Advent 4B - "The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came"

 

Saint Luke 1:26-38

Everybody knew that when the moment came, in what they liked to call “the fullness of time,” the assignment would be his.  He was, after all, an angel’s angel.  While legend had it that he had led the forces of Heaven along with the archangel Michael, in an epic battle against the powers of darkness he had long since given up the ways of war for the diplomatic corps. 

If this was a military mission Michael would have certainly been given the call but this assignment required a certain measure of tact and more than a little diplomacy so, when the time came, the duty fell to Gabriel.  As century after century passed, he neither denied nor bragged about the notion that he would be the one. 

In the meantime, down through the rolling years, Gabriel and his fellow angels did what angels simply do in God’s eternal plan – act as messengers between God and God’s creatures.  He brought messages to the prophets, some of joy and some of gloom and doom.  But mostly he had some really strange encounters with many of the people.

They kept acting as he was there to do their bidding. “Find me a place to put my horse,” they would demand as if Gabriel and his kind had nothing better to do than find people good parking places.

They made cute little images of him and gave him and his fellow angels credit for everything from happy marriages to good skin.

He shuddered to think that later in history, all because of a movie, they would come to believe that “every time a bell rings an angel would get their wings.”  “That’s not the way it works,” he almost shouted out loud to nobody in particular. “I’m an angel. You’re a human.  We don’t change places.”  Most of the time he just shook his head and wondered. “Can’t these people understand that angels are here to serve God.  We were not created to be the slaves of humankind.”

But humankind was always enslaving something, mostly each other.  They seems to be slaves to the powers of war – attacking one and other one moment and reducing each other’s country’s to rubble the next.  When he spoke frankly and off the record Gabriel thought they were not worth saving.  

Still, he had a feeling that the time was drawing near when the Almighty would do something for he had just returned from telling some old priest named Zechariah that his equally ancient wife, Elizabeth, was about to give birth to a prophet. The old geezer raised such a stink that, in a rare fit of pique, Gabriel struck him dumb right there in the holy of holies of the Temple.

Since the angel could not remember the last time a prophet had been born, he knew that “the game was afoot for those with ears to catch the distant view.”  A line he loved so much that he would, just for fun, whisper in the ear, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to put on the lips of Sherlock Holmes.

Finally the word came.  The time was now. That his order arrived in a stunningly plain envelope should have told him something.  Before he opened it Gabriel wondered where he would be going.

For a moment he allowed himself to imagine standing in the courtyard of the temple and hearing his voice ring out: “For unto you is born this day a saviour...”

Or, maybe he would be sent to Rome, the centre of the empire (Surely, he had enough frequent flyer miles for that!)  He would point his finger right in the Emperor’s face and announce: “I present to you God’s only begotten Son.”

When he opened he envelope his mouth fell open.  The message is that he was to go to one Miriam of Nazareth. Who was Miriam?  Where was Nazareth? 

He turned the message over looking for other names, perhaps a list, a backup plan just in case this Miriam told him to take a hike.  There were no other names. The Almighty was banking everything on this one person that neither Gabriel, nor anybody else for that matter, had ever heard of.

When he got out his charts and started looking, he had to look hard because Nazareth was but a dot on the map.  “Imagine,” he said to himself, “beginning the story of salvation in a backwater place like that.”  

Gabriel was even more stunned when he finally found Miriam, known to her friends by the diminutive, Mary.

The poet, Frederick Buechner, helps us along.

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.

He told her what the child was to be named, who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her.  You mustn’t be afraid, Mary, [the angel said.] As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear and holding his breath that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.1

 The problem is that she didn’t answer – at least not right away – for she has a question and a statement of her own to make.  Both, I am sure, struck terror in the heart of this angelic visitor because they were ones he had been fearing since the beginning of this mission.

So, he held his breath as he heard her say, “How can this be?” said Mary.  “I am still a virgin.”  This was exactly what Gabriel did not want to hear – a statement of the obvious and a statement that demanded clarification.

Mary may have been a child in the angel's eyes and ours but she is no fool. She knows enough to realize that so far something very important has been left out of the angel’s story.  If she is going to have a baby she is going to need to have something she has not yet had.

Gabriel intentionally glossed over this, hoping that she would not notice, but Mary informs him, in a simple question, that something is missing from the angelic equation. 

“How can this be?” Mary may have asked again.

\Nobody could ever accuse Mary of not being direct. She had just asked the question the angel had been dreading because he had no explanation either.  

The angel was holding his breath.

Mary was thinking.

Gabriel checked his notes again.  There were no other names on the list.  The angel was trembling, and sweating, and still holding his breath because her response was no foregone conclusion.

Mary could have said no.  She could have said: “Listen my fine winged friend. I have got Joseph, whom I love, and my whole life ahead of me.  And you’ve got the wrong person. I don’t have time for this!  I don’t need this! So don’t let the door hit you in the wings on the way out.”

For what seemed like an eternity the two of them stood their looking at each other. One waiting for an answer, holding his breath because he had nothing more to offer to the conversation.

Then, in novelist Reynolds Price’s words:

...she looked well past him – the rim of the skyline back of his shoulder – and there was an odd cloud forming itself in the shape of a dark bird rushing toward her. She looked met the angel’s eyes again and said: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.”

That’s all Gabriel needed to hear.  He rushed from the house and when he hit the fresh air outside he did something that no angel has done before or since.  He fainted, face first, in the mud.

When he came to in the arms of his fellow angels, he couldn’t remember anything but holding his breath.

“What did she say?” he asked and closed his eyes anticipating the worse.

“She said, ‘Yes!’” his colleagues replied with immeasurable joy.

That simple “yes” meant more than Gabriel’s mission would be counted as success. That “yes” made way for Jesus’ birth and for him to become one of us. To be born of a human mother and to know in a very real way, what it is like to be human. Jesus would know what it like to have a family, to make friends and then loose them, to have a life and then loose it.

Mary’s “yes” made Christ’s coming possible.  If she had said “no” who knows what we might be celebrating.  Maybe some Druidic festival about the lengthening of days, but we’re not.

We’re celebrating Christ’s coming into this life to save you and to save me.

So take a moment this day to thank God, thank Mary, and, oh yes, thank Gabriel.

He’s the angel over there, whose colour, only just now, is beginning to return to his face.

________________

1.  Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (San Francisco,CA: Harper San Francisco, 1993).