Br. Keith Nelson

Saint Michael and All Angels

Revelation 12:7-12

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”

In the Nicene Creed, we affirm our faith and trust in God our Creator in these terms. As the earth all around us proceeds from a divine source, so too does heaven: the nearer presence of God to which we are invited for eternity. As the beings and things around us manifest to our senses constitute the “material expression of God’s love,” so too do those unseen beings of the same created order share a mysterious role in God’s unfolding plan for us, albeit one hidden from our natural senses.

This, in a nutshell, is the theological ground of our celebration today: The feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We prayed in today’s collect, “Grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment may they help and defend us here on earth.” Angels – and angel simply means “messenger” – act as mediators between earth and heaven, the seen and the unseen. The angels point us to the perennial question: “How is God present in the world? And what is our response to that presence?”

The ministries of angels may seem too fanciful or abstract a place for the modern mind to begin, so we can turn first to the ministrations of everyday creatures.

Through this liturgical season of Creation, we have affirmed and celebrated God’s presence to us in the creatures God has made and called “very good”: other humans, but also the sun, moon, and stars; the sky above and waters below; the soil and plants, birds and four-footed beasts. God is present in the world to us through them.

Perhaps you have experienced moments in the presence of God’s non-human creatures when you felt quiet and still, wordlessly available to the simple goodness of that being in its otherness. A plant or a stone, a river or a bird, can indeed minister to us, and we to them. This is not simply human projection, but a glimpse of God’s original intention for creation: a relationship of harmonious companionship, in which our mutual presence lifts one another beyond complexity, difference, and enmity, closer to the heart of the Creator.

I feel this especially when I am in the presence of certain very old trees. An old oak tree, encountered individually in this way, hums with its own distinct life and personality. Yet it also acts powerfully, even selflessly, as an ambassador of its entire species. To encounter one Oak is to encounter all Oaks, all oak-kind. In the life of one is the life of all. This is corroborated not only by global folk wisdom but by modern tree science.

Perhaps angels are not all that different than oaks.

Though today we celebrate St. Michael, and by extension other named angels such as Gabriel, Raphel, and Uriel, the vast majority of scripture’s many angels are anonymous. In the life of one angel is the life of all angels: and this life, in its essence, is a life centered in the nearer presence of God. It is the glory of God, not themselves, that the angels are intent on communicating.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews asks, “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”

Christian tradition has interpreted this to suggest that, as spirits, angels are invisible and immaterial creatures. Summarizing the tradition in the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas maintains that angels possess individual consciousness, but consciousness that is utterly unlike ours because it is not mediated or organized around a body. As “bodiless powers,” angels have no physical senses, no appetites, and presumably no gender. They communicate and receive communication from God and from one another beyond language, non-discursively, and instantaneously. And they act in response to such communication with an efficacy of will that far surpasses ours.

Tradition holds that they appear to us in forms legible to our senses, and remarkably like our own, because this is the most effective means to inspire awe, to establish relationship, and to draw our minds, hearts, and wills into harmonious alignment and obedience to the divine will.

Perhaps you can see where this is leading: all angels point us toward the mystery at the core of our faith, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the greatest messenger of God’s presence. The incarnation of Jesus Christ – God made human – has bridged the divide between heaven and earth in a way no angel could: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Jesus answers most fully the question of how God is present in the world: not simply like one of us, but as one of us; with a body like ours; joys like ours; pain and sorrow like ours; a death like ours; and a resurrection from the dead that has destroyed the power of death. In Jesus, we participate in that resurrection life even now. The first letter of Peter affirms: these are “things into which angels long to look!”

If visible creatures and invisible angels are our neighbors in God’s created order, the demons are, by their own choice and proclamation, our unseen enemies. As the loud voice in heaven proclaims in our reading from Revelation: “Rejoice then, you heavens, and those who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

The great sin of the fallen angels is pride: not the rightful sense of satisfaction in a job well done, but that spiritual presumption that fails to recognize that no gift is inherently our own, but a gift of the Creator to be used for the good of all creation.

Here is how one early monastic writer, John Cassian, describes the origin of pride in the fall of Satan:

“We see that the angel who, on account of his great splendor and beauty, was called Lucifer was cast out of heaven for no other vice than this one. . . . This thought alone was his first downfall. Because of it he was abandoned by God, whom he did not believe that he needed. At once he lost his balance; he tottered, became fully aware of the frailty of his own nature, and lost the blessedness that he has enjoyed as a gift of God. . . . In his belief that he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort, he lost even that which was his by the grace of the Creator.”

St. Michael the Archangel (art by Br. Keith Nelson)

I will end with an image. You have before you a small token of today’s feast, an image of the archangel Michael I created based on an early medieval prototype.

In the upper left of the image, we see the cross of Christ, held in the right hand of St. Michael. In and by the cross, every enemy of love and truth is conquered. The cross surmounts a spear. While the tail of Satan, depicted as the dragon of Revelation, raises its own barb at God’s angel, St. Michael fearlessly holds Satan in his proper place and at his proper distance. The spear tip is aimed at the mouth of the dragon, who is is “the deceiver of the world” through the lies he speaks. The truth of God’s salvation in Christ is the antidote to every lie. In his left hand, St. Michael holds a sphere that symbolizes the world, held safe in the hand of God its Creator.

The name Michael means “Who is like God?” The answer of course is: no one is like God. The humility before God at the heart of Michael’s name is the source of his victory.

While most images depict St. Michael and the dragon, Satan, as inverse opposites, there is one telling detail in this image that reveals their common origin: their wings. Unlike later images of Satan, with leathery bat-wings, his wings here are identical to Michael’s. This is a pointed reminder that Satan and his host are fallen angels. In this we find something profound: they are not evil by nature. They have become evil by their own choice to turn from God. Nothing created by God is inherently evil. Genesis declares, “And God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

Like the angels, we are gathered here before the heavenly throne to pray on behalf of all and for all. Like St. Michael, we are called to hold the world’s evils at the proper distance, rising above it in thought, word, and deed, with God’s help. But with the angelic host we worship a God of unrelenting Love, extending prayers to the farthest depths, where we see only evil, hatred, even antichrist with his many masks. Persisting to the end, we “shall see greater things than these: heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”