, or the angels we hear about in the Christmas story. Angels have an important role to play in the Christmas story.
There is a tendency in the modern world to mock belief in spiritual things like angels and even God, but they have an important part to play in my life and I believe that they exist and influence my life. Don’t get me wrong, I have never been faced by the heavenly host lighting up the night sky and singing “glory to God in the highest” the remarkable thing is that the angels I have encountered in my sixty odd years would never see themselves as being angels. They are men and women who have influenced my life by the things the say and do, the way they live their lives, and just simply the people they are. Gender doesn’t seem to matter; I can name both men and women and they are not always very learned or holy people in the eyes of the world.
- Who are the angels you have met on your life’s journey?
- How have they influenced you?
It strikes me as I read the Christmas story that angels play a very specific role, they are the messengers of God. Charles Wesley begins one of his most famous Christmas carols “Hark! The herald angels sing “glory to the new-born King”” It is worth thinking about the words of the carol when and if you sing it this year, Charles Wesley gives us the privilege of singing with the angels the message that they bring.
The most important response to the angels is to listen to their message. Our lives are often so crowded with “stuff” at Christmas that we don’t make time to listen to the message, and then respond.
- What is God saying to you this Christmas?
- How might you respond?
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!