Sermon for Michaelmas

admin | 29 September 2013

“There was war in heaven”

Michaelmas daisies dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They remind us that dancing with angels belongs to the truth of our humanity.

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives whether as students or teachers, priests or parishioners. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to the understanding of creation and our humanity. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak, in a kind of way, to another feature of our humanity, too, our loneliness, or what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness,” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate, to take hold of meaning which is only possible in an intelligible world. The angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good.

In the year 1257, perhaps even what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, at the University of Paris, 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). Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or by the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels can 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, whether it is the massacre of a church congregation in Pakistan or the hostage-taking in Kenya, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the 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, proclaim and show?

“There was war in heaven,” we are told. There is the constant struggle between good and evil in our souls, in our communities and in our world. These are profoundly 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 accomplished neither by ourselves, nor even by the help of angels alone, but 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.

Angels are an inescapable feature of the biblical landscape from Genesis to Revelation, from the Angel with the flaming sword that prevents the return to the Garden to the Angels of the Churches and about the throne of God, “ten thousand times ten thousand”. St. Michael and All Angels remind us 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 whatever the circumstances, whether it be war zones far away or the confusions and concerns near at hand in our own communities and our own souls. The angels, in short, help us to think more profoundly about the meaning and nature of our humanity and about the principles of good and evil.

They think with us, as Aquinas suggests, by “moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding,” reminding us of redemption and the truth of our humanity in God. “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.” The angels teach us. Describing the figure of Michael the Archangel on the clock tower of the cathedral in her beautiful novel, The Dean’s Watch, Elizabeth Gouge notes that the figure shows “the supreme certainty and confidence of the angelic breed.” The angels belong to the idea that the world is intelligible, that there is an order and a purpose even in and through the disorders and confusions of our lives.

But when we dismiss the angels from our company and our discourse, we find ourselves in the wasteland of modernity, forgetful of 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;

In so doing we have ceased to know and we have ceased to care, having forgotten, he says, “the way to the Temple” (Choruses from “The Rock”). We have ceased to dance with angels in the certainty and the confidence and in the joy and delight of God’s world. We lose something of what it means to be human.

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 which we have to will in our lives, learning, if ever we will, to dance with angels.