Sermon for the Feast of Michaelmas
“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.
