Hark!

A reflection on listening for angels and other things we do not understand

Hi Everyone,

I hope this finds you well and looking forward to the new year. As you can tell, I’m not writing on Substack much these days, but I do hope to occasionally send things out that I think might be helpful, like the reflection below, adapted from a sermon I gave recently.

It draws from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 2:13-23) just after Jesus was born. In it, Joseph receives three dreams from an “angel of the Lord” that guide the family to safety. It prompted questions for me about whether I really believe there are guides from the other side (angels) trying to help me. And if there are, am I listening? The sermon also reflects a bit on the challenge of having ‘faith’ in a world that is so often hard and unfair. You can find the scripture text at the end of the article and there’s an audio version if you’d rather listen to it.

Wishing you peace and joy in 2026!

Ian

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(Audio Version)

I want to start with a Christmas poem that has become something of a favorite of mine. It’s called: For Maia and it’s by someone named Gary Johnson.

For Maia

by Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some
troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the
sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels hovering overhead?
Hark.

I love the way the poem weaves in favorite Christmas carols. And I love the image it paints of a little girl (Maia, I’m guessing) holding hands with the poet (her grandfather, I’m guessing) as the two of them walk the neighborhood; Maia singing with the untarnished hope of a child for the faithful to come, joyful and triumphant. While grandpa, looking through his grown-up eyes, sees neighbors fighting the everyday battles of overflowing garbage, snow-covered sidewalks, and the flu…and thinks…not much triumph going on here.

She looks with the fresh eyes of innocence, and he looks with the realistic eyes of experience. He knows, like we do, how unfair this world can be. He’s seen, as we have, how the greedy and the power-hungry get their way. How the poor and the weak fight for scraps…How life, for any of us, comes with struggle and sorrow.

And maybe he wonders, like we have, what kind of God would allow such a world. And why things have to be so hard. And as sweet as he finds his granddaughter’s singing, I get the sense he’s questioning what’s so great about being among the faithful.

He seems to be thinking maybe it really is a dog-eat-dog world. Maybe we really are on our own. It certainly seems sometimes, as if God has abandoned us; gone absent when we are most in need.

And then that wonderful line:

“And yet, there is much we do not understand.”

In our scripture today, it’s days after that first Christmas and Emmanuel is now in the world, but so far not much has changed. King Herod, pushed to madness by the threat of this new light, determines to snuff out all the young lights across Bethlehem. It must have been awful.

Matthew quotes Jeremiah (31:15):

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

No one looking out over Bethlehem during this, could be blamed for losing their faith. The forces of hatred seemed to be having their way. God seemed nowhere to be found.

But there is much we do not understand.

For just before Herod went on his rampage, something unlikely happened. A young mother and father quietly slipped out of Bethlehem with their newborn son. The father had been warned in a dream, by an angel of the Lord, to take the family to Egypt. They probably went by night, quietly, unnoticed. And thus it happened, that the light of the world was saved.

Now for you, this evidence of holy intervention might not be enough. You might reasonably argue that if God’s angel could whisper in the ear of Joseph, why didn’t he whisper in the ears of those other parents too?

And on some days, it’s not enough for me either. I don’t know why things have to be the way they are. I don’t know why God seems to traffic in whispers and dreams instead of billboards and bullhorns.

All I do know, is that when God came to Joseph, Joseph did something that changed the course of history: he listened. He took the dream seriously. He was open to the possibility that sometimes dreams are not just dreams. Even if it didn’t make sense to him, he was humble enough to know there was much he did not understand.

And I wonder how much of the suffering our world has endured might have turned out differently if more of us, were more like Joseph. Maybe, as insignificant as it seems, our willingness to listen for angelic whispers plays a larger role than we think.

So let’s talk about listening. Not just listening in the regular sense, like listening to your friend, or to a podcast, or pretending to listen to a sermon, like you’re doing now. I mean that particular kind of listening that Joseph seemed so good at, the kind that pays attention, not to the noise out there, but to the quiet wisdom in here.

Think about how much time you spend listening to the world around you – to the newscasters, the nay-sayers, the pundits, the professionals. And how little time you spend in quiet, in silence, in simple receptivity, saying: Speak Lord, your servant is listening.

And imagine for a moment how different our world might be, if we all started the day with a little bit of Holy Listening. Or what if we all developed a habit of periodic pauses through the day, just to hear what God might want to whisper in our ear. Or what if, and I know I’m dreaming big here, humanity got to the point that in any given situation we were more interested in what God wanted than what we wanted.

I know…it’s not going to happen. At least not any time soon. Which probably means we’re going to continue to suffer unnecessarily, and the Herods of the world are going to continue to have their way.

But if our scripture today has a message for us, maybe it’s that all it takes is one average Joe (or Jolene) willing to listen for God, to keep the light of the world alive.

You know, the old English word, “Hark,” simply means: to listen. It was popular in Shakespeare’s day, but has largely fallen out of use, except of course when we sing, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”

The word “hark” is related, though, to a phrase we do still occasionally hear: “harken back.” And there’s an interesting story about how the two are connected.

In the 1800’s, the word ‘hark,’ was already barely used, but was revived by hunters, who, when their dogs had lost the trail, would yell: ‘Hark!’ It was a signal to the hounds to return. And they would then ‘harken back” to where they last picked up the scent.

I tell you this because it seems to me that as grown-ups, we can become so jaded by the ugliness of the world, or the struggles in our own lives, that we “lose the scent” of the Holy. And what we need is to “harken back” to a faith that came more naturally to us as children.

This is, I think, what often happens at Christmastime, when we’re sitting quietly by the Christmas tree, or attending a candlelight Christmas service, and suddenly our hearts are welling up. We may dismiss these moments as simple nostalgia or sentimentality. But I think more is going on.

Like the little girl in the poem, I think, we are feeling again the Mystery of God and the holiness of life. Getting in touch with a part of us that knows that even though terrible things happen in the world, there is still an underlying beauty and sacredness our grown-up minds can’t explain, but our hearts feel.

So, in these tender days after Christmas, before the noisy machines of the world start whirling again, I invite you to find some moments when you can just sit quietly…and harken back. If your heart has, perhaps, been a little too hardened by the world this past year, let it soften again. See if you can feel again the simple faith you once had in the goodness of life. And let yourself entertain the possibility that there could be angels wanting to whisper in your ear.

Who knows, in doing so you might unknowingly contribute to keeping alive the light of the world…or at least your own.

Scripture Text: Matthew 2:13-23

¹³ Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph^[h] got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

¹⁶ When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi,^[i] he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi.^{[j] 17} Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

¹⁹ When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ²⁰ “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” ²¹ Then Joseph^[k] got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. ²³ There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazarene.”^[l]