Preached on the feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), September 29, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.
Genesis 28:10-17
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Which means that today we are celebrating something mysterious. It is mysterious because we at once seem to know a lot about angels, and very little. Angels are well attested in Scripture, including by Jesus in today’s Gospel passage. But what are they?
The mystical theologian of late antiquity whom we call Pseudo-Dionysius writes this about angels in the treatise called The Celestial Hierarchy: “…it is they who first are granted the divine enlightenment and is is they who pass on to us these revelations which are so far beyond us.”
Angels are messengers from God to us. That’s what the word “angel” means. It simply means messenger. But not just any messenger. An angel is a messenger specifically from God, passing on to us revelation of the will of God.
In Hebrew Scripture, angels tend to show up when it is time to confirm covenant with God. In the reading from Genesis this morning, Jacob dreams about angels at the moment that God confirms for Jacob the covenant made with Abraham and Sarah and Isaac. We may recall that when Abraham and Sarah encountered angels it was also an occasion for the confirmation of the promises of God. But this confirmation seems always to shake things up, to invite us to shift our perspective, to challenge our assumptions.
When ‘Jacob woke from his sleep [he] said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” He did not know it. This is what I mean when I say that an interaction with an angel can shake us, in a good way. Jacob learned that night something new about God, and about the place where Jacob was.
‘And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”’ Imagine being in a place that you do not expect to be the house of God, and receiving, in a vision of angels, the good news that where you are is the gate of heaven.
It is common to refer to a church as a house of God. I like to follow Paul, and the Gospel of John, in the idea that we as the Body of Christ, become the house of God. If a church is a house of God, it is because in it are people who bear the image of God, and who are doing their best to pay attention to God, to listen to God.
I like to think of the Eucharist as a gate of heaven, the fulcrum of the Cosmos. Jesus says to Nathanael, and to us, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
I believe that when we together celebrate the Eucharist, and enter into the mystery, trembling, maybe with a little bit of the fear of Jacob, maybe a little bit with the glad astonishment of Nathanael—I believe when we enter into the mystery of this sacrament together, we are encountering the awesomeness of a time and place when God is with us, in Christ.
And I believe that it is possible that there may be angels “ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” when we gather to offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
Angels are messengers of God that confirm our covenantal relationship with God, and in the Gospels, confirm Jesus as the Son of God, the Logos, the Christ. And in confirming Christ, angels confirm Christ in us. But angels can only do so much. They are messengers. They are not God. They are not Jesus the Christ. Nor are they us.
In the reading from Revelation, Michael and other angels do a lot. They engage in an epic battle. It conjures extraordinary scenes of beings of awesome power, beings that in many ways, to echo Pseudo-Dionysius, are “so far beyond us.”
If we are not careful, we could interpret this to mean that angels are taking care of everything. Sure, we should do the usual things of loving God and loving neighbor, steadfastly following the Way of Jesus as best as we can, together, but perhaps in the end, at the time of this epic battle, we are mainly spectators, watching the angels do their thing.
Not so. Notice that in the reading, after the battle between the angels, the decisive defeat of the Accuser comes through the action of people. Let’s hear this part of the reading again: ‘Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades…” —“comrades” here means followers of Jesus, confessing Christians— “for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. But they [the comrades, Christians, us!] have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.
People, us, conquer the accuser by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. We are to conquer the accuser through Christ. We are not bystanders in this struggle. We do not only tremble. We also act. Jacob, once he collected himself, renamed the place he was as a place of God. He confirmed his covenant with God. Jacob heard the message of angels, and he acted.
In Revelation, the followers of Lamb witness the work of angels, and they act. We, here today, set aside time and space to pray, to consider together the mystery of the angelic order. Today we bear witness to the ministry of angels throughout Scripture, and throughout the history of the traditions of the Church. And directly pursuant to our witness, comes our action.
This is our time to act. The angels have done what can. They have conveyed the message, the good news, that our God is in intimate, faithful, covenant with us, and that Jesus Christ is indeed the Son of God, and that we are to listen to him, and to follow him. We are to love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Let us gather at this table today in a spirit of action. The heavens have opened, the trumpets resound, and Christ wins the victory over despair, over the Accuser, over death itself. We are not bystanders in this, but are to participate, here and now, in Christ’s victory. Let us share the bread, knowing that the Lamb has poured out his blood for the reconciliation of all, and be courageous in our testimony, to each other, and to all the world.