Archangel

Scripture: Michaelmas, A.D. 2013 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Welcome, brothers and sisters, to Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels!—a poignant reminder that the most important things in our lives are often the very things we can neither see nor touch.

We gather this morning neither to adore nor idolatrize any spiritual power in place of God, but rather to petition, praise, and give thanks to the Almighty for all that He has done, and continues to do for us, through His heavenly host. Believe it or not, we are at all times surrounded by a vast and unseen multitude of spirits, especially when we gather for worship around the holy Eucharist. And these creatures, whom we call angels, are both completely alien to our understanding yet are also the best friends we have in this world.

Let’s start at the beginning: what is an angel? According to the unanimous witness of orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and even much pagan understanding, an angel is a pure spirit. He has no body, no gender, no senses as we know them. Yet we cannot call him “it,” for an angel possesses both intellect and free will, which makes him a person—though certainly not a human one. He has a beginning, for he is created finite by the infinite God, but he has no end and cannot die. He does not taste or see or hear as we do, but simply knows, directly and intuitively, as God gives to him the knowledge. He exists in time, but not time as we know it, not the chronological progression of matter, the ticks of a clock. An angel exists within spiritual time, with one face to eternity and another towards humanity.

Because he has no body, he is wherever his mind is. Should he think of Mars, he is on Mars. Should he think of many places at once, he is in all of them. His mind is vast and free and unencumbered by passions or instincts or ignorance. And each angel, of which there are countless billions, is as different from each other angel as to be a separate species, as far removed as we are from dogs. Angels, you see, are the real aliens, the real extraterrestrials. They come not simply from other planets but from outside our very universe, from outside space and time. Little wonder that primitive cultures seem to have worshipped them as gods, for gods they would be—were there not one true God, infinitely beyond even them.

So then, what is an angel for? What is their purpose? Well, like all things in Creation, God made angels not out of necessity but out of pure grace. To ask the purpose of an angel is to ask the purpose of art, the purpose of children, the purpose of life. But God employs angels for just about everything in the Bible! The highest and greatest of them all He uses as His own heavenly council. The middle choirs are tasked with maintaining the laws of nature and of reality itself. And the lower choirs descend to take care of us—to guard and guide nations, tribes, and individuals. Yes, it’s true: each of us has a guardian angel, a sort of spiritual bodyguard. You really do have an invisible little alien perched protectively over your shoulder.

Angels give us comfort and encouragement. They pray for us, and we for them, recalling that they ever keep their faces before our mutual God. Their job is not so much to protect us from physical danger, though many stories speak of this, so much as it is to keep us out of spiritual peril. They fight an invisible war for our souls. No angel can force you to do something good; not even God can do that without violating the free will He has given to us all. But there are spiritual powers all around us that seek out our good, our salvation. And they support us, battle for us, whether you believe in them or not.

Now I realize that talk like this can seem puzzling, even uncomfortable, coming from a 21st Century pulpit. We have been conditioned, you and I, to internalize such things, to speak of good and evil, of angels and demons, as something purely psychological, purely in our minds. But that’s just a symptom of the self-worship that has overcome us in the postmodern era. We pretend that everything’s in our heads: truth, justice, goodness, beauty, freedom, even God. But they’re not. In fact, they’re more real than we are. Every one of us swims in a vast unseen sea of spirits more wonderful and frightening than anything presented to our waking eyes. To them, we must all seem quite ephemeral. They pass through us as though we were but air.

Take note that when we speak of spiritual warfare, we do not invoke tribal conflicts or religious strife. Spiritual warfare has nothing to do with weapons of the flesh, and the lines of conflict fall not between peoples or faiths but divide right down the middle of every human heart. Christ and His angels abhor worldly violence. Our true enemies are never human, never other men and women on the opposite side of a line. No, we struggle against foes far stronger yet infinitely more subtle than these. Our opponents are sin, death, and hell: the devil, the world, and the flesh. See, here’s the flipside of free will: as we may choose to worship God or worship ourselves, so too did the angels once choose, at the very moment after their conception. And something like a third of them chose rebellion for all time.

It was an angel, after all, who chose to defy God, to try and set himself up on the throne of the Almighty. They called him Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the greatest, strongest, most beautiful being in Creation, second only to God Himself. But he could not swallow his pride. He could not bend the knee to a God Who planned to take on some animal body, to become one of the stinking wretched apes of earth. So he rebelled and waged war, a war he must’ve known that he would lose, against the Architect of All, the only God he’d ever loved. How do spirits make war? How do ideal forms without flesh wage bloodless battle? I do not know. We cannot know. But it must have been more terrible, and more rapid, than anything we can imagine—a war of wills and pride and lightning.

And as Lucifer became Satan—the Accuser, the Opponent—so a new spirit rose to oppose him. This new challenger did not hail, like the devil, from the highest of choirs closest to God. He was, in fact, a lower angel, with lesser intelligence, lesser ability, than the dragon he would fight. But the God of infinite intellect does not champion intellect. The God of infinite strength does not favor the strong. Rather, God cares for selfless, joyful love. And that’s what this smaller angel had in spades. He rallied the hosts of Heaven to cast the Devil into Hell, and his war cry soon became his name: “Who is like God?” he demanded, as he cast out the accursed. “Who can ever be like God?” In Hebrew, that is mixa’el: the Archangel Michael.

St. Michael is the name given to the leader of the heavenly host, commander of God’s holy and spiritual armies. He came to this position not by strength, though he has more than we can ever comprehend, nor by wits, though his mind stretches vastly beyond our own. He leads because of his loyalty, his selflessness, and his love. It is the role of St. Michael—and of all the unseen powers called to our aid by Jesus Christ—to cast into Hell the devil and all the forces that defy God, prowling about the world to seek out the ruin of souls. He is the guardian of guardians, patron of police and firefighters and soldiers.

Traditionally the Church teaches that St. Michael has four important roles, one of which is the command of the angelic host. He is also the angel of death, who comes to us in our last moment and snatches us from Satan’s claws by giving sinners one final opportunity to repent. At the end of the world he will bring the scales of justice to earth from Heaven. And last, but not least, he is the chosen guardian of God’s priestly people, the children of Abraham. As he led Israel through the Red Sea in days of old, so now he protects the Church and keeps it whole—preserving Christianity in spite of all the Christians. He is the terrible swift sword that puts the enemies of Jesus to flight, and so he is the comfort of us all who cling to Jesus’ Cross.

This may be a lot to take in on a Sunday: light and darkness, angels and demons, Michael and Satan. But this is an important story to tell, for ultimately it is our own. We tell it now, on Michaelmas, to remind us of certain vital truths. First, we praise God for the astonishing breadth and wonder of Creation, of a universe more populous and expansive than even the strongest telescope can see. We are surrounded with wonder, and beauty, and adventure at every single moment. Second, we rejoice to know that we are never alone, that we always have the strength and support of the community of God. We have our brothers and sisters in Christ, the land we are to steward and the beasts as our companions, and we have the multitude of the heavenly host, saints and angels alike, always eager to offer petitions and prayers and spiritual powers on our behalf.

And finally, we must all remember that there is real evil in this world—not just in our heads, but objectively, “out there,” tempting us to ruin. But there is also real good engaged in active battle on our behalf, and this is not an even contest. Good is far, far stronger than the worst that evil brings to bear. Michael has cast Satan from Heaven, and Christ has defeated him forever on the Cross! Good wins. God wins. And victory is assured. Halleluiah.

Thanks be to Christ, St. Michael and all angels. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

Prayers of Intercession:

With the whole people of God in Christ Jesus, let us pray for the Church, for those in need, and for all of God’s Creation.

Holy God and mighty, let Your Church shine like a beacon

           Accomplishing Your righteous will through bishop, priest, and deacon

May all the members of Your Body work to do Your will

           Renew our lands and waters that the hungry have their fill

Bring life to blossom ev’rywhere, throughout Creation fair

           And may all bear Your witness, Lord; in Jesus—hear our prayer

Preserve all who are punished for their faith in Jesus’ Cross

           May You in Your authority bind up their ev’ry loss

Lift up all now laid down low by illness, sin, and grief

           Deliver them from darker powers; send to them relief

Devil, world, and flesh conspire to drag us to Hell’s lair

           Send Michael, Lord, to slay the beast; in Jesus—hear our prayer

Be the source of faith and strength for mission work abroad

           Bring healing hope to all the earth, to know that You are God

Unite us with the holy dead who dwell with You above

           And know the everlasting life that is Your ceaseless love

We give You thanks for messengers, the angels of the air

           May spirits blest empower us; in Jesus—hear our prayer

Lord, we pray for those we lift before You, both silently and aloud: for Dave, Mike, Pat, Chuck, and Lon; for the sharp skills of all physicians, that they serve Your Holy Spirit of healing; for the unity of one Church in the love of our one Lord; for the forgiveness of our many sins; and for the promise of undeserved grace poured out upon us all.

Into Your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray

Trusting in Your mercy to light and guard our way.  AMEN.