Welcome!
To Week 4 of the Sunday School in a Bag Advent and Christmas program – six weeks devoted to Immanuel and the question: What does it really mean to say “God Is With Us”?
If you have not already, check out Lesson 1, Lesson 2, and Lesson 3 first!
Now… Messengers
In both Hebrew and Greek, the words Mal’ach (Hebrew) and Angelos (Greek) both just mean “messenger.”
In fact, even our English words messenger and message come from the Greek word angelos.
At some point in history, we stopped translating the word angelos whenever it appeared to refer to creatures we see as “superhuman” rather than to any ordinary human messenger. For many centuries now we have referred to such creatures by that untranslated Greek word: Angels.
However, at its core, in both the Old and New Testaments – in both Hebrew and Greek – angels are, first and foremost, just messengers. That is the role they play in all biblical stories. It is their purpose and the reason they are included in the stories.
Angels, while they may tend to defy ordinary human explanation, exist in the stories to relay messages between Humans and God.
And that is what this week is all about: Messengers, and the messages they bring.
Shepherds
Christmas is the time of angels – that is, the time of messengers.
As you read Luke 1-2 (the Christmas story) you might notice that every person involved in the story is there to deliver some message. First, we have the shepherds, who receive a startling message from an unexpected source. But that is not the end of their story. No. By the end of their story, the shepherds who received the message have become the messengers in turn.
Watch their story here.
Anna and Simeon
Then, in the temple, there were Anna and Simeon, two elderly people who find their purpose in life fulfilled and restored by a “chance” encounter one day with a baby and his parents. Here is their story:
So who are the messengers?
The takeaway from all of this—just to sum it up nice a clear—we are all the messengers. The angels to our own times and places. That is our purpose, the reason we are each included in this ongoing story. God’s messengers are what we are all meant to be in this world. And if that seems reductionist or way too simple, or you just can’t imagine yourself every standing up in front of a crowd to preach a sermon, just take a moment and think back again through how many different kinds of messengers there are in the Christmas story. Luke, the Gospel writer himself, who as far as we know never went out an preached to anyone is included among them. Luke’s messenger role was to interview people and quietly record their stories.
Mary’s messenger role was to quietly remember these things while raising her children in an otherwise more or less normal, domestic life.
Joseph’s messenger role was simply to protect and provide—be a father and husband. You know, in all four Gospels, Joseph does not have one single spoken line. And we’ve already noticed how Zachariah’s message started in absolute silence…
The point is, if public speaking is not your thing, you’re still a messenger. If your life is spent waiting for something to happen, you are still a messenger. If you’re 84 years old and the most impressive thing you find about yourself is that you are still among the living, you are still a messenger. If you’re an uneducated laborer who knows everything there is to know about sheep and not a lot about much else, you are still a messenger.
And in the end, the supernatural beings and miraculous signs that light up the sky around us are just more messengers…
Because we are all the messengers.
Immanuel. God with us. This phrase we’ve been dwelling on this Christmas season…
I’ve said before, Immanuel is just a fact. God is with us, today, tomorrow, yesterday. God is with all people always, whether we know it, acknowledge it, want it or not.
God was with Mary, Joseph, Zachariah, Elizabeth, the shepherds outside Bethlehem and all other shepherds—the Wisemen of next week’s story and all other Wisemen—Anna, Simeon, and everyone in Jerusalem and beyond Jerusalem…
God was with them all long before any angels appeared to them—long before any miracle births—long before their roles in this drama began…
Because Immanuel is just a fact.
It is when we become aware of this fact, when we realize Immanuel consciously and understand this to be true in our own lives—that is the moment when ordinary people become angels.
That’s what happened in the Christmas story. Not once, but over and over and over again. The characters become somehow aware of God’s immediate presence with them, and that knowledge cannot be kept silent or ignored.
We become messengers in this moment because it is the moment we realize there is a truth in this world that is just too big, too extraordinary, too beyond the common experience to keep hidden. And so we must speak it, must act on it, must make it known beyond ourselves… somehow.
That’s all for this week folks!
