Angels in the Ordinary

Do you think you’ve ever entertained an angel? I’m not sure that I’ve had one round to dinner, but I have had interactions with other people that make me think God put them in my path.

The one example that I still think about now and then is when a girl borrowed my phone at a train station. It was while I was at seminary, and on this particular evening I was quite grumpy. I don’t even remember now why I was in a bad mood, but I was. At the time Lewis was living in Ipswich, while I was still studying in Oxford, so we only saw each other at weekends. So I’m waiting for his train to arrive, and this girl a little younger than me, probably a university student, approaches and asks to borrow my phone. She needs to contact the person coming to collect her, and for whatever reason doesn’t have access to her own cell.

Now normally, my reaction to such a request from a stranger would be suspicion. The polite and awkward, ‘sorry, no’, while you edge away wondering if the person is plotting thievery. But something made me say yes, and as I handed it over the girl started chatting to me, asking me all about my life. And as I answered, explaining what I did, what I was training for, that I was waiting for my husband, she responded with amazement. The exact words escape me, but the overall impression from her was ‘wow, your life sounds so interesting and fulfilling and you are so lucky!’. It felt like an angel had been sent from God to scold me, to snap me out of this ridiculous bad mood, and to remind me about all the blessings that I was busy taking entirely for granted. It was an invitation to reorient myself that I needed more than I realised. After a few minutes and a successful couple of calls, the girl was collected from the station, returning my phone without running away with it, and I was left, humbled, and reminded that God sends angels to walk among us. Or rather, that sometimes we are called to be angels to one another.

Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews is a powerful one this morning. It asks a lot of us, but it all stems from this one recurring idea God teaches us again and again - that every human is as valuable as another, which is to say, beyond measure. Or as the old saying goes, which my mum liked to say a lot, ‘treat others as you would have them treat you’. Do unto others what you would have them do to you. It can seem very cliche, but it captures a whole host of moral and social ideals. And, who would have guessed it, a whole bunch of God’s commandments too.

Do not lie. Why? Because you wouldn’t like to be lied to. Do not steal. Why? Because you wouldn’t like to be stolen from. Do not commit murder. Why? Hopefully that one is obvious! But then there are also dozens if not hundreds more rules and commandments throughout the bible that all stem from this idea: looking after the needy and less fortunate, taking care of extended family, how to treat strangers, the importance of hospitality, why it matters how we behave.

There’s a reason that Jesus affirms that the most important commandment, after loving God, is to love your neighbor as yourself, and that’s because it has such a wide ranging knock on effect. It carries all these other things along with it as a natural consequence.

There are some significant difficulties though. Firstly, we are naturally selfish creatures whose instinct is to put ourselves first, rather than on equal footing with anyone else. Secondly, some of these other people are just awful! Surely, God didn’t mean for us to love THAT person as much as ourselves, with their political views and way of life and the way they speak and behave… But unfortunately it isn’t the 10 suggestions, but the 10 commandments, and God really did mean it, quite seriously. So the letter to the Hebrews instructs us, do not neglect to show hospitality and to do good.

Now if I asked you to describe an angel, or to describe how you think meeting an angel might feel, I wonder what kind of thing you’d say. I imagine that you are visualising a positive encounter. We think of angels as bringers of joy and hope and wonder. And they are. But they are more than that. Angels are God’s messengers, no matter what the message might be. Sometimes, like the girl at the train station, their message might be more of a wake up call, more of a prod in the right direction, more of a serious reminder that our character and actions really matter.

So perhaps when we feel challenged by the command to love, we need to pay attention to what lesson God is teaching, or what invitation to grow we are being given. An interaction with a person we find difficult could still be an interaction with an angel, if we view it from the right perspective.

We call the kind of God-love that we strive towards ‘sacrificial’ love because it is rarely easy. To love how God wants us to is hard. To aspire to be like Jesus is hard. To treat others how you want to be treated is hard. And goodness knows that we live in a world where we are instead encouraged to think of our neighbours as ‘others’, as unknown scary creatures who are different in so many ways. Our neighbour is painted as unsympathetic, an outsider, someone so far from ourselves that we begin to believe it exempts them from being included in God’s command. Instead of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, our society asks them how they got shoes in the first place. This is the world we navigate through as God sends us angels and commands us to love others as ourselves.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus points us to humility in social situations, with the wider implication of humility in all aspects of life, to serve and give and show hospitality without any expectation of being repaid. And the reason we can do this is because we are oriented towards something better. Instead of fear or keeping count of favours, we do what is hard because we believe in our God, because we are people of hope, because we are people who bend towards eternity rather than the short term worries of this life. Not only that, but we are encouraged to do what is hard with an attitude of joy and thanksgiving.

The letter to the Hebrews urges us to ‘continually offer a sacrifice of praise’. That language comes up in our Eucharistic prayer as well, offering our hearts of praise week after week, giving glory to God who gives us life itself. For if we are confident that the Lord is our helper, we have nothing to be afraid of.

And we are never asked to do this alone. God walks with us every step of the way, and sometimes even sends us angels when we aren’t expecting it, in all sorts of people, in all sorts of situations, but always with encouragement to reorient ourselves towards our identity of people full of hope, doing our best every day to live into God’s sacrificial, amazing love.

Amen.

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14