Sermon for the Eve of Michaelmas

admin | 28 September 2017

“There was war in heaven”

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives; it is particularly a feature of our life as students and teachers and as priest and people. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak as well, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. 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. We are part of a larger spiritual community, the community of Angels and humans. “The services of Angels and men”, the Collect notes, are “ordained and constituted” by God “in a wonderful order.” We pray to God that “they may succor and defend us on earth”.

Angels? But you can’t see them! True. You can only think them. That, of course, is exactly the point. We can only think them and we can only think with them. We can even learn from them. The outstanding theologian, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, asked the question, “Can a man be taught by an Angel?” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q.11, art. Iii). The Angels can teach us, he shows, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels 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 forms of violence and abuse, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Perhaps 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.

“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, Satan, the tempter, all these scriptural terms appear here in a concentrated way. They belong to the principle of all that opposes the goodness and the truth of God and that principle is what is overthrown. “There was war in heaven,” not there is. But on earth, it is another matter, a matter of our willing to will the reconciliation between God and man. And that is 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 ultimate victory over all and every form of evil.

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 scriptural landscape for Jews, Christians and Muslims as well as having their counterparts in other religious and philosophical traditions. 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, from war zones far away to the violence near at home in our own communities.

The Angels 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 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.” The Angels teach us, ironically, it may seem, something about what it means to be human.

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;

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”).

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.