4th Sunday of Advent Year B

4th Sunday of Advent
December 18, 2011
The other night, as I was putting my 3 year old son to bed, Jack and I were talking about angels. Early on in the conversation, Jack says to me, “Me no like angels. Me scared of angels.” You’re scared of angels? I asked. And just as the words, “But why?” where coming out of my mouth, I realized something. The kid was on to something. Angels are scary! In just about all the stories in scripture about angels, what is the one of the first thing the angel says? “Do not be afraid!”
The word angel (angelos) means messenger. Angels always show up with an invitation from God; a warning that God is about to shake things up, and God invites that particular person to be a part of God’s new beginning.
In her book The Glorious Impossible, Madeleine L’Engle retells the story of the life of Jesus through her own words and the illustrations of the medieval artist Giotto. On the page about the Annunciation, she writes,
An angel came to Mary. A fourteen year old girl was visited by an angel, an archangel. In Scripture, whenever an angel appears to anyone, the angel’s first words usually are, “FEAR NOT!”—which gives us an idea of what angels must have looked like.
So the Archangel Gabriel, who visited Mary, greeted her with great courtesy, and then said, “FEAR NOT!”
And then he told her that she was going to have a baby, a remarkable baby who would be called eh son of the Highest.
Mary was already engaged to Joseph. The wedding would be soon. This was strange and startling news indeed. Mary, fourteen years old, looked the angel in the face, asking, with incredible courage, “But how can this be?”
And the angels told her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you. and the Holy Thing which shall be born of you shall be called the son of God.”
What an amazing, what an impossible message the angel brought to a young girl! But Mary looked at the angle and said, “Be it unto me according to your word.”
And so the life of Jesus began as it would end, with the impossible. When he was a grown man he would say to his disciples, “For human beings it is impossible. For God nothing is impossible.”
Possible things are easy to believe. The Glorious Impossibles are what bring joy to our hearts, hope to our lives, songs to our lips… i
When angels show up, it is always with an invitation to participate in the Glorious Impossible. God could easily do it without us, but God doesn’t. Augustine once said, “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.”
Today we celebrate that God is inviting us all to participate in the Glorious Impossible: The miracle of God with us. Do not be afraid.

i. L’Engle, Madeleine. The Glorious Impossible. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1990, 1.