Welcoming Angels

Sermon 28 June, The Fourth Sunday After Trinity

Readings: Jeremiah 28.5-9; Romans 6.12-23; Matthew 10.40-end.

Theme: Welcoming Angels.

In many different religious traditions angels play an important role. In the Christian tradition angels are understood to be messengers who mediate between the heavenly and earthly dimensions of reality. They communicate a message of God’s infinite goodness and mercy to those who are in particular situations of need or of being called to a particular service.

This divine message reminds us that during our earthly pilgrimage we are journeying towards a heavenly reality that is only faintly present to us at the moment but will be fully revealed later on, on our journey. 

The angel Gabriel, at the annunciation, is perhaps the most well-known example and the invitation to Mary through this message is to bear the Christ child. Mary welcomes the message of this angel into her heart, and it will be through this act of obedience that the Lord will come to dwell among us. 

One of the things we are thankful for in our chaplaincy is the spirit of welcome that exists in our church. Many people who come and go among us tell me how grateful they are to find a home away from home. That is down to you and your friendliness, and it is something that we should recognize as a gift of God. This spirit of welcome is expressed through the greetings with the friendly smile on entering the church, by the refreshments served after the service, and in the expression of delight shown when someone arrives back in the chaplaincy after a period of being away.

The welcome of the stranger is emphasized in our Gospel for today. The way welcome is spoken of in that context is in terms of welcoming the Lord in our midst. 

There is something divine about welcome that is picked up by Paul in the second reading in terms of sin and grace. Sin leads us to close ourselves off from others, to be hard of heart, whereas grace opens us to receive the other in gratitude and tenderness of heart.

The grace of hospitality, of welcome, is one which we receive from the God who has made a temple for us to inhabit in the body of his son. In Jesus, we are welcomed into the new temple of his body which is the church: the body of Christ here on earth as in heaven.

In the Old Testament, this temple of the Lord was the Great Temple in Jerusalem, the successor of the Ark of the Covenant which represented the place where God dwelled on earth among God’s people. It was destroyed when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, and the Israelites were deported to Babylon. This is the exilic context of our first reading from Jeremiah, as the prophet points towards to the return of the sacred vessels from the sacked temple to the people of God.

So, to be church is to be a divine place of welcome. Church is a space of encounter with others so that all may become friends. We welcome others because the grace of God has been poured into our hearts which opens us to receive the Lord himself. As Hebrews 13.2, so beautifully reminds us, in welcoming the stranger some have unknowingly welcomed angels! And we do well to remind ourselves that the world is a larger place than some reductionistic accounts of reality portray. Though we may have been influenced by these frameworks of reality, we do well to heed the message of the Bible about angels. When we do this we allow the spiritual dimension of everyday life to be present. No longer is life lived in four dimensions alone, but we enable the fifth dimension of the spiritual realm to be present in a faint, but nevertheless perceptible manner.

When channels of communication are open to this fifth dimension then we are no longer closed to the interpenetration of heaven and earth which is the new reality of all those who follow the Christ; the one in whom heaven and earth are now eternally bound. When we do this, we begin to see the everyday presence of the risen Christ inhabiting our world through the welcome of many angels who come across our paths. Most of these will be just ordinary people who step out of their way to be of service. They offer us a word of welcome, of assistance and of meeting a concrete need we may have at that particular moment. But we should also be open to those encounters which transcend our four-dimensional experience and open us to the inhabiting of space and time by this fifth dimension of the spiritual realm.

This spiritual realm is one which is not foreign to daily life but actually immanent in it. It is just that we can lose our antennae for this dimension because we have become spiritually myopic. We become short sighted and fail to recognize the larger horizon with which daily life is framed. When we realize this and take the necessary steps to address it, then we may be surprised that we can find ourselves welcoming angels in all sorts of places in our lives that previously seemed closed to this spiritual realm.