For Nothing Will Be Impossible with God (Isaiah 6:1-7, Luke 1:26-37)

For Nothing Will Be Impossible with God

December 14, 2025

Isaiah 6:1-7, Luke 1:26-37

By: Susannah Conner

The Advent preaching team decided to split up the text by following the main characters of the Christmas story. April knew she wanted to preach Zechariah and Elizabeth, John gravitated toward Joseph, next week Elle will preach Mary. That left the angel Gabriel which I was excited about in John’s living room where we were hammering this all out, and by the time I’d gotten into my car to go home I was completely panicked. I don’t know what an angel is.

I mean, we can all conjure the sort of popular fairy tale entity of the same name. We’ve seen Touched by an Angel. It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels in the Outfield. Maybe you’ve read Dante and Milton. Maybe you enjoyed Dante and Milton. I did not. We’ve seen the defining works by Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo. Y’all probably hung some angels on your Christmas trees. But the images in my mind, when I consider the general shape, size, and function of an angel are distinctly extrabiblical. This composite, gauzy superhero isn’t described as such in the Bible.

And I realized, before I could even get to Gabriel and the Christmas story; before I could properly consider the existence of angels; the thing I needed to know, was: What sort of creatures exist? The Bible throws us some real curve balls on this count. In Genesis 6 we find the B’nai Elohim, the sons of God, and the Nephilim, giant offspring of the sons of God and Ahuman women. We don’t hear a lot more about that. What happened to them? Beelzebul, Baal, Satan, Morningstar, demons, malachim, cherubs guarding the entrance to Eden. The seraphs of Isaiah. Winged, fiery serpents in Numbers and Deuteronomy. Jonah’s giant fish and the leviathan of Psalm 74 – the Behemoth and Leviathan in Job! Have you read Job 41 recently? It’s a dragon. It’s describing a dragon.

I’ve talked to some of you about this over the past several weeks and I know for a fact that we’ve got a whole spectrum of belief here, when it comes to the seen and the unseen, so I need us all to agree on a couple things before we can responsibly talk about Gabriel. The first is that the Bible mentions more creatures than you or I have ever encountered on this earth. We just don’t know: We don’t know what some of these passages are referring to; we don’t know what has changed over a few millennia. We don’t know when our word for something is aligning with an English translation of a Greek translation of an ancient Hebrew word. But right out of the gate, we have to be willing to leave the door cracked on what we believe does and does not exist in the vast and unknowable cosmos. That’s number one. We have to agree that there might be creatures out there that we don’t know about. 

The second thing we have to deal with is this whole problem with the cultural language around angels. And – as is often the case – translation has really muddied the waters. I mention cherubim and seraphim. It seems like these creatures are where we get the winged guardian image that is so often associated with angels. We heard the passage from Isaiah 6 this morning, the seraphs with six wings attending the Lord on his throne. Celestial beings, employees of God, not human beings, and I don’t see any evidence in the text that our ancient storytellers think these are the same things: cherubim, seraphim, malachim. In the Hebrew bible this is the word translated as “angels”, malak – singular, and it means messenger. This word is used all over the Bible to describe people and entities of all kinds delivering messages. An early, notable story about malachim, translated in your Bible and mine as “angels” is the story of the pronouncement to Abraham that Sarah will have a child in her old age (this should feel very familiar to us where we’re hanging out in the Christmas story). Genesis 18, three men visit Abraham, he provides them hospitality, they give him this message: Sarah will have a son. By the time we get to 19 verse 1, these same guys, two of three, are being called malachim. And when Lot shows them hospitality in the city of Sodom, they have inside information that the city is about to be destroyed. Malachim. Messengers you want to listen to. Who apparently look and walk and act like men who can drink Abraham’s water and eat cakes and calf under a tree.

Do I think these messengers are the same sort of creature as the angel (that’s angelos - messenger in Greek) in Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth? In Luke chapter two, an angel comes to the shepherds by night to tell them about the birth of Christ. “And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of heavenly host,” stratias, literally “an army.” Named, collectively, in verse 15 as angels. Here’s what I want us to agree to let go of: I don’t think angel is a specific term for a biologically specific creature. I think if you read up on angeloi and malachim, across the old and new testaments, you’ll find – in the places where it’s translated as “angel” – these are words used for a third party who’s delivering big news on behalf of God.

You know Moses and the burning bush? Angel. Malak. In the book of Acts Peter is freed from prison by an angel, an angelos. Burning bush, very different than a guy who can pick a lock. Both messengers from God.

And I think the liberties we take with the idea of angels, as if they were a species, can result in everything from bad theology that hurts other people to thoughtless angelology (real word I just learned) that puts us into a harmless little self-delusion.

The bad theology one, we’ve all heard. When, upon the death of a young person, someone tells the grieving parents that God needed another angel in heaven. That’s obviously not biblical and it’s obviously not helpful. We all try to make meaning when faced with inexplicable loss. But the idea of angels is such a cipher; such a vaguely religious nothing that can stand in for anything, that it can get deployed in harmful ways.

Harmless delusion, on the other hand – that’s me. I love asking God for angels. And I think this is how most people interact with the idea of angels within Christendom. Many of you know my kids, Mike and I have a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old. It was about the time that Adrienne turned three this October that both kids started sleeping through the night more reliably. Up until that point, we’d been sleep deprived for 4 and a half years. We moved here when Loren was three months old, it’s possible, until this fall, that I have never had an interaction with any of you when I didn’t feel like I had a concussion. And when they were both babies and we’d have a jag of really bad sleep or they both had colds, I would lay in bed, desperate for rest, and pray “God, can you please give them each angel? Just two of your smallest angels that you’re not using. To watch over them and help them sleep.” Honestly, if I hadn’t been preaching this story I don’t think I would ever have given this any thought at all. It was just something my addled mind grasped for. Like rubbing a lucky penny. I don’t think I believed it was real, so much as it felt like a way to ask God to put flesh on the bones of my intentions. This is what I want. It is something I cannot do. Give me an angel.

And that’s really just not what angels are. Biblically, cherubim guarded Eden. And the Ark of the Covenant. They didn’t guard people. Seraphim are only explicitly named in our Bible in the Isaiah passage from this morning and the job they’re doing is putting a hot coal in a guy’s mouth. And malachim, angeloi, angels, messengers; It’s a one-way thing. God has something to say, God wants to make sure the hearer hears it. Maybe there is a small, associated task. And, the thing is, this biblical reality is plenty fantastical without embellishment. People will continue to make speculative art about angels that will be beautiful and symbolic and feathered and absolutely mythical. I don’t have any problem with that. But in my personal faith, I don’t want to get the myth confused with the real phenomenon that is described so often, so vibrantly, with so much diversity, from Genesis to Revelation. Messengers. Operating on God’s orders. Circumventing human error. Catalyzing something big.

What we have here, in these scenes from the first chapter of Luke – when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and when the angel we presume is Gabriel comes to Zechariah – what we have here is God putting flesh on the bones of God’s intentions. Because, human beings, we don’t always know when God is whispering to us in the night, it might take some rounds of misunderstanding, consultation with those wiser than us, time and prayer and discernment. It might take mistakes and doubt and conflict. God speaks to us that way, patiently, protractedly, but ours is a God that drops into time with us, on occasion, and works urgently to bring something specific about in a time and a place. “In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. Her name was Mary.” Angels get very specific instructions. They show up right on time and they will only give their message to the intended recipient. They’re like process servers. And, let me tell you, most people in the Bible who get a visit from an angel are pretty freaked out. Mary is greatly troubled. Luke 1:12 “When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him.” Right time, right place, and really disorienting.

One of the things that’s misleading about the mythical cartoon angel is that it is recognizable. In the Bible, no one seems to immediately recognize a messenger from God when they see it. And when they do know what they’re dealing with, the descriptions range wildly. I mentioned Peter getting busted out of jail, this is in the book of Acts, chapter 12:6-9, “The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. ‘Quick, get up!’ he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists. Then the angel said to him, ‘Put on your clothes and sandals.’ And Peter did so. ‘Wrap your cloak around you and follow me,’ the angel told him. Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.” Peter walked on water. There are few people in the Bible who are more down with the magical, metaphysical realities of the kingdom of God. Peter’s the guy who walked on water. And Simon Peter was Jewish. He would have received a deep religious education and been familiar with the cherubim and the seraphim and the malachim of it all. And he doesn’t recognize an angel from God even when he’s being broken out of prison under the noses of at least four guards. Must be a dream.

Again, I don’t think the word angel is referring to one thing that looks one way. What makes an angel an angel is what they’re doing. “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people”, at this particular time. This is what’s happening. This is what it means. Gabriel and the angels are busy in this story. They have to tell everyone what’s going on. Zechariah gets met in the temple, Mary at home, Joseph is visited in a dream, our angel army comes to the shepherds after Jesus’ birth. If we remove the angels from this story, we’ve got a post-menopausal woman who gets pregnant, a terrified teenage girl ostracized by her community, and a world that’s received no clue that anything of consequence has happened at all. None of this will work unless God sends some very specific, very embodied messages to the people from whom God is asking unbelievable cooperation. This seems fair, if improbable.

But, for me, the great freedom of being a Christian is that my life is oriented around the God who deals in improbabilities. A God who chooses unlikely people for impossible tasks and brings them along with all sorts of rule breaking and mischief. Why not angels? We’re already celebrating the virgin birth of the God of the universe, who chose to come into time and space, not rich and ruling, but poor, hunted, and without a home. Why would we believe that and stop at angels? When you recognize how often, throughout the Bible, that God just out-plots God’s people and needs to send a clarifying word to keep everything on track, I start to think that messengers of God might be holding this whole mess together. I’ve told you a few angel stories this morning, but we haven’t made a dent in the number of times this happens in the Bible. Hagar, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, Jacob, Gideon, the women who find Jesus’ tomb empty, Philip, Cornelius; they all lived remarkable lives of faith and they all had to receive a messenger, at one point or another, who kept it all moving. Kept the movements in time with the intentions of God.  

And it’s all the same motion. Angels, messengers, Christ; it’s the same thing; it’s the same reaching out. It’s the same God who can’t stand to be apart from you, collapsing the distance in every imaginable way. It’s the same God who captures our imaginations with the improbable and the impossible, because that is the way to our hearts. Miracles, meaning, good news. I don’t know what an angel is. But I know that nothing is impossible with God, so sayeth Gabriel. And that these stories remind us that there will be help for the faithful – inexplicable help, weird help. There will be company for those who step out in faith. Do not be afraid. When you find yourself called to speak truth, lead people, risk comfort, step into the fire, reach out toward God; God has some unbelievable ways of reaching back.

Amen.