Apex

Death of a Star, by Awanqi

Propers: St Michael and All Angels (Michaelmas), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

Every culture, every faith, every philosophy on this planet—with but a few dissenting voices—has believed and taught and lived as though the cosmos were alive. The universe presents itself to us as saturated with meaning and purpose and value, with goodness and beauty and truth, with reason and intelligence, awareness beyond our own. We are minds within a world of minds, spirits within a world of spirits. And one great Mind, one great Spirit, encompasses us all.

The ancients had a hierarchy of being, as do we. In general, we will value the life of a tree over that of a rock, the life of a dog over that of a tree, the life of a child over that of a dog. At the peak of this scale, the pinnacle of Creation, sat the gods. These were the smartest, strongest, truest, and most beautiful beings there could be. They shone like the stars in the heavens, unchanging and celestial, timeless as the firmament above.

Below the gods were lesser divinities, spirits of nature, ancient and mercurial as the moon. These went by many names: nymphs, dryads, faeries, elves, daemons and djinn. Like nature herself, they were closer to us, both dangerous and alluring. We shared much with them, yet we were not them. Then came men, then beasts, then minerals, an unbroken chain of being. Yet we have within us awareness of something beyond all being.

Beyond nature, beyond the gods, beyond space and time itself, lies the Source of all existence, the Ground of every being: not part of the hierarchy, yet present at every link. This was not one of the gods; great as they were, they had limits, even flaws. No, this was reality beyond all space and time, beyond distinctions of high and low, of being and non-being. This the ancients called “the God”—God with a capital G—infinitely higher than Zeus could ever be, yet closer to each one of us than ourselves, closer than the blood in our veins.

This is the dominant worldview, the dominant cosmology, within the Hebrew Bible, and the worldview at the time of Jesus Christ. Only the terminology varies. What Greeks call gods, Judeans call angels. What Greeks call daemons, Judeans call shedim. But the God, the One God, He’s beyond it all: above it, beneath it, around it, within it. The God is infinite, all-powerful, and perfect. The One God isn’t just mighty; He is good. In fact, He is the Good, of which all goodness here below remains a shadow or reflection.

Today is a day when we talk about the angels: of Sts Michael and Gabriel and Raphael, of St Uriel and the guardian spirits; of Cherubim and Seraphim and Ophanim and all the hosts of highest Heaven! This is Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. Banish from your imagination the Precious Moments figurines. Angels in the Bible tend to terrify—as well they should. They are the apex predators of the spiritual world.

An angel has no body, other than his mind. Wherever he thinks of, there he is. He is not subject to physical laws. He has no flesh to separate from soul, and so cannot be killed. Angels are immortal, formless, ancient; leviathans swimming in a sea of cosmic consciousness. They were born on the first day of Genesis, according to Augustine: spiritual light separated from darkness. The awareness of the angels would drive a sane man mad. That’s why we describe them as winged lions, flaming serpents, wheels within wheels, full of eyes.

As our awareness of God grew, so did our awareness of evil. The ancient pagans never worried whence evil came: their gods were as cruel as they were lovely. Yet as we came to understand that there is only One True God, Maker of all things, we soon saw that He must be all-good. If God could cause evil, then He couldn’t be God. So whence cometh wickedness? What malevolent power could unbalance the universal scales?

Only an angel, it seems. Only the creatures at the peak of all Creation could cause a crack to ruin all the world. Hence, Lucifer, Satan, the Devil. Created to be good, to bear the light of God, Lucifer fell for pride. The highest have the farthest they can fall. One tradition holds that God revealed to the angels that one day humankind would be redeemed, that God Himself would become a Man by the Blessed Virgin Mary: gestant puellae viscera, in the words of the ancient hymn: “God through the guts of a girl.”

That right there would be the scandal that Satan couldn’t stomach. Or at least that’s the version that I like. Regardless, Scripture states that “war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.” Michael, mind you, is one of the few angelic beings specifically named within the Bible. He was the guardian of God’s people, Israel’s spiritual prince, defending them from the angels of the nations. His name, Mikha’el, means “Who is like God?”

And this, we’re told, became his battle-cry. It’s not that Michael was the strongest of the angels. Indeed, archangels are often classed the second-lowest of the choirs. But Michael proved victorious because he trusted not in his own powers, not in his own wisdom, but in the infinite goodness of our God. And so he rallied the hosts of Heaven—crying “Who is like God? Who is like God?”—and cast down the devil down to earth, where he became our adversary, the Satan who hunts like a lion.

Over time, we came to call the fallen angels demons. And quite frankly, this makes our demons scarier than the rest. For mainstream Islam and Judaism, even the pagan and karmic faiths, evil spirits are nature spirits, what we might imagine as faeries. But in Christianity, a demon is an evil angel, a far more frightening foe. You cannot kill an angel. You can’t outrun it nor outthink it. All that you can do is pray: pray to God to send St Michael to batter his banished brethren, until that day when hell is no more and all of Creation renewed.

Such is the takeaway from the story of St Michael. He is the spirit of humility casting down the spirit of pride. We do not fight evil with evil. We do not fight wrath with wrath. Rather, when fury and hatred and self-righteousness well up within us, or when they fall upon us from around us and above, we find our strength in humility. We find our strength in God. Jesus taught us this lesson, breaking hell upon His Cross. And this applies not just to Christianity, nor even only to humanity, but to all of Creation, all of reality, all of the heavenly host. Christ has conquered Heaven, just as He conquered in hell.

And now of course the question arises: how literally must we take this? There are those who would absolutely scoff at the notion of a cleric in the postmodern West, in the Year of Our Lord 2024—with a degree in the sciences no less—speaking to adults of angels. Surely this is metaphor. Surely these are ideas. Should we not rather understand Satan as a symbol, as a spirit of evil rather than as an evil spirit? Aren’t we a little old for faerie-tales?

To such a one I would reply: you’re closer than you think. I said before that angels are creatures of the mind. They are, in a sense, living ideas, who take on a life and a will of their own. So if you say that someone has thought the angels up, I wouldn’t disagree. It’s just that they are products not of our measly monkey minds, but of the Mind behind it all, the Mind we call the Word. Some ideas are bigger than us, bigger than we could imagine. Such ideas are angels.

So which is it, preacher? Are Michael and the Devil real people, real spirits waging a spiritual war? Or do they live as symbols, of humility conquering pride, of faith as the greatest of strengths? My answer of course is both. Myths are more real than the material. I have long been convinced that when it comes to the higher levels of reality, to spiritual reality, the distinctions we seek to draw here below, divisions between metaphor and fact, all break down into truth. I can tell you that Satan is real. I can tell you St Michael is true.

But beyond all that, beyond mythic clashes in the heavens, beyond a spiritual struggle that stretches down the hierarchy of being to pierce through every human heart, beyond Creation itself, we are surrounded in every moment by the infinite love of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Trust in Him, trust in His mercy, and nothing can take you from Him. Nothing can ever steal you from His loving and crucified hands. This is as true in the heavens as it is in the pits of hell.

St Michael, Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. For who is like unto God?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
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X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026