The message of the angels

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

"Greetings! Favored one! The Lord is with you!" If not for the Scripture's familiarity with angel appearances, one might expect to also hear "take me to your leader!"
Angels are scary! The next thing this angel says to Mary is "do not be afraid," and for good reason, too. Usually this word of peace is the first thing spoken, but I wonder if the angel wasn't a bit star-struck herself at being able to meet the one God had chosen to carry God's own Self into a fully flesh-and-blood existence. Perhaps a twist on those first words could be something along the lines of "oh, wow, hello you wonderful woman! God is right here inside you, isn't it exciting!" Then Mary gets a bit confused, a little self-conscious, perhaps, and the angel has to return to the usual script: "Do not be afraid!" I mean, seriously, what else can be said?
It's a bit wonderful, though, to consider all the times angels tell people not to be afraid, we come to assume that angels are terrifying. However, it could also be their reputations that stir up so much emotion. Who has ever had their life *not* turned upside down after an encounter with an angel? The three angels that visited Abraham and Sarah brought news both that Sarah was to be a post-menopausal mother and that the neighboring Sodom and Gomorrah were to be destroyed (Genesis 18). The angel that appeared to Gideon greeted him incognito at first, addressing him with the same "the Lord is with you" and turning his entire world upside down (Judges 6). Jacob wrestled all night with an angel and ended up with a limp and a new name (Genesis 32). Those are just the three that come most quickly to my memory, but angels don't just appear and that's it. They appear and our livelihoods and expectations and entire futures are altered. It's not just "don't be afraid even though I'm full of light and just showed up out of nowhere." It's also "don't be afraid, God is about to do a new thing that you hadn't even thought to expect, and it's going to feel like the end of the world for awhile."
Anyone who has experienced pregnancy, or the loss of a pregnancy, knows this experience of an entire world coming into existence. Anyone who has been drafted into military service knows this experience. Anyone who has experienced sudden homelessness or severe illness knows this feeling. Marriages are a new world. Promotions are a new world. Layoffs. Major storms. Winning the lottery. New relationships. As stable as we would like to have our lives, as under control as we would like to seem, something is always changing. We sometimes try to make sense of it, good or tragic, by saying that God is in control and has a plan and brings about all things for a bigger purpose... but God does not cause tragedy. God does not inflict suffering. God does not kill to punish. We have invented a world of suffering and isolation in many and various ways by our own fears and selfish ambitions, and sin hurts and haunts us all. I'm not talking about who's at fault for our individual pains, I'm talking about the over-reaching brokenness which shows up in lots of '-isms' like racism and classism, but is bigger and deeper even than those. The things which unsettle us so that we turn inward and spend our energy trying to save and protect ourselves and our own at any price, cut off from the rest of creation because we feel attacked and threatened.
So the angel says "do not be afraid." Like a surgeon about to start the anesthesia before an operation. "This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt everyone involved. This is also going to save and heal everyone involved." Peace *making* is hard work. Reconciliation is not a light switch we can turn on or off. History is a repetition of retaliations, wars to pay back other wars, and the cycle is impossible to break.
Impossible for any one of us, that is. "Do not be afraid." "The Lord is with you." Nine months in utero, God has experienced waiting and growing, bleeding and breathing, stretching and cramping, eating and all that comes after eating, teething and scraped knees, making friends and being bullied, learning and teaching, walking and sleeping, weeping and wrestling, dying and rising. All that we have ever or will ever experience, "the Lord is with you." All that we fear and celebrate, "do not be afraid." All that we struggle with and take for granted, God is here with us in the flesh, not only to comfort and to guide, but to heal and to save, to do for us that healing and saving work we do not have the power, or at times even the desire, to do for ourselves. Every time our lives are up-ended, or our neighbors face instability, every time the Lord is with us. Every time we are reminded to live in freedom, and not in fear. Because for all of the ways the world continues to change, for all of the ways we have to adapt and wish we could just rest instead, for every moment of newness which takes us off-guard and rocks our world, God is with us, and we are not only told not to be afraid, but we don't have to be afraid. We don't have to fear anything any more, not even death. Because God has come. God has come and lived among us, and died among us, and returned to life among us, for us, that we might never fear death again.