Day: September 29, 2016

Sermons

Sermon for Michaelmas

“Michael and his angels fought against the dragon”

“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress … In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Michelangelo? The ninja turtle? No, the great Renaissance artist. Or is this simply all a digression? The name, Michelangelo, derives from The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels’ which marks the closing down of September, on the one hand, and the beginning of the School Term, on the other hand, especially at Oxford and Cambridge and the schools which derive their traditions of education from them.

Turtles and angels do have something in common. They are both part of the created order. They both belong to our reflections upon the world as intelligible. Angels remind us of some very important features of our humanity. They remind us that we are spiritual creatures by virtue of our thinking and our loving. When we think and love we are in the company of angels.

Michaelmas speaks about the things which belong to our intellectual and spiritual life. One of the wonderful thing about angels is that you can’t see them. You can only think them! For some that seems crazy. If you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist; it isn’t real, some may think. Well, to the contrary, there are lots of things which we can’t see but nonetheless respect and recognise: our thoughts and feelings for one thing as well as lots of things in particle physics such as quarks, neutrinos, and nuons or in math with such things as numbers and shapes – these are not sense perceptible things. They are realities grasped by our minds through our thinking. Like the angels, we can only think them.

Angels belong to a long and profound tradition of poetic and philosophical reflection, to the ways in which the world is intelligible. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world, intellectual principles which are intermediate, in some form or other, between God and man. We can only think the angels and, in some sense, when we are thinking we are in the company of angels.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Michael and All Angels

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

Coello, St. Michael Vanquishing the DevilThe name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

Very early in church history, St. Michael became associated with the care of the sick. The cult of Michael developed first in Eastern Christendom, where healing waters and hot springs at many locations in Greece and Asia Minor were dedicated to him. Michael is supposed to have appeared three times on Monte Gargano, southern Italy, in the 5th century. The local townspeople believed that Michael’s intercession gave them victory in battle over their enemies. These apparitions restored his biblical role as a strong protector of God’s people, and were also the basis for spreading his cult in the West.

The Feast of St. Michael & All Angels is also known as Michaelmas. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates today as the Feast of Sts. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels.

Artwork: Claudio Coello, Saint Michael the Archangel Vanquishing the Devil, 1665-1670. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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