Sermon for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels / Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 29 September 2019

“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.

But perhaps you will protest: “Are not Angels simply the product of our imaginations?” the creatures of our minds, as it were? As if Angels are our delusions. Better to say creatures who are mind, wholly mind. The Angels are pure intellectual beings of immaterial substance. They are the ordered and distinct thoughts of God in creation, the moving principles of his goodness and truth, the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world. And since the intellect transcends the sense, Angels cannot be seen except by the mind in thought. You can’t see them. You can only think them. The Angels are creatures who are mind that only minds can think. Indeed, no world that is thinkable without them. The Angels belong to an intellectual understanding of the universe.

They belong to the perfection of the created universe as creatures of pure thought and remind us that there is more to reality than what can be seen and known empirically or through sense perception. Some of the most important things in life are the things you cannot see: love and thought, for instance.

Angels, let us say then, are thinkable, but what does it mean to think with them? After all, there are endless numbers of things which are “able to be thought”. The Collect offers the beginning of an answer. “O Everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order.” The services of Angels are instituted of God. The services of Angels are joined with the services of men “in a wonderful order.” Thinking God means thinking with the Angels who are God’s thoughts in creation. And such is our celebration – Angelic vision on Angels’ wings. Our worship actually is always with the Angels. When we praise God, we praise him with the Angel liturgy of heaven even in the songs of Angels, for instance, the Gloria in excelsis Deo. But what can that possibly mean for us and for our lives?

At the very least, a kind of freedom from our anxieties and cares. “Be not anxious,” Jesus tells us three times in the Gospel for Trinity XV which complements wonderfully the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We get buried and consumed in our cares, in our fears and our worries, not the least of which are the paralysing anxieties and fears about the global climate crisis; anxieties rooted in the illusions of our control and power. We need the vision of Angels which cuts through the clutter and anxious busyness of our thinking and our doing. Angelic sight is intellectus which is the corrective and the redemption of our discursive thinking, ratio, which in our contemporary world is always calculative and instrumental, and deeply limited as such. It is this kind of reasoning which consumes and destroys us leaving us empty and in despair. There are no practical or technological solutions to spiritual and intellectual questions; there never have been and never will be.

On the facade of the Basilica San Michele Maggiore di Pavia in northern Italy there is wonderful bas-relief of St. Michael the Archangel. He gazes calmly and serenely straight ahead, untroubled and collected, standing on a dragon-like serpent. Below him arrayed on the pillars of the portal are a whole host of creatures all chasing and consuming one another. It shows, I think, the interplay and connection between ratio, our divided, discursive, linear kind of reasoning, and intellectus, the clarity of understanding which grasps the whole within which the parts find their meaning and without which we are buried and consumed in our worries. Intellectus is like what the Canadian poet and philosopher, Jan Zwicky, signals as ‘gestalt’ thinking, thinking the whole in and through the relation of the parts. Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, teaches that the Angels see “the Word and everything in the Word.” Our liturgy, too, is about a gathering into understanding of all the divided and separated aspects of our lives and our world. We are gathered to God on Angels’ wings. Such is the true meaning of our service to God, a vocation which we share with the Angels. To know the world in God is the beginning of an antidote to our worldly fears and anxieties but only through providing a way to face the realities of our fallen world.

The fall-out from the story of the Fall is the story of Cain and Abel, the first murder and the beginning of the long, sad story of death and destruction of one another. God calls Cain to account with questions which repeat and echo the questions which are put to Adam and Eve. “Where are you?” “Where is your brother, Abel?” “What hast thou done?” Through such questions we are called to account. It is not about external judgement. We are asked to confront the contradictions of our own behaviour, of our thoughts and actions; it is an ancient question. These contradictions are always about a denial of God, of the principle of life, the principle of our knowing and our being. Such is the meaning of the important and poignant statement by God to Cain. “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” This is the counter to Cain’s denial about his brother’s presence: “I do not know,” he says, but even more it counters his deadly indifference. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This convicts us about our relations with one another and our world and opens us out to the ethical demands in which we find the true dignity of our humanity. Blood is a profound symbol of life and here recalls us to the author and principle of all life, God.

We cannot restore ourselves to God and to the world in God. We know and experience our separation and division from God and from one another, and, indeed, from our own selves. The Feast of St Michael and All Angels reveals the cosmic dimension of the struggle between good and evil but without leaving us trapped in a despairing dualism. “There was war in heaven,” not there is. Yet the Angels do not overcome Lucifer, “Satan,” “the devil,” “the great dragon,” “that old serpent” of deceit by any power of their own. “They overcame him,” St. John the Divine tells us, “by the blood of the Lamb,” meaning the sacrifice of Christ.

The Angels gather us to Christ and to all things as seen and known in God. It is at once the counter and the corrective to all our anxieties and cares.