Sermon for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels / Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
“And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”
They overcame whom? “The dragon,” “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan,” the deceiver of “the whole world,” and “the accuser of our brethren.” It is a wonderful scriptural collation of terms for the principle of all evil, for what opposes God, recalling us to the foundational stories of the Fall in Genesis. Another term, not mentioned here, but used four times in the Old Testament and once in the New Testament, and which becomes a significant term for Satan or the Devil in poetic and philosophical literature, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, is Lucifer. It means the light-bearer or light-bringer and illustrates profoundly the nature of evil as a negation or denial of the Good. Lucifer, the bearer of light, denies his creatureliness in the vain attempt to be God himself. As such he turns his back on the light and truth of God and in so doing contradicts the conditions of his own being, becoming the Prince of Darkness and the Father of lies.
Michaelmas derives from the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels and marks the beginning of the academic year known as Michaelmas term at the great Medieval universities, and the institutions derived from them. The Angels are with us in our thinking and our praying, in our lives of sacrifice and service. They are ever with us in our liturgy. The Sursum Corda at the Eucharist concludes with the compelling and uplifting words, “therefore with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee,” singing the Trisagion, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts,”in the words of Isaiah and St. John. Such is the mystical theology of the liturgy. We are lifted into the life of God on Angels’ wings.
The Angels are very much with us. There is the insistence in Scripture about the presence of Angels from creation to redemption. There continues to be in our contemporary culture a yearning for a spiritual company, a sense of being part of something greater. Angels are part and parcel of the spiritual landscape of our lives. They certainly belong to the scriptural landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions and to the philosophical and theological imaginary of our intellectual traditions.
