Day: September 29, 2022

Sermons

Sermon for Michaelmas

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?”

God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question in Genesis to our humanity. Where are you? In the Book of Job, the question deepens the metaphysical and spiritual meaning of that first question. They have entirely to do with the world as spiritual and intellectual, as ultimately good and deserving of reverent respect and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who find themselves in a spiritual community. God’s question to Job points us to that community of spiritual creatures: the morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. We are in the company of angels, something which our liturgy constantly reminds us. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name”.

There is more to reality than what meets the eye. It is what belongs to the mind, to intellect and spirit. Michaelmas testifies to the spiritual nature of reality, not as solipsistic and narcissistic nonsense in flight from the world and the body as evil, but as signalling the intellectual and spiritual structure of the world in which we find our truth and being. Thomas Aquinas, the great Angelic Doctor, as he is called, remarks that the Angels move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding. They are an essential aspect of creation as intelligible and good and belong to a long and profound tradition of reflection about the world as in principle knowable, as known and loved by God in the Christian understanding.

The Angels are the pure thoughts of God. To think is to think with the Angels and to think with the Angels at once counters and redeems our limited linear forms of reasoning, ratio, by recalling us to intellectus, to the unity of thought, to the grasp of things as a whole without which the parts fall away into nothingness. God’s question to Job echoing God’s question to us in the garden of Eden calls us to account as intellectual and spiritual beings and to a self-consciousness which recalls us to God and thus to the truth of our humanity as made in the image of God.

This does not deny the reality of suffering and evil. God’s question to us in Eden calls us to account because of our denial of what God had said about not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By disobeying we learn two great truths, our mortality and ourselves as self-conscious creatures who like God know good and evil. But unlike God, we learn this through separation and negation, through contradiction and so unlike God who knows evil through the good we have to learn the good through the experience of suffering and evil. Yet the vocation to know even as we are known remains. It impells the spiritual journey in which we are in the company of Angels who assist us in our thinking and doing. They bring down to us the thoughts of God and raise us up to the things of God.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 September

Unde malum?

Whence cometh evil? Why, if everything is so good in the Genesis accounts of creation, are things, well, so often so bad? The Judeo/Christian/Islamic understanding offers a way to think about the question of evil, of suffering and death that speaks, perhaps, to our contemporary world in its certainties and uncertainties.

Simply by beginning with the idea of creation as an orderly process whereby things are called into being and distinguished from one thing and another, order as good is strongly affirmed. This changes the whole perspective on the question of evil because the problem can’t be with the created order, with the world itself, as it were, nor with God, the intellectual and spiritual principle of the being and knowing of all things. In some cosmogonies – accounts of reality – order arises out of primordial chaos but, as a consequence, there is always a sense of uncertainty about the order of things, always the fear that chaos might overturn the order of the world. This ancient fear has its counterpart in the fears and anxieties of our own world. It is part of the contemporary disconnect from the world and from our own embodied being. Evil, it seems, is somehow ‘out there’, somehow external to us.

Genesis suggests to the contrary that the problem is not simply ‘out there’ in the fabric of the world nor is it simply ‘other people’ whom we demonize. The problem is with us, at least in terms of an aspect of our humanity. Are we not part of that good order of creation? To be sure, as made in the image of God, as the dust into which God breathes his spirit, at once connected to everything else in creation and yet distinct and having the responsibility of care for the order by acting out of the image and spirit of God that properly defines us. Unde malum, then? Whence evil? The poet John Milton offers an answer in his great poem, Paradise Lost. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe”.

‘Adam in the garden is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The commandment has to be seen as also being good, as being part of the good order of things. At issue, then, is how do we come to know good and evil? Or to put it in another way, how do we come to know that we know? Milton names the problem as disobedience. We learn but through separation, through contradicting the basis of our own knowing and being, through the experience of suffering and death, quite unlike God who knows evil through knowing the good Yet we learn and indeed embark upon the arduous journey of education, not to return to the Garden, for there is no going back, no unthinking what we have thought and done. There can only be our learning through repentance – metanoia – literally, our thinking after the things of God. We learn the good in part by learning and experiencing evil.

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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

Spinello Aretino, Saint Michael and Other AngelsThe 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.

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