Soul Force

Entertaining Angels Unawares

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

February 1, 2009

When Captain Stormfield marched into heaven, he was in for a mighty surprise. Yes, he was met by St. Peter. Things were in order as far as that was concerned. The problem was, as Stormfield perceived it and Mark Twin reported it, Peter was out to lunch.

"I beg pardon, and you mustn't mind my reminding you and seeming to meddle," Stormfield says to Peter, "but hain't you forgot something?" Peter ponders for a moment and then shakes his head. "Forgot something? No, not that I know of." Stormfield is stunned. "Think," he says. So Peter thinks, but he has to admit, "No, I can't seem to have forgot anything."

Put yourself in Captain Stormfield's shoes. After more than a thousand church services, many devoted to the advantages of heaven over earth, a truly good man arrives at the Pearly Gates and the gatekeeper doesn't seem to know what in the world heaven is all about.

Think about it.

If you were doing a crossword puzzle, and the clue was "heavenly item," four letters, first letter "h," there would be only two obvious possibilities, halo and harp.

"Look at me," Captain Stormfield complains, "look at me all over." Peter looks. "Well?" he asks. "Well!" Stormfield cries, "You don't notice anything? If I branched out amongst the elect looking like this, wouldn't I attract considerable attention? Wouldn't I be a little conspicuous?"

Peter is nonplussed. "I don't see anything the matter. What do you lack?"

"Lack! Why, I lack my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my hymn-book, and my palm branch—I lack everything that a body naturally requires up here, my friend."

As amazing as it may seem, the gatekeeper of heaven is truly puzzled by all this. After pondering for a while, Peter finally says, "Well, you seem to be a curiosity every way a body takes you. I never heard of these things before."

Captain Stormfield looks at St. Peter in astonishment. Then he puts it on the line. "Now, I hope you don't take it as an offense, for I don't mean any, but really, for a man that has been in the Kingdom as long as I reckon you have, you do seem to know powerful little about its customs…."

[Well, t]o please Captain Stormfield and free the Pearly Gates for other arrivals, Peter gave in to his request and provided him with a harp, a wreath, a halo, a hymnbook, and a palm branch. At last, fully equipped and in a state of absolute bliss, the good captain settled down on a cloud with about a million other angels, gave his palm branch a wave or two for luck, tuned up his harp strings and started to sing.

About seventeen hours later, the angel next to him asks, "Don't you know any tune but the one you've been pegging at all day?"

"Not another blessed one," says he.

"Don't you reckon you could learn another one?"

"Never, I've tried to, but I couldn't manage it."

At this, his companion shakes his unhaloed head. "It's a long time to hang to that one," he says. "Eternity, you know." To which Stormfield replies, "Don't break my heart. I'm getting low-spirited enough already."

They sit in silence next to one another. Finally, the veteran angel asks, "Are you glad to be here?" To which Captain Stormfield replies, "Old man, I'll be frank with you. This ain't just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be when I used to go to church."

That's the problem with heaven [concludes Forrest Church]. We know more about it than the angels do. A vacation forever, Sunday seven days a week, everyone in uniform, harps, hymnals, and halos commissioned upon arrival from the PX, not to mention wings. [1]

Most of us have a little trouble with the traditional notion of heaven. For starters, the old three-tier universe – heaven up there, just a little beyond the atmosphere, hell down there under our feet, the plane of the living right here on solid ground, flat as a pancake as far as the eye can see – well, that idea of the cosmos is musty with age when we can see photographs of this tiny blue boat of ours hanging in the heavens when seen from space by our astronauts. However, we do know that heaven is the dwelling place of the angels, and of God, of course. Angels come down from heaven, after all, to carry messages to righteous men and women like Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, to Mary’s her betrothed Joseph and to shepherds watching their flocks by night – all key moments in the Christmas story we recalled again just recently.

So angels are, in their essence, messengers, and in fact the word we translate as “angel” means precisely “messenger” in both Hebrew and Greek. We have developed all sorts of curlicues about angels since the writing of the stories in the Bible, but basically angels are just messengers. In fact, they sometimes seem to simply vanish when their message has been delivered. I mentioned the messengers who appeared to Abraham and Sarah at their tent on the plains of Mamre when we talked about “Miracles of Birth” during Advent. Three men appear in the heat of the day and Abraham hastens to make them welcome, with the help of his wife Sarah and his servants. One of them announces that Sarah, then 90, will bear a son within the year; not surprisingly, she laughs! That birth does happen, of course, according to the story. Then one of the messengers discusses the fate of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with Abraham and, after Abraham extracts a promise that the cities and Abraham’s cousin Lot will be spared if there are at least ten righteous people in them, they head off on their next mission. However, only two messengers arrive at Sodom! What happened to the third? The rabbis concluded that the third angel was the messenger with news for Sarah and was no longer needed once that message had been delivered.

Abraham’s grandson Jacob experienced several such visitations, the first when he was fleeing from his brother Esau, whom he had tricked out of both inheritance and blessing. As the story has it, [Gen. 28:] ¹² “[… Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” It is from this scene, of course, that we have the hymn “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” Jacob’s next encounter with a messenger is more interesting; after 20 years, having married Rachel and Leah, fathered a number of children and acquired substantial wealth, he is returning to his homeland to face his brother Esau once again and he is terrified that Esau will want to do him and his family wrong. Here’s how that story is told:

Gen 32:²⁴ And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. ²⁵ And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. ²⁶ And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. ²⁷ And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. ²⁸ And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. ²⁹ And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. ³⁰ And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

Jesus, too, experienced a message being delivered; here’s how it’s described in the Gospel of Mark [1:9-11]:

⁹ And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. ¹⁰ And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: ¹¹ And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

I never thought of this experience as being a visitation by an angel, but in fact the dove and the voice from heaven are precisely messengers. Like many, I have long been under the impression that this voice from heaven was an announcement to the world of Jesus’ blessedness and mission, but interestingly the text says that “he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him,” not everyone around on the occasion; so perhaps this message too was private, something that gave Jesus, like Jacob before him, the confidence to carry out his life and mission as he understood it.

Over the centuries, theologians and ordinary people became more interested in the messengers and wanted to fill in their figures: wings, for starters, haloes sometimes, figures like cupids. The question then naturally arises as to whether they have substance, as earthly creatures do – since they appear perfectly solid when they appear – and of course the question of how many of them can dance on the head of a pin follows from this inquiry as the day follows the night. Perhaps the best answer would be that they have corporeal substance when delivering messages and hence at most one could fit – painfully –on the head of a pin, but when not bearing a message they are incorporeal and an infinite number could fit – and dance! – in no space at all.

Now, that’s a silly discussion about angels, but maybe it reveals a truth anyway. Let me illustrate. I recently started to experience an odd phenomenon with my eye: in low light, I started seeing a little flash in the outside corner of my right eye every so often. I was, if you will, catching a glimpse of something literally out of the corner of my eye. Some of you who have experienced this will recognize the symptoms, and the floaters which go along with it; and yes, I have seen my optometrist and it’s a perfectly ordinary part of the aging process; the vitreous in the eyes moves away from the retina as we age and it’s perfectly normal to have this new thing happening out of the corner of my eye – though if you do experience it, you should have your optometrist make sure that it’s normal – it can be very serious; mine fortunately was not.

That purely physical phenomenon alerts me to a more psychological experience: noticing out of the corner of my mental eye that something is not as I expected it to be. Our daily lives readily become routinized. We wake up, stretch, shower, have our coffee (or tea), read the paper, head off for work or proceed to our daily rounds, and sink into everydayness. There is great comfort in everydayness. But every once in a while something appears out of the corner of our eye – an odd person, an unusual opportunity, something that doesn’t fit in our daily routine. As often, the nudge is more severe, often in the form of suffering to ourselves or those around us: a loved one becomes ill and dies; our own death approaches with an unexpected and frightening diagnosis from the doctor; we lose a job or have a sudden and unexpected failure on a project; a child becomes seriously ill. Or perhaps some danger suddenly looms and as suddenly a rescue occurs.

My brother’s family tells a story of a time when their daughter, then four years old, darted in front of an oncoming train. It was too late for them to grab her, but before she could be harmed, an angel snatched her out of danger and brought her to safety. I never inquired too closely as to the physical attributes of the angel. I have a sense that the story would have turned a little more vague at that point – perhaps that it happened in the flash of an eye, that the angel didn’t have a form, properly speaking, but that something, somehow, rescued that little girl from deadly peril and that they are eternally grateful to whoever or whatever that was.

I think we can open ourselves to something that some would call the appearance of angels in our lives. I know someone who is convinced that her real needs will be met by—well, she prefers to think of it as the universe conspiring on her behalf, but others would say angels instead. She needed a printing press to carry her art in the direction it was heading but had no means to get the money she needed to pay for it. Out of the blue, someone offered her some very high-paying work which earned exactly enough to make up her shortfall for buying the press. Her car was on its last legs and she had no idea how she could afford to replace it when some relatives called and asked if she had any use for a used car they were replacing. She believes that when she allows it to, the universe will provide.

The Apostle Paul, or rather someone writing in his name, reminds us, as our centering thought puts it, to “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” [Hebrews 13:2] The author was most likely referring to the story of Abraham and Sarah and the mysterious visitor who promised them a baby even at their advanced age. But I think the meaning can be taken more broadly to suggest that we might consider any stranger as having the potential to bring us good news – perhaps of an unexpected sort – and that we should be open to such unexpected possibilities.

There are small ways of cultivating such hospitality. When we focus entirely on where we’re going and what we have to do, our attention narrows and we miss what’s happening out of the corner of our eye. As we plow down Main Street in Hingham, we pay little attention to drivers from the side streets waiting patiently to join the stream of traffic, even if we ourselves have been in the same situation just moments before. What if we cultivated a welcoming to the stranger on the side street and slowed down to invite them to end their waiting and join the main stream of traffic? What if we said “Hello” more often in the grocery store? What if we greeted strangers wherever we found them? Might we find the universe smiling a little bit more? Might there be messengers who offer something we need to learn or attend to? Even in our struggles, even when we wrestle all night long with intractable conflicts or insurmountable problems, we may discover – as did Jacob that night of his wrestling match – that a blessing lies at the other end. We don’t have to believe, as did dear Captain Stormfield, that we will become angels in heaven when we die, but we can, I think, cultivate angel-friendliness while we live.

I doubt there’s any way to prove these things one way or the other; these are the sorts of things we have to take on faith. I think what is needed is a willingness to listen to what is not explicit, to notice what is not obvious, to attend to what is seen out of the corner of the eye.

In this way we can become hospitable, welcoming, and available; in this way we can open ourselves to entertaining angels, who may in the end turn out to be something akin to our own better selves.

Amen.