The angels’ song: glory

But God became human

Luke 2:8-20

After college, I worked for a time at Tyndale House Publishers. Artist and calligrapher Tim Botts generously designed for Dave and me our wedding invitation and program. He and Handel can tell the story of the angels’ song better than I can. Without doubt, this is one of the most spectacular “But God” moments in history, witnessed by a group of sleepy shepherds in a quiet field outside the village of Bethlehem.

My photos of pages December 22, 23, 24 by Tim Botts, from “Daily Portraits of the Word” calendar published by Inkwell Greetings

Listen: 39:15-43:35 on this recording of Handel’s Messiah by the Academy of Ancient Music and choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford

When the angels had returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem!” … And there was the baby, lying in the manger. After seeing him, the shepherds told everyone what had happened and what the angel had said to them about this child. … The shepherds went back to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen (Luke 2:15-20).

I wrestled with this passage, and its tragic aftermath told by Matthew (chapter 2), while writing Three-in-One: The Mysterious Friendship of Derry and Benny, which I hope will be out by Easter. Peace on earth? Good will among men? Fear not?

Like Mary, in quiet moments I ponder the age-old questions. Advent reminds me that we don’t yet know the end of the story. And that God is writing a comedy, a grand romance, not a tragedy.

The ending of Earth’s story will be but the beginning of glory that surpasses even the angels’ song. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

10:25-13:15 on this recording of Handel’s Messiah by the Academy of Ancient Music and choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford

Countless thousands of angels

But God promises profound joy

Hebrews 12:18, 22 You have not come to Mount Sinai, a place of flaming fire, darkness, gloom, and whirlwind … and terror and trembling. … No, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering.

Can you imagine being part of that joyful gathering, surrounded, buoyed, overwhelmed by thousands of angel voices raised in worship of the Lamb, the Lamb who laid down his life for you?

A couple of years ago, I had a tiny taste of what this might be like. I was standing in worship in my church in Pittsburgh when all at once, I could see into Heaven. I can’t explain this; I can only tell you what I experienced. I felt goose bumps; a depth of wonder I don’t know how to describe. Awe.

And gradually I realized: the angels were singing with us. They sang the song we were singing in honor of the Lord. I wish I remembered what that song was.

The time of worship ended. The vision faded. I was so overwhelmed I had to sit down. After the closing prayer I looked around me. Did no one else see what I saw? How could I ever describe it? Was I meant to share it with others? To what end had God given me this glimpse of glory? Was it for me alone, to encourage me in a time of sadness?

I don’t fully know the answer. Tonight, I feel I am to share this with you. Perhaps you are in a moment of discouragement, wondering whether your life will ever come right. Perhaps this second-hand peek into the reality of God’s “heavenly Jerusalem” will prompt you to ask for your own deepened understanding of the joy-filled wonders that await us.

I offer this as a gift, passing on a gift given to me, Heaven touching earth. May the Holy Spirit use it to bless you as only he knows how to do.

Shutterstock: Bruce Rolff

I heard the voices of thousands and millions of angels around the throne … And they sang in a mighty chorus: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.” And then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea. They sang, “Blessing and honor and glory and power belong to the one sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.” Revelation 5:11-13

Worthy is the Lamb, Hillsong

Angels, again

But God’s angels serve us!

Hebrews 1:14; 2:9 Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?

She did WHAT?!

I was reading one of Karis’s journals, age fourteen. She described a habit she had developed, when she couldn’t sleep because of pain. In the early morning hours, she would slip outside and sit on our front step, watching the sun rise and our neighborhood slowly come to life, greeting and blessing passersby hurrying up the hill to catch buses to their jobs across town. We lived in a sort of rowhouse, fronting directly on the street, sharing walls with neighbors right, left, and back.

A view of our street, our open carport on the left, the step where Karis sat behind the neighbor boy in blue (one of Karis’s closest friends). Karis, center, between Rachel and Valerie, holds her dog Buddy. Dave’s dad was visiting us. See the trees and lake in the middle distance? This is the water reservoir for our part of the city; it now boasts a park and walking track designed by a beloved member of our church. Living near the “represa” was one of the perks we enjoyed–along with our wonderful neighbors, who looked out for us in every way they could. We cherish friendships with them still, and visit whenever we can.

Why did I feel alarm—and outrage, if I’m honest—learning about this seventeen years later?

We lived in a dangerous neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, where assaults, robberies, and kidnappings were frequent, especially of white, blond children and teens, presumed to be from rich families. Karis knew this. Every one of our neighbors’ homes had been broken into; a teen across the street had been shot; one family’s young children tied up and terrorized; every home robbed … Most of this occurred in the vulnerable early hours of the day. All the horror stories sprung to my mind; our neighbors gathered in our living room seeking solutions. Yet Karis consciously and deliberately exposed herself to harm while the rest of the family slept.
It’s difficult to adequately express the complexity of keeping Karis alive day to day, totally apart from these external threats. On any given day, she could wake up feeling well enough to go to school, and I would proceed with my ministry and household plans for the day, only to be called a few hours later: “We found Karis passed out in the bathroom …” The race across the city to emergency care … the inevitable scolding by her doctor for not acknowledging school was not really an option for a person like Karis. (An extrovert, she hated every single day she missed being with her friends and all the activities of school.)
The cost of Karis care to each of our other children, when so often, for example, family plans had to be cancelled because Karis was once more in the hospital. Christmases, birthdays, weekends spent in one hospital or another. I couldn’t believe Karis would so brazenly add the danger of assault or abduction to her life and ours.

So why did she do this? We didn’t allow our daughters to walk anywhere alone. Not ever.

I took some time to calm down, then kept reading.

Over the course of her high school journals, Karis justified her early-morning breach of family rules because:

She needed those hours away from her pain-filled bedroom. She needed to breathe fresh air and commune with God in the beauty of sunrise, a beauty hard to come by in our concrete jungle.
She needed people. Anytime other people were present, even peripherally, she could focus on them and not on her distressed body. (This reached the point when she was in college that her doctor told us he couldn’t care for her anymore. That’s another story.)
She knew precisely when she had to slip back into the house and her bedroom before others in our home woke up—and figured “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them.”
She wanted to LIVE–and her health limited her in so many ways.
And finally, Karis felt perfectly safe, because she wasn’t alone: her angels were with her. Her angels, Faith, Hope, and Love, whom she could see, whom she talked to and often referenced in her journals.

Hmm, I thought. Perhaps this explains something. I had always wondered why in twenty years there, our house was the only one on our street never broken into. We were the “rich Americans,” the natural target of robbers and kidnappers. And we knew, because neighbors easily made their way into our house to put out a fire while we were away one Sunday, that getting in wouldn’t pose any problem to professional criminals.

Unknown to us, three powerful angels, apparently, resided at our address.

Karis never suffered harm for disobeying our family rules. Each successful escapade reinforced doing it again. And it seems, from her journals, that Karis’s angels supported her adolescent misconduct in this and in many other ways. For example:

Riding buses across town (our “town” was a city of 22 million people) without telling us or asking permission.
Maintaining relationships with people, including guys, she met on the bus.
A whole night spent with her friends in a city park without letting us know where she was. Why didn’t she call when she missed the last bus home after a concert in the park? Because she “knew” we would be asleep and didn’t want to wake us. (We and the other parents, of course, spent the night phone-tagging and worrying and praying.)

How does God assess all that? Some mysteries, we will only understand in Heaven. But once we’re in the presence of the Lord, they probably won’t matter anymore.

Can you see angels?

But God’s world includes angels

Matthew 18:1-10 About that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus called a little child to him and said, “I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. So anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven … Beware that you don’t look down on any of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels are always in the presence of my heavenly Father.”

“An artist is one still able to see angels,” Madeleine L’Engle tells me in Walking on Water. “To be visited by an angel is to be visited by God. To be touched by an angel is to be touched by God.”

Immediately, of course, I think of Karis. Dave joked as she was growing up that she needed two guardian angels, not just one, to keep her safe through all her adventuring and exploits. But in reading her journals, I discovered she had three, and often saw them and took comfort and guidance from them.

Those of us around her, intent on keeping Karis safe and alive, tried to limit her, because she seemed to have missed out on common sense. Where is the line between fearlessness and stupidity?

We thought, silly us, looking at all we had invested in her life, that she “owed” us this: to walk within boundaries of safety, to not risk her costly life on (to us) frivolous pleasures. I placed value on what it took for me and others to support her in her extravagant ideas.

But for Karis, every day of life was Gift. So many times, doctors had said her broken body could no longer support life, yet she lived on. This made her careless, or overconfident, or too trusting, from the point of view of us who did not see her guardian angels or accept her absolute conviction that she would live “not one minute more or less than God has planned for me.”

“Where is the line between responsible faith and reckless presumption?” I would ask her.

“Ah, Mama, you worry too much. No one has ever solved the dilemma of free will vs. predestination. You need to embrace the both-and, not try to reduce it to either-or.” A deflection. I was not comforted. I did not worry less.

So if an artist is one still able to see angels, in what ways was Karis an artist? I remember her economics professor at Notre Dame telling me that after he graded Karis badly on an essay filled with her customary multi-hued imagery and made her rewrite it in proper academic diction, she thereafter submitted two essays for every assignment: one she wrote for herself, and one she wrote for him. “Economics is about Life,” she told him. “I can only understand it in that context. Then I translate it for you into the language that makes sense to you.” His view of his subject was transformed.

And that’s what she did for all of us who paid attention. She taught us to listen, to see, to go deeper. To embrace mystery, rather than try to tame it. To touch Joy. And Freedom.

Ah, Karis. I’m so glad James sees you dancing. With the angels. With Jesus.

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

But God’s word is trustworthy

Acts 27:9, 20-26 We [apparently Luke was along on this voyage] had lost a lot of time. The weather was becoming dangerous for sea travel because it was so late in the fall, and Paul spoke to the ship’s officers about it. … A terrible storm raged for many days, until all hope was gone. No one had eaten for a long time. Finally, Paul called the crew together and said, “Men, you should have listened to me in the first place and not left Crete. You would have avoided all this damage and loss.

But take courage! … For last night an angel of the God to whom I belong stood beside me, and he said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Paul, for you will surely stand trial before Caesar! What’s more, God in his goodness has granted safety to everyone sailing with you.’ So, take courage! For I believe God. It will be just as he said.”

Whenever I see a reference to angels in the Bible, I mark it with an A. Biblical writers comment on angels matter-of-factly. Karis did too; for her they were a part of normal life. Several times in her journals she mentions seeing her guardian angels. As her father sometimes commented, she pushed her limits so recklessly she needed more than one. Because she saw her angels from time to time, I wonder whether the net effect was to make her bolder, rather than more careful (as her mother often would have preferred).

But God speaks to me in other ways. As far as I remember, I’ve never seen an angel, nor heard one speak. Have you? If you have an angel story, I would love to hear it!

*One artist’s depiction of a guardian angel Shutterstock: Zwiebackesser*

In fact if you have a “But God” story (and I’m sure you do!) I would love to hear it and post it to encourage others. We’re surrounded by so many challenges in this broken world that we need to take note when God intervenes in our stories, as Luke did in writing Acts. “Remember and tell!” are frequent invitations in Scripture, especially in the Psalms.

Don’t you remember better when you put an experience into words, and when you share it with others? Whether in the moment happy or sad, scary or tranquil, our interface with God helps us plant our feet more firmly and hearten each other more concretely. “This happened to me” carries more punch than just about anything else we can say.

We wouldn’t know this story—about Paul standing up in the middle of a typhoon to encourage his shipmates with what he heard an angel say to him—had Luke not taken the time and trouble to write it down. So, I challenge you: take the time. Record for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for people you don’t even know, what God has done for you. Share with us how he has intervened in your wild and precious life.

I’ll make you a bet: once it’s clear in your own mind, clear enough to write, God will give you opportunities to share your experience with others who need it. As Paul said, “Take courage!” Believe God. He even sends angels to communicate with us. Pass it on.