St. Michael and All Angels
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Genesis 28:10–17, Psalm 103, Revelation 12:7–12, John 1:47–51
Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the living god, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen Today is Michaelmas or the feast of Saint Michael and all angels. If you’re from a non-liturgical tradition, that sounds really confusing. Michaelmas is the English contraction of Michael mass, the mass of Saint.
Michael just as Christmas, is the Christ mass. And this feast of the angels originated in the Christian East with the veneration of saint Michael somewhere in the third century. It began to spread to the west in the fifth century, and it is culturally associated with the beginning of autumn in school, many religious institutions and English institutions have Michaelmas Term rather than the rather pedestrian false semester.
Father Doug mentioned the blackberries, the other thing that Michaelmas is known for is eating goose. I could find no particularly good reason for this except that gooses have wings. It started as the feast of Saint Michael, but grew to include all angels, those messengers of God that appear in scripture and tradition.
Saint Paul, as we know, talks about principalities and powers. Scripture also mentions thrones and dominions, angels, and archangels. These are apparently beings who guard, who deliver messages, who protect, who lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, they console our Lord after his temptation in the desert, and also in the garden of Gethsemane.
They are even responsible for the jail break of a couple of apostles, and they have roles in the final consummation of all things in revelation. By the late Middle Ages, there is a particular focus on four archangels. Michael, the protector or warrior, he can first read about him in in Jude one nine, Gabriel, the messenger found in Daniel and Luke, Raphael, the healer found most extensively in the apocryphal book of Tobit. I think chapter 12 and then Uriel, the angel of the afterlife or the the angel of death found in the apocryphal book of second Esdras. These became the focus of the feast and they’re kind of a holistic focus. We have protection.
We have communication, we have healing, and we have the last things. angels that surround all these key events in our life. So that’s kind of what we celebrate today. It’s a major feast.
It used to be a holy day of obligation in the Roman church. That’s what we celebrate, how we celebrate it is another matter. I don’t know if you remember what CS Lewis said about the devil.
He said the problem with the devil is you can either pay him too much or too little attention too much or too little. I think the same can be said of angels. Sometimes we can spend too much attention on them.
I think of two things that I’ve experienced in my own life around that speculation and the desire for power. um speculation, in other words, we can spend an awful lot of time saying, well, just what are angels? What are they? I kind of had this question.
Many of you know I was an an atheist and a in a convert from scientific materialism. And when I began to accept the idea of God that was one thing, but then there were these additional creatures and I love Jesus pretty well, but but I didn’t know what to do with these additional creatures. They seemed superfluous to my materialistic mindset.
So I ran around and I came across things like Mortimer J Adler, the founder of the Great Books curriculum who said that the best way to think about angels was as was to think of them as minds without bodies, not very helpful to a former materialist. There is the Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides who seems to collapse angels just into the material world. If you read Maimonides long, he seems to be saying that angels are just things like gravity and planetary rotation.
It’s it’s just the strings behind the creation that we don’t see. All that stuff is angels. Well, if that’s the case, science has erased angels.
And then there was new age thought that said that angels were everything from demigods to the lost people of Atlantis to ancient aliens. In other words, the more I read about what angels were, the more uncomfortable I got, the less impressed I got. And I had the overwhelming question, what does this have to do with Jesus?
An offshoot of that, of course, is I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and particularly coming out of that new age thought it wasn’t just trying to understand angels that was important. It was that other grand human temptation to try and control them. I don’t know how many of you remember the angel Taro cards books on how to communicate with angels, uh the the fascination, not only in popular culture on TV with kind of benign African-American women angels on CBS in the evenings and also with how we might get favors from these semi-Christian semi-pagan beings.
Again, what did it have to do with Jesus? All of it seemed somehow misplaced, somehow wrong, and so for a long period of my Christian journey, despite my love of medieval life and medieval festivals of which Michaelmas was such a big part, I just kind of pushed angels to the side. It was too baroque, two florid, too confusing, and what did it have to do with Jesus?
I’d made the error of paying too much attention, turn into the error of pain too little attention. because, although the temptation for a former materialist with an enlightenment mind may be just to throw angels away, they’re in scripture. We can’t do that. They’re there, they’re real. Jesus as in our gospel today, mentions them clearly. So maybe the issue is not to give them too much attention, but we better not give them too little attention either.
So what’s just right? That’s why I want to switch this today from the question not so much of what angels are. but whose they are. not what they are, but whose they are. Did you notice that all those archangels that I mentioned, Michael, Gabriel Raphael, Uriel, their names all end in what?
“El,” the Hebrew word of God for God. El angels are of God. angels are from God, so I don’t know if there are photonic energy or minds without bodies, but I know where they come from. They are from God who knows they are is what it’s important.
The great theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth puts it this way. “God’s action in Jesus Christ is called the kingdom of heaven.”[1] From this kingdom, God selects and sends his messengers, the angels, who proceed the revelation and doing of his will on earth as objective and authentic witnesses, who accompany it as faithful servants of god and man, and who victoriously ward off all opposing forms and forces of chaos.
Now it’s hard to read Barth. Let’s see what he’s saying. Once upon a time scripture tells us there was discord in heaven, at least twice in scripture, it’s mentioned clearly.
There was discord in heaven. That discord was dealt with through the mind of God and Jesus Christ, through the blood of the lamb, and through the expulsion of those who would not follow God. We were not privy to that, but that is what we were told. and following that expulsion, there is no discord in heaven. heaven is at one, the kingdom of heaven is as Karl says, is centered around, God saving action in Jesus Christ.
The ranks of angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven as we put pray in the liturgy, surround the self-donation of God for us for our benefit, and in anticipation of that in proclamation of that as the follow up to that, God sends his messengers objective. Yes, they’re real, authentic, Jesus testifies to them. Witnesses who accompany us as faithful servants that God’s work would be done.
Angels are real angels are active, but Karl reminds us that angels are not the main thing. Jesus Christ is. Look at the contrast in our readings today. Jacob is at Bethel and he’s on the run.
Is Jacob off is and he stops and he lays his head down and he has a vision, a vision of a ladder going to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it and he recognizes that this is a profound thing that in some way this is the gate of heaven that this is a holy place. Jump ahead to John today. Jesus references the story, but with a profound difference. what are the angels ascending and descending on?
Not an it, but a who not a ladder, but Christ himself. Whatever an angel is it is immaterial to us. None of our business.
Who’s an angel is? Is all that we need to know? Whatever they send out into the world comes from Jesus Christ, whatever they take back to heaven goes through Jesus Christ.
The center isn’t some rickety old ladder, even if it reaches all the way to heaven. The center is the Son of God. So what does this do to our cosmology?
We can say that we serve a creative God who has ordered the universe in ways that we have discovered and in ways that we have yet to discover. I suspect also in ways that we will never discover. He has put everything together in accord with his will, just so.
It is very good. And in this world, there are beings that serve and worship God as our collect says. They serve and worship God angels, yes, but maybe Maimonides is right too also physical laws, thermodynamics and gravity worship God in their own way. the beasts of the field in their nature and those of us in the church, all creation is drawn together each in our place in the order to serve and worship him who is God.
There are also beings in this world that help and defend us on behalf of God angels, yes, but also fellow saints throughout history and throughout these seats. Science, medicine, and government, yes, even in this day and age, I dare say government, rightly construed all these things help and defend us on behalf of God. It’s like looking in the back of a TV.
There’s all those silver lines. It used to be wires, but now it’s silver lines. I don’t know what they all do, but they work together in concert to produce the picture I watch.
That’s how creation is. And somewhere in that mass is angels. and they do their part in service to a loving God. In our Christian life, if we’re not careful, we can so often major in the minors.
We find ourselves obsessing over things like our prayer life or are we reading enough, should I fast, what about pilgrimages? We can even obsess about things like denominational traditions. You can make too much of Anglicanism. Angels can be like that.
It’s almost as if we are to celebrate them today and then put them back in their place in service to God, where they’ve always been and always will be. To use another analogy. We know the power of electricity.
We like electricity. But when we don’t have electricity, it’s not so much that we want the wires connected. The wires themselves without power running through them would be useless.
It’s not the wires. It never was. It was always the electricity.
It’s not the angels per se. Wonderful friends and companions, though they may be. It’s Christ.
It’s always Christ, so the key with this feast is to neither make too much or too little of the ministry of angels to never create confuse the creature with the creator in celebrating Michaelmas in the end, we are not so much celebrating the angels as Him who made them.
[1] “God’s action in Jesus Christ, and therefore His lordship over His creature, is called the “kingdom of heaven” because first and supremely it claims for itself the upper world.” Karl Barth, Geoffrey William Bromiley, and Thomas F. Torrance, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 3, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 369.
