By Connie Frierson
After slugging through some tough questions for God, I nabbed the one and only question lite. “Do Angels Really Exist?” I figured for Palm Sunday after weeks of dealing with Terrorism, Tragedy, Doubts and Struggles, it would be a good thing to turn our attention to something sublime. So the question is do angels exist. Let’s start by turning that question around. Do you believe angels exist?
Let’s look at the general, ordinary population says about angels. Not that you all are representative of all America, think you all are remarkable and not at all ordinary. But if you were the folks who answered the Time Magazine poll, the polling would go something like this. About 69% of you believe angels exist. So all of you on the main sections stand up. This would be the people who believe in angels. This section, over there in the Friendship Room, are the skeptics. Of this 69% about 46% believe in personal guardian angels, Actually a Baylor University pole showed that 55% believe in guardian angels. So people in these two sections remain standing. Of this group, 32% have had some encounter or experience of an angelic presence. Look at all those people. Suppose that they were not all clumped together but spread out among you. That would mean that sitting right next to you or two people down the row is someone who has encountered an angelic presence.
But if your neighbor has met an angel they probably aren’t talking about it. Nancy Gibbs wrote an article in Time Magazine. She writes. “Maybe it is not surprising that people who believe they have had an encounter with angels are among the most reluctant to discuss them. Yet there is an uncanny similarity in the stories and a moving conviction behind them. Very often the recognition comes only in retrospect. A person is in immediate danger -- the car stalled in the deadly snowstorm, the small plane lost in the fog, the swimmer too far from shore. And emerging from the moment's desperation comes some logical form of rescue: a tow-truck driver, a voice from the radio tower, a lifeguard. But when the victim is safe and turns to give thanks, the rescuer is gone. There are no tire tracks in the snow. There is no controller in the tower. And there are no footprints on the beach.”
This experience of the mysterious presence of another, who comfort, guides and brings peace and hope, is so common in human experience that an author, John Geiger has written a book that collects hundred’s of stories of these figures. This is a secular book so he does not call them angels. The book is called, The Third Man Factor. Have any of you heard of the third man factor? If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon it is probably because you do not hang around with mountaineers or extreme climbers. But in that community the sense of another presence hiking with you when you are in danger is so strong and so common that mountaineers have coined this term, the third man factor.
The stories are populated with extraordinary people, rational people, explorers, sailors, mountain climbers, aviators, deep-sea divers and scientists. Many of the people who have had these experiences have mountains or rare species of plants and animals named after them. One of the most famous and typical of the stories is of Sir Ernst Shackleton. In 1914 Shackleton led an expedition to explore the Antarctic. The ship became ice bound and was crushed. The crew made it off the boat and became stranded on Elephant Island. In desperation Shackleton, and five others, took off to make a 680-mile voyage to South Georgia to seek rescue. By a complete miracle they made the voyage but then realized they were on the wrong side of the island and needed to cover a mountain range and glacier to reach the South Georgia whaling station. Shackleton, and two others, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, walked and climbed and slid over the mountain range. As they walked more dead than alive, each of these three men experienced a fourth man in their company. This presence encouraged them, steadied them, and led them. Each of the three had independently experienced this presence. The stories of those who sense the miraculous and mysterious presence of another are so similar. Often they involve a physical struggle that is life threatening, profound loneliness, loss and being pushed to the limit. Scientist struggle to explain this sense of presence. Some have surmised that these stories are some kind of hallucination brought about by some breakdown of brain function. But hallucinations are maladaptive. These visions lead not to mistakes but to amazing triumphs and endurance. Some have thought that they involve lost of oxygen or high altitudes and result from some organic chemical changes. But these stories transcend altitude. Some occur at sea level or in caves. Many sense this presence without any altitude or oxygen challenge. Shackleton put it this way, in these moments they have, “pierced the veneer of outside things.”
These experiences aren’t limited to mountaintops. Nancy Gibbs article in Time Magazine recounts the experience of Melissa Deal a filmmaker in Atlanta. “Melissa will never forget the day her husband Chris Deal died: it was exactly one year after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not save him, nights when she could not sleep. But she was sleeping soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room and past the nurse's station with its 360 degrees view of the ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3 a.m. by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being able to find Chris. Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions. "Where have you been? Are you okay?" Chris just smiled. "It's fine," he told her, "I'm all right." His companion remained quiet, his eyes on the floor as though not wanting to be noticed. He was tall, dressed rather like Chris usually did, in a flannel shirt, new Levis and lace-up work boots that appeared as if they, too, had just been taken off the shelf. "There was no real age to him," Melissa says. "No wrinkles. Just this perfectly smooth and pale, white, white skin and ice blue eyes. I mean I've never seen that color blue on any human before. They were more the blue like some of those Husky dogs have. I'll never forget the eyes."
Chris seemed to want to be left alone, and so she reluctantly agreed to leave. When he came back to his room, she says, "He was lit up, just vibrant. Smiling. I could see his big dimples. I hadn't seen them in so long. He didn't have the air of a terminally ill and very weak man anymore."
"Who was that guy?" she asked.
"You're not going to believe me."
"Yes, I will."
"He was an angel. My guardian angel."
Melissa did believe him. "All I had to do was to look at him to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had happened."
She searched the hospital to find the man. There was no one around, and the security guards hadn't seen anyone come or go. "After the visit, Chris told me his prayers had been answered. I worried for a while that he thought the angel had cured his cancer. I realize now it wasn't the cure, it was the blessing he brought with him. It was the peace of mind." Chris died two days later.
In the 11 years since Chris's death, Melissa says not a day has gone by when she has not thought about the angel and what he did for her husband. "Chris' life could not be saved, but the fear and pain were taken from him,"
If there is such a thing as a universal idea, common across cultures and through the centuries, the belief in angels comes close to it. Jews, Christians and Muslims have postulated endlessly about angels' nature and roles, but all three religions affirm their existence. There are angels in Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism; winged figures appear in ancient Sumerian carvings, Egyptian tombs and Assyrian reliefs.
Visible or invisible, in disguise or in full glory, angels appear in more than half the books of the Bible: it was an angel who told Abraham to spare his son from sacrifice, who saved Daniel from the lion's den, who rolled the stone away from Christ's tomb. It was a host of angels who appeared to the shepherds and the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary. It was an angel who led Peter out of jail, encouraged Paul when he was about to be shipwrecked. It was angels who fed and nurtured Elijah and Jesus in the wilderness. Jacob wrestles with an angel at Bethel and has a dream of a ladder going up and down from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending. The bible is full of angelic presence.
Perhaps the more important question is not “Do angels exist?” but rather “What difference does it make that angels exist?” Jacob’s ladder is a vision of the spiritual realm. Angel’s presence on the earth and in heaven tells us that while we live in a material world, our world is primarily and completely a spiritual world. God is reaching out in infinite ways to humanity. It is telling that the most angel rich area of the bible is Christmas and Easter. Angels proclaim and witness to the incarnation and the resurrection. There when God is coming into the world in the flesh, angels are there in hosts. When Christ vanquishes death and brings the Kingdom of heaven closer to earth, angels are there to witness to the resurrection. This shouldn’t surprise us. The very language of the bible points to the core aspect of angels. In Hebrew the word for angel is malak. In Greek the word for angel is anggelos. Both mean messenger. Angels worship God. Angels do the will of God. Angels protect and comfort and assist, because that is the will of our God. Angels are evidence of God’s love for us.
It is time to share one of my angel stories, a story without fire works or obvious supernatural elements but an angel story nonetheless. I need to show you my favorite of all the gifts I received for my graduation from seminary. This is an angel I received from Rose, my kids bus driver. You have to understand Rose to get the hilarity of this gift. This sweet little angel is from the toughest bus driver ever to get behind the wheel in the tri-state area. Rose is a law and order bus driver, hard as nails. Kids don’t get away with spit with Rose at the wheel. Rose is a character. She drives a black and white spotted Holstein painted bus in demolition school bus races. I think Rose got this angel at a truck stop on the way home from the school bus racing circuit. I was so touched that she wanted to give me something. But the shear kitsch of this gift just triggered all my anti-angel bias. This curvy angelic chick is like a Disney princess with fiber optic wings. She isn’t powerful like Michael, or frightening like Gabriel or mysterious like the visitors to Abraham or the presence of the fourth man in the fire furnace. But this is what this angel did for us. My graduation was a bittersweet time. I was celebrating an accomplishment but it was so sad not to have my dad, or my mom, or my husband there to share it with me. My whole extended family was there to help with the party the whole weekend but we all felt the loss. It brought our mourning out afresh. Yet throughout the weekend, we would set this little angel glowing and we would break out into laughter, laughter all out of proportion to the joke. I think we ran the batteries out. So who was the angel here, a little plastic and feather nick knack, or Rose, who kept my kids safe and was so kind, or this congregation that celebrated with me or is this all evidence of a God who loves me, knows me inside and out and who gave me the gift of laughter in the midst of sadness.
We are not alone. It matters that our world is filled with a community of beings who love us, encourage us and guide us. It matters that we have people like Rose, people like this congregation. It matters that Christ’s love extends to us through his spirit and through angels. We live in a rich spiritual world of God’s creation.
Amen.
