Saint Michael and All Angels - Sunday, September 29, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Saint Michael and All Angels - Sunday, September 29, 2019

Genesis 28:10-17
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

I want to being with two quotes. The first, which we heard yesterday at Vespers, comes from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote in the 12th century:

“Today we celebrate the feast of the angels, and you wish me to preach to you a sermon worthy of the occasion. But how can we poor earthworms speak worthily of angelic spirits?”

The second is from the Anglican Church of Canada's equivalent of Lesser Feasts and Fasts:

“Many good and faithful Christians find it difficult to accept the existence of angels; for them, angels have no more reality in fact than unicorns, griffins, or the phoenix. It may be true that the existence of angels is not one of the things in which Christians must believe if they want to be saved. Yet whenever Christians say the Nicene Creed, they confess that God has created “all that is, seen and unseen.” Entertaining the possibility of angels may be one way of acknowledging the sheer diversity of life, visible and invisible, that God has ordained in creation.” (For All the Saints, 2007)

I preached last year on this same feast, and as I approached today's sermon I felt that I had exhausted then all that I had to say about angels and angelic spirits. But that is of course untrue. There is a cornucopia of literature about these mysterious beings, not only in Christianity but in also inter-testamental and later Judaism and in the ancient and contemporary religions of the Near East and beyond. And if you don't believe me, just Google “angels.”

Why should this be? I think because we are all looking for deep connection, and angels are one way of speaking about that great connection or re-connection between earth and heaven, between the natural and the supernatural, between us and God. The image of Jacob's ladder upon which angels ascend and descend could not be clearer. And for Christians, that ladder is nothing other than the Cross of Jesus Christ, as the marvelous hymn we just sang tells us: “Alleluia to Jesus who died on the tree and has raised up a ladder of mercy for me.” A ladder of love that re-connects all the cosmos to its primal and originating Source.

But if that be true, then any acceptable talk of angels must point us always beyond them to God and specifically to God as reveled most fully in Jesus Christ. When speaking of angels, it is very easy to get caught up in esoteric speculation about the existential status of these beings, their hierarchies, their fascinating influences on human beings, both bad (as we hear in the stories of Satan and other spiritual forces of wickedness) and good (which we celebrate today with Michael and all the spiritual forces serving a holy God). In fact, complex speculation on celestial spirits played a large role in the Gnostic religious systems that were the main competitors of an emerging Christianity in the ancient world.

But what if we took to heart the words of St. Gregory of Rome who, writing in the 6th century, tells us that the word “angel” means messenger and that it denotes not a nature but a function. Whatever these spirits may be, it is their message that makes them angels and it is their message that we celebrate today. So I ask you to consider this morning what is their message, both for ancient times and for us today.

Having seen it on the internet, I know for a fact that there are 23 interactions between human beings and angels in the four Gospel narratives, though there are other references to angelic beings throughout the Scriptures of both Testaments. What do the angels tell us in these interactions? What is their message? I think there are five pretty clear ones.

The first is: “Don't be afraid!” This is repeated over and over to put at some ease our hearts when they come close to a message from the living God. And how much we need to hear that message in this age and in every age. Don't be afraid. And why?

Because the angels tell us that they are here to proclaim good news...sometimes disturbing or disruptive or inconvenient—as, for example, “You're going to have a baby”--but in the end good, good for everybody. News that God is with us, dwells with us, comes to be among us: “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people...”

Thirdly, the message of the angels is sometimes, as it was to Joseph: “Get out. Move on. Use your best skills and strength and wits to get to a safer home, a better place in life for you and for those you love.”

Fourthly, there is the message that God comforts us in affliction, as God in God's angels comforted Jesus after his temptations in the wilderness and in that time of great temptation which was the Garden of Gethsemane. Who knows what those comforting angels looked like to Jesus or to us? Invisible maybe. Maybe another person or a part of creation, but comfort nonetheless. We have all known such comfort. And I suspect that, perhaps unbeknownst to you, you have been just such an angel to another or to a suffering, unjust or imperiled society or planet.

And finally, and perhaps most central is the message of the angels that tells: “Christ is risen: he is not here! Go to Galilee, you will meet him there and not in this graveyard.” It is the great message of hope that we all long for, the proclamation that the final word for us all is not Death but Life, abundant Life, Life and Love overflowing.

Yes, these are ancient messages, but they are as new and as necessary and as welcome today as they were in two thousand years ago. Don't focus on the messengers. Focus on the message.

Oh, and there is one other message from the angels, given at the beginning of the Book of Acts. You may remember it. The apostles were watching as Jesus ascended into heaven, gazing upward, and suddenly two men in white robes stood by them and said: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up toward heaven?” In other words, get a move on, there is work to be done, lives to be lived, folks to be loved and a message to be spread.  As the revised St. Augustine's Prayer Book so nicely puts it:

Remember Christian Soul 

that today and every day you have 

God to glorify. 

Jesus to imitate. 

Salvation to work out with fear and trembling. 

A body to use rightly. 

Sins to repent. 

Virtues to acquire. 

Eternity to hold in mind. 

Time to profit by. 

Neighbors to serve. 

The world to enjoy. 

Creation to use rightly. 

Kindnesses to offer willingly. 

Justice to strive for. 

Temptations to overcome. 

Death perhaps to suffer. 

In all things, God’s love to sustain you.

So let's get a move on. And may the angels guide, guard and protect us all.

Amen.