Sermon for the Feast of Michaelmas
admin | 29 September 2012“There was war in heaven”
It is hard enough to contemplate the spectacle of war on earth. How much more disturbing to think of war in heaven! For however we think of heaven, if we think of it at all, surely, it is about what is beyond the strife and stress of a weary, and war-torn world. What can it mean to speak of war in heaven?
The ancient biblical story of Cain and Abel is the account of the first murder. A fratricide, the killing of a brother, its intention is to awaken us to a larger sense of our common humanity in its disarray. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Cain response to God’s convicting question, “Where is your brother?” God’s question in that story echoes and extends God’s first question to us in the whole Bible, “Where are you?” Where we are is very much bound up with one another. Cain’s response is a question of dismissal and denial, a dismissal and a denial of his obligation and concern for his brother and by extension to anyone else.
“Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says. It is a wonderful image that contains within itself volumes upon volumes of the sense of justice that means that no injury, no hurt, no deed of undoing, no act of malice can go unnoticed and overlooked. It opens us out to truth, the truth of God before which we are held accountable, a truth which transcends, but does not ignore the things of our hearts or the things of our hands, both the seen and the unseen. After all, if looks could kill not only would we all be dead, but even worse, we would all be murderers!
But angels? War in heaven? What does any of this have to do with Cain and Abel? The point is already there implicitly in the ancient Genesis story. It is simply this. The struggles between good and evil are cosmic in scope and they are inescapably spiritual struggles with which all spiritual creatures contend.
Angels are simply part and parcel of the biblical and spiritual landscape. They remind us of that larger company of the spirit in which we find ourselves, if only we would see, see that is with the eyes of the soul. It is a point which our liturgy makes continually. “Therefore with angels and archangels and with the whole company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy holy name.” We are at one with the angels in prayer and praise. Their presence is an unmistakable feature of the biblical landscape and speaks to our being as spiritual creatures too, creatures who know and love.
There is more to reality than meets the eye. As Fr. Crouse used to quip, the angels are “celestial no see-ums”! The angels, to speak theologically, are the invisible reasons for the visible things of this world, the thoughts of God in motion, as it were, the intellectual and spiritual principles of reality. With respect to prayer, the angels lift our thoughts to God and bring the thoughts of God to us. We are all together in the same house, as it were, they above stairs and we below, but united in that same fundamental activity of worship.
In the year 1257 at the University of Paris, perhaps even in what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, Thomas Aquinas, affectionately known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). There is a wonderful clarity to his argument by which he shows that the angels can indeed teach us, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”.
Perhaps the Angels may help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism or the machinations of political ignorance and hubris? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know?
“There was war in heaven”, we are told. There is the constant struggle between good and evil in our souls and in our communities; these are spiritual struggles. But “Michael and his angels fought the dragon and the dragon prevailed not.” The ancient serpent, the devil, the principle of all that opposes the goodness and the truth of God is overthrown. “There was war in heaven,” not there is. We are saved by grammar! But on earth, that is another matter, a matter of our being willing to will the reconciliation between God and man. And that is neither by ourselves, nor even by the help of angels alone, but only by “the blood of the Lamb,” the image of Christ in his sacrifice for us.
The angels lift us up to the contemplation of heavenly things. But they also descend to assist us in the service of God in earthly things. It is not just clarity of mind but also charity of heart that comes with the help of angels. Is that not, perhaps, the burden of St. Matthew’s gospel lesson? “Take heed that ye despise not the least of these little ones,” Jesus says, meaning that we are not to be the obstacles in the way of the ascent of souls to God, especially the souls in our charge. We are wonderfully reminded that “in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”
We are inescapably part of a larger community of spirit, a community of angels and men, which demands certain responsibilities of us in acts of charity and service everywhere in the world, from the troubled world of the Middle East to the violence in our own communities. The angels, in short, help us to think more profoundly about the meaning and nature of our humanity both in its truth and its confusion. They think with us by “moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding”, reminding us of redemption and the truth of our humanity. “I see” says Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “that angels were first taught the divine mystery of the humanity of Christ, and then through them the gift of knowledge came down to us.”
But when we dismiss the angels from our company and our discourse, we find ourselves in the wasteland of modernity, forgetting the needful things which belong ultimately to our truth and dignity. T.S. Eliot captures this prophetically and poetically.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
We have forgotten, he says, “the way to the Temple” (Choruses from “The Rock”).
The angels help us to think about what it means to be human. They recall us to that larger spiritual community of rational souls and intellectual beings. They help us to learn that, in the face of the world’s troubles, the power of the good is always greater than the forces of evil. “There was war,” even “in heaven,” to teach us that great truth, the truth of God’s victory which is there for us to will in our lives.
“There was war in heaven”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Michaelmas
St. George’s, Halifax
September 28th, 2012