Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Perhaps one of the reasons I tend to forget my sermons is that preaching for me is very much capturing an unrepeatable moment in time. The occasion and my journey into it will never meet again like this. In the older sermon, I referenced a piece of art - the Peace Fountain, a sculpture next to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. The depiction of St. Michael the Archangel there, as in much other art and iconography, has St. Michael holding a sword or spear and overwhelming the dragon, Satan, as described in the reading from the Revelation to John.
I simply asked, “what does this mean = an angel waging war against the dragon Satan?” I had been studying the topic of the Bible and violence for some time and took that opportunity to summarize some of what I had been learning. The triumph of justice over sin and evil and the coming of God’s realm of peace wrenches the cosmos and changes the very character of life on earth, now joined with heaven.
Today I meet the feast through an encounter with a quite different rendering of St. Michael. The image before us is from a church in Spain, date unknown, that hangs in my office here in the monastery. No sword or spear or war or violence here, no obvious symbolism that this is St. Michael other than Art.com’s word for it. It visualizes an authentic theology of angels: present, yet mysterious; benevolent, but slightly intimidating; human-like while at the same time seeming to step into our material world from some foreign place.
Whether the glass has darkened with age and dirt or whether the artist created it that way, the contrast of the ominous and impenetrable surrounding with a face of such peace and bliss endlessly fascinates me. Just as with the Peace Fountain sculpture, we can ask, “what does this mean?”
To approach an answer to that question it may be helpful to revisit a bit of the theology of creation itself. Theologians often begin with the question, “why did God create at all?” Was God lonely? Did God want a world of submissive, subservient beings to inflate God’s ego?
No. God’s nature is to give, to share glory, to be revealed in goodness, truth, and beauty. The creation is the gift and sign of God’s being as limitless generosity, abundance, and blessing to all. God did not create to control or dominate, but to delight. God delights in and with us as we enjoy the good things of creation. God creates humans because God can. God enjoys us. God created angels to share in the beauty of all that God has made, so that angels will enjoy being angels just as we enjoy being human. So we share a similar and complementary vocation with the angels; to inhabit the meaning and work of our place in the cosmic order that God’s fullest intent and purpose for making us will be made known in us and directed back to our Creator as praise and glory. The existence and appearance of angels gives us clues about what the universe is for and the character of the God who made it.
The assigned readings cast angels in the roles of sign-bearers of God’s communion between heaven and earth. The way they witness is by moving - moving up and down. The Genesis reading of Jacob’s ladder dream has angels “ascending and descending on it.” In the Gospel reading, the Lord echoes Jacob’s dream when he tells Nathanael that “you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” In the three-tiered universe of the Bible, the spiritual realm was up in the sky above and the realm of evil, death, sometimes called the abyss or sea, “down”. So the significance of the angels ascending and descending becomes a way of describing a connection between the unseen, spiritual “above” and the tangible, earthly of our physical world. Most ancient religions would have created a process of purification, training, or knowledge to attain a glimpse of heaven.
Jacob’s dream and Nathanael’s prophecy are not earned by their goodness, possessed by human power, discerned by human understanding. Rather the dream and prophecy are God’s gift bestowed freely for God’s glory and honor into and through human witnesses who share in the heavenly vision of a world beyond what we can see and touch and contain. It is not a stretch to say that this ascending and descending are happening everywhere all the time, unseen by our physical eyes. The angels appear in a particular time and place not so that we will seek to contain that time and place, but, like all sacred places and acts, to point beyond themselves to a God who is happy to be everywhere all the time.
The God who desires to be known as mystery sends messengers to unveil the invitation to covenant. The reading from Revelation adds an interesting twist to this communion between heaven and earth. The angels who war against heaven are thrown down to earth, but do not ascend. Something tragic has been lost in their act. They now become beings who rebel against and harm the creation that previously was the source of delight. It seems even the heavenly beings have a degree of freedom to worship or not.
Finally, this feast is a reminder that liturgy invites us into two main responses. First, we hear and enact the prophetic call to amend our ways and live in reconciliation and peace with our brothers and sisters. The imperatives of scripture give content to our desire to love God and neighbor faithfully. The second and equally important task is less about doing and more about being. Today is such a day. Our task is to pause, look, listen, be awed to wonder and praise at the lavish blessing and beauty of being gifted to taste, even now, the eternal gladness of the glory of God with the angels. Amen.
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