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Advent Devotional for Sunday, December 25
Luke 2:8-20
Among our cherished photographs, there’s a picture of our younger daughter, Claire, when she was maybe three years old. She’s dressed like an angel—white robe, tinseled wings—and she’s one of maybe fifty angels in her age range in that year’s Christmas Eve service in our church in Atlanta. The picture is taken just a few moments before the earliest of three services on that Christmas Eve began, the one designed especially for families. Older children and youth fill out the rest of the cast—Joseph, Mary, the shepherds and magi and barnyard animals—and the liturgy is, well, chaotic. In the background of the picture, other angels are romping with excitement; but Claire is looking side-ways at the camera—her bottom lip protruding and tears welling up in her eyes. “Claire, sweetie, why are you so sad?” one of us says. “It’s Christmas Eve and you’re an angel!”
“I don’t want to be an angel,” she protests. “I’m afraid that I might fly away from my family!”
Angels are everywhere in this text. They overpower shepherds in their field, and one of them says what God’s messengers in the Bible are almost always saying when they draw near: “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news…” Then more angels strike up a Hallelujah before they go back up into heaven. However much they frighten those shepherds that night, they also point them toward a destination. It is Bethlehem—the exact spot where God wants them to be.
I’m not an expert on angels, but I’ve encountered my share of them over the years. They manage to come into my life at just the moment when they’re needed most. Which means that they are never flying away from their family—the family of God—but are rather always flying toward their family. And always—always!—they are bringing God’s everlasting assurance. “Do not be afraid.”
Over and over again, they come to the very spot where God wants them to sing in something new; and, by God’s grace, they and their message make a redemptive, transforming difference—in Bethlehem, or Kabul, or Cairo, or Port-au-Prince, or Lufkin, or Lubbock, or Conway, or Pine Bluff, or Lafayette, or Shreveport, or Ada, or Tulsa, or Santa Fe, or Boulder, or…
Thank you, O God, for the news of this Christmas Day. Help us make time today, at the manger, to listen to the songs of angels, and to not be afraid! Through Jesus Christ, who came to his family—never to leave again. Amen.
Theodore J. Wardlaw
The W. C. Brown Professor of Theology
For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip individuals for the ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources in the service of the church; to promote and engage in critical theological thought and research; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people.
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