"What are human that you are mindful of them or mortals that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels 

(Hebrews 2:6-7)

Suppose I take a coin. It can be one way up or the other. It can be a head coin or a tail coin depending on which side is pointing up. But if I flip the coin and send it spinning into the air, which is it, heads or tails? We don’t know. It spins and turns and in flight it’s sometimes heads and sometimes tails and, overall, it’s in a kind of mixed state - a bit heady and a bit taily. It’s only when we stop it and examine it at sometime in its flight that we know which it is at that particular moment in its flight.

Where I’m going with that is to ask why we are lower than the angels. We are children of God, right? We are made in the image of God. At our best we reflect that. At our best we are like the Psalmist in Psalm 26 - or at least as he believes himself to be - people of integrity and decency. At our best we are kind and generous; we care for one another and fulfil Christ’s commandment: love God and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Call that our head side if you like.

But we’re not always at our best. We’re not always head side up. At our worst we can be selfish and greedy; we can succumb to the temptations that come with our biology and break the relations we enter into with the best of intentions causing sadness both to ourselves and those we purport to love.  At our worst we turn away from God and refuse to see those who are different from us, be it by race or creed or colour, as our neighbours. At our absolute worst we can be savage and brutal. Call that our tail side if you like.

We are coins in flight: moment by moment showing one side of our natures and then another and overall a combination of the two and a little lower, therefore, than the angels. If we’re honest, sometimes a lot lower. Augustine of Hippo in his book, “The City Of God” devotes a whole chapter to a story of his childhood. He and another boy climbed a tree in a neighbour’s garden and stole a whole pile of pears. On reflecting on this event many years later Augustine saw that there was no reason for him to do this - he wasn’t hungry; he came from a moderately well-to-do family and could have pears if he wanted them and he and his friend threw most of them away. He’d done it simply out of badness. He’d had a taily moment

We are coins in flight and we all have our taily moments - those moments when, if we catch ourselves in flight and examine ourselves we may think, “Man, what are you doing?” Or looking back on them, like Augustine and the pears, we may still feel a twinge of guilt. But these moments do not define us and we should not allow ourselves to be bound by them. Two things stand out in our text this morning. One is that God cares for us. The other is that we are for a while lower than the angels.

God cares for us. God cares for us so much that he sent his own son to us to die on the Cross for all those taily moments in our life and to be raised to life on the third day to wash all those moments and give us a fresh start whenever we need one; to give us a chance each day to be better than we have been and to embrace the opportunities life presents to us for heady moments.

Yes we are coins in flight but we are not just coins. We are more than simple physical objects bound by the interplay of physical forces to simply alternate between good and bad, between kindness and cruelty, between compassion and selfishness, between love and hate. We have, at least to some degree, the power of choice: the power to decide that if, we have been tails moment then the next we will be heads and mend our ways. The power to decide that if we have been heads one moment then we will continue to be heads the next: that we will continue to grow and to reach upward.

To reach upward to the light and love of God. Yes we may be below the angels right now, but God cares for us. He cares enough for us to come into this world in the life of a human being, in Jesus of Nazareth, to show us what we as human beings can be, ought to be, are meant to be and what one day we will be when we stand before God washed clean through the Cross of Christ bathed in the light of Heaven for eternity.

For now, though, we are coins in flight. But unlike coins we can make choices and guide our course. We can make choices, day by day, to try - at least try - to do what’s right. We can try to be honest in our dealings with each other. We can recognise those who are different from us not as threatening invaders but as neighbours and children of God. When we use those self-checkouts at Tesco and they ask us if we want to donate to charity we can hit “Yes”. When others are persecuted we can stand with them. 

For a little while, here on Earth, we are coins in flight but unlike coins we can choose our course. We can hear the call of the God who cares for us and calls us to him. We can follow in the way of Christ and in doing so make this world a brighter, kinder place.

Father as the forces of the world urge us to be less than we are meant to be guide us to choose you; to choose love; to choose to follow your son

Preached at Baxter Hall Eastriggs and Annan Old parish church

Complete Service