HOMILY GRITS The Feast of St Michael & All Angels 2001

September 29, 2001

Genesis 28:10-17 or Daniel 10:10-14; 12:1-3
Psalm 103
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51 or Luke 10:17-20

It is a story familiar to every Anglican that Gregory the Great was first inspired to send missionaries to England when he saw some strange creatures for sale in the slave markets of Rome. They were quite unlike the dark haired and flashing-eyed folk of Italy, or the dark-skinned and flashing-eyed folk of Africa, for they were fair-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned and strange. He was told they were "Angles" but thought they were Angels. A nice pun. Angles soon become Anglicans, however, and are rarely now mistaken for Angels, at least by Roman popes. What perhaps prompted Gregory to think these were Angels, however, was probably their strangeness, not their moral innocence. Another analogy of Anglicans to Angels may be, for Romans and for Protestants, that Anglicans are both different from them and yet close to them. It is difficult for most moderns to believe in either Angels or Anglicans. (Anglicans and Lutherans are the only 'protestants' who still celebrate this feast of the angels, 'though at Christmas all Christians are bidden to 'Hark! the Herald Angels sing!") To which order of creatures does this hymn refer?

                       You are pure spirit
                        But we here below
                        Linked in both orders
                        Are tossed to and fro.

The hymn means by "both orders" the orders of spirit and matter--but that is not technically correct. For to dispel the confusion, the collect for the feast says that there is but one order, not two: "Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals". Spirit and matter are not to be so neatly distinguished as to be thought of as two orders, alien to each other in creation. And this is what is so upsetting and so odd about the angels. We name the day for "Saint" Michael indeed, just like Saint Peter or Saint Paul, and yet "he"/"she"/ or "it" is quite different from us. The Bible also tells of Gabriel and Raphael, but there are others. Our feast includes all of them with an 'etcetera,' "& All Angels." The holiday, called Michaelmas, even survived Oliver Cromwell's mauling the calendar.

William Blake claimed that "it is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone." Men and women do not get to be called 'saints' unless they have learned that, too, which the angels have known all along: God alone is thrice Holy. This is the song the angels taught us, and we rarely gather for worship without borrowing it from them again and again: "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might. Heaven and earth are full of your glory." The belief in angels more than anything may be what distinguishes believers (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) from the unbelievers of the age. It was an angel that first called on Mary of Nazareth with revolutionary news. It was an angel that delivered the glorious Qu'Ran to the illiterate Prophet. Each is believed to be an incarnational occasion. The few Zoroastrians left in the world believe in angels, and it is apparently from them that much of our angelology was derived.

One of my seminary teachers pointed out long ago that the grounds for disbelief in angels are the same as the grounds for disbelief in God: an inability to admit the existence of a realm of incorporeal spirit. We think that to be "humanist" we must cease being "angelist." But the angels are better humanists than we are, for they are always rooting for us mortals. Look at the message of the Christmas angels: "Peace on earth amongst those of good will." And look at the ministryof angels in the story of Jesus himself: from Joseph's dire dream of warning, 'Get out of town right now' to the bright gospel angels at the tomb, 'He isn't here! He is risen! Go and tell his students!' It is always an "Eu - Angel" a "good Angel", a "good Message", a Good Spiel, which they have come to be and to bring us. In their case, pure spirit as they are, the Medium is the Message. In the words of that same Gregory who mistook English children for angels, "You should be aware that the word 'angel'denotes a function rather than a nature. These holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. [But] they can only be called angels when they deliver some message. . . some angels are given proper names to denote the service they are empowered to perform. In that holy city, where perfect knowledge flows from the vision of almighty God, those who have no names may easily be known. But personal names are assigned to some, not because they could not be known without them, but rather to denote their ministry when they come among us."

True, "Mic-ha-el" means a question: "Who is like God?" and "Gab-ri-el" is "the Strength of God," and "Rap-ha-el" is "God's Remedy." And "U-ri-el" is the "Fire of God." One of the titles for the ordained minister is "Angel of the Church", and his or her life and preaching are to be an "evangel" to the church, for in the case of ordained ministry, too, the medium is to be the message, and not a massage. Paul says of us however that "we have this treasure in earthen vessels". The ministry of he gospel is an invasion of the world with the authority of Christ's word. The first mission to the Gentiles, outside the hedges of Israel, was the mission of the Seventy, and it was accompanied by wondrous signs. The disciples returned with glee, singing their equivalent of "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott" in the words of Martin Luther. "One little word shall fell him", for the gospel agel is aggressive! Jesus himself was filled with a vision in which he saw Satan "fall like lightning from heaven."

"The Commonwealth of God does not consist in mere talk," wrote St. Paul, "but in power." God's power over all the power of the enemy. Yet the * lust * for power is itself a diabolic temptation, and Jesus warns of it: "Do not rejoice that the spirits are subject to you; instead, rejoice that you have a future in heaven." Your names are written in the Book of Life. "A hand touched me and set me trembling, then said to me, I have come because of your words" said the angel to Daniel in the vision. "Your words have been heard." Elie Wiesel writes in "Messengers of God":


   "Be careful with words.  They're dangerous.  They beget other words,
    or angels.  It's up to you to give life to one or the other.  Be careful.
    I tell you nothing is as dangerous as giving free reign to words."

Michaelmas is traditionally the beginning of the Academic Year. The academic enterprise deals with angels, that is with words, with messages and messengers. The 'angels' of science, culture, art, and religion. And the struggle for meaning in this enterprise is a wrestling with the angels, and some of them are demons. The devils are, after all, fallen angels: messages missent, nihilistic, pointless, inchoate, absurd, headed for the dead letter office. "Absurd" is a word dervied from a word for "deaf" as "obedient" is derived from a word for "hearing." The difference between an angel and a devil may simply be this, that an angel is obedient, and a devil is a absurd, deaf and oblivious to the Word. One authority, says Alan Watts in "Myth and Ritual in Christianity", claimed there were 7,405,998 fallen angels, who have lost 'the good of the intellect'. That is Dante's definition of the devils and the damned as well--those who have lost the good of the intellect. They can no longer hear God's voice because they no longer listen for it. They have become 'absurd'. The Academic enterprise is one of listening, of making sense of life. And this is why God has sent us angels, and why we have our traditions of education, for the world does not make sense of itself. It needs interpretation, it needs visions, dreams, a running commentary. It needs to hear the message of the angels, who help us to define humans, just as dough-nut holes help to define dough nuts. They are indeed pure, and we can't see them, and without the purely spiritual hole in the cake, we have no dough-nut. Their ministry is so self-effacing that it is not necessary to believe in it to benefit from it. Somewhat like the atmosphere, it's here anyway, to our great, if ignorant, benefit.

Angels minister to us especially in our solitude, in our aloneness, sometimes with the insights that come into consciousness suddenly, in somewhat the same way that the fallen angels are equipped to tempt us: sometimes unannounced, suddenly, they torment. So the angels can minister not only suddenly, but swiftly. Their wings, in art, denote that swiftness, and are not intended to be realistic representations. They are also depicted as having mouths, but their mouths, unlike ours, are dedicated only to singing motets and whispering sweet somethings, for voicing communiqués and cantatas. Maybe even for kisses. But they do not like us need to keep alive by stuffing bits and lumps of the remains of other creatures into the hole at the upper end of themselves, as we do. But then, they do not need the Eucharist either, 'though they are always there when we are. Our singing and speaking with our mouths is for us an added extra, one that we may even say was an evolution wherein a sideline became (for preachers at least) the primary use of the orifice. But preaching can never become the exclusive use of our mouths while we remain mortal. For, along with the night-blooming cereus, we are part of that wonderful order which is forever mortal. And we alone of the creatures need to eat the bread of angels, the Panis Angelicus which is the "Food of Those Wayfaring." It has been called a mystery that the angels themselves 'desire to look into.' Unless modern women and men can recover some measure of solitude, some time to pray (and it is one of the ministries of angels to carry our prayers to God), some time to feel the rustling of their wings again, and to listen to God, we shall miss the humanizing message of the angels, and forget that we too are . creatures.

Apocalyptic literature is full of angels and demons. Times of calamity, of global conflict and tribulation bring on disastrous, cataclysmic visions, even on television. While the angels in church windows are almost always young, beardless, bosomy, usually androgynous, of indeterminate gender, this may not be a bad start. In the Bible, angels are not so much sweet as they are strong. and their wings might nowadays be replaced in art by jump suits and rocket powered pogo sticks. We need the assurance of their strength. Science fiction does better service here than church windows: it's a much better apocalyptic. C. S. Lewis's "Perelandra", one of his novels which should be read as sequels to Daniel and Revelation, has a description of angels which is provocative indeed. In "Perelandra" the hero, named Ransom, meets the angels of Mars and Venus, for planets as well as countries have angels. In Daniel's vision, the angel of Persia (now the angel of Iran) kept Gabriel bogged down in an argument for three weeks, delaying the interview with Daniel. Here's Lewis's description of the angels:

"Two gigantic incandescent figures in human form, compared with whose glory, at once dynamic and stable, the whole planetary environment seemed tilting and drifting. One--the angel of Mars, shone with a light that was pure, hard, and bracing. The other, the angel of Venus, glowed with a warm splendour. But on the faces of both one single changeless expression was stamped, which the observer could only identify as charity: but it was more terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or descending into, natural affection. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love, shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity."
Ferocious love. Not to consume, to ingest, as devils do the souls of men and women in their hatred. As Wormwood pointed out to his nephew in The Screwtape Letters, the fallen angel lives by eating up the souls, sucking out the life, of humans. "A human is primarily food," he writes, "our aim is the absorption of its will into ours." The angel of God is instead a ferocious lover of the human race, and it is in our own day more intent to assist us than we are ready to be assisted. But the assistance, if it is to be for our liberation, must be secret, unseen, as the presence of angels was all about Elisha on the mountain. "Open the eye of this young man," Elisha prayed, "because he feels that we are outnumbered." An enemy army, with horses and chariots, was round about the city. And the young man despaired, "Alas, what shall we do?" And Elisha prayed, "O Lord, I pray thee open his eyes that he may see." So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw. "and behold, the mountain was full of horsres and chariots of fire round about Elisha." The assurance of the Scriptures is that the love of God is secretly ministered, if not obviously manifested to us, in the ministry of angels. They whisper to us in our blessed nights and insights, come to us in the gift of reason and intelligence, and speak to us in the gospel of Jesus, and the lives of holy people. In John Macquarrie's "Principles of Christian Theology" he writes that "the doctrine of the angels opens our eyes to this vast, unimaginable cooperative striving and service, as all things seek to be like God and to attain fulness of being in God. . . the doctrine of the angels directs our minds to the vastness and richness of creation, and every advance of science opens up still more distinct horizons. Any mere humanistic creed that makes man the measure of all things or regards him as the sole author of values is narrow and parochial."
The writer to the Hebrews, comparing Gospel to Law, puts it this way: " For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them. . . but you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first born who are enrolled in haven, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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