Sermon by Stuart Pike

Photo Credit: edenpictures on Flickr.com

Sermon Text:

Today is the Feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. Whenever the subject of this feast day comes up in conversation someone almost always asks the question, what are angels anyway. Do you believe in them?

Certainly the existence of angels are strongly supported in the Bible throughout the Old and New testament. Jesus himself mentions them, and of course, Angels herald his own birth and his own resurrection.

But angels have become such a craze in our popular culture and so when people are asking me what I believe about angels, I think it is in the context of this craze, with some of its imagery that many people are asking the question.

Ron Rhodes in an article about angels writes that although Angels for 100s of years seemed simply to be relegated to Christmas cards and the occasional work of art, since the 1990s especially and along with the development of New Age religions and culture, Angels have been making a comeback. Big time.

Today you can find angels-only boutiques, angel newsletters and magazines, angel seminars and college-level courses, angel T-shirts, calendars, postcards, sunglasses, jewelry, and an angel Broadway play.

There have been feature stories on Angels in Newsweek and Time magazine.

So what is the fascination with Angels?

One reason cited for angel popularity in New Age literature is that angels offer people a spirituality that does not involve commitment to God or His laws. Sophy Burnham, author of A Book of Angels, believes the current popularity of angels is "because we have created this concept of God as punitive, jealous, judgmental," while "angels never are. They are utterly compassionate." Or, as Time magazine put it, "For those who choke too easily on God and his rules...angels are the handy compromise, all fluff and meringue, kind, nonjudgmental. And they are available to everyone, like aspirin."

I think that one thing that is positive about the angel craze, though, is that it shows how hungry people are for something deeper in their lives than what they usually perceive with their five senses. People are looking for something that will allow them to go far deeper than their own logic will enable them to go. They have a spiritual hunger.

But what does the Bible have to say about angels?

The story of Jacob in today's Old Testament Lesson speaks of the land in which Jacob found himself. It speaks of a special place. It was the place where Jacob had his dream and heard his God speaking to him in the dream. Jacob was running away from the mess he had gotten himself into. He was running from a brother who hated him and who wanted to kill him. He was at a cross‑road in his life, he was basically a refugee, and he went to sleep somewhere in the middle of the wilderness and he slept with a stone for his pillow.

It was such an unlikely place to find angels, or anything holy. A place that simply looked like a wilderness.

He didn't really know that God had been following his progress through his life, and he had no idea that the land on which he slept would become the land that God would give to him and his descendants. In Jacob’s dream he saw a vision of Angels ascending and descending on a ladder which stretched up into heaven. Angels in the bible always herald the divine. Usually they are messengers of God and they precede something holy which is about to happen. They aren’t the holy thing themselves. They announce the holiness.

After Jacob sees the vision of Angels in his dream, God himself shows up and gives him the promise that the land will be given to him and his offspring who will be as numerous as the dust of the earth.

And when Jacob arose from his sleep he was full of awe. In fact he even said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other