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St Michael & All Angels
H o
m i l y G r i t s
Saint
Michael and All Angels
September 29,
2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order
the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your
holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your
appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Genesis 28: 10-17 And the angels of God were ascending and descending
upon it.
Psalm 103 or 103: 19-22 Benedic, anima mea - Bless the Lord, O my soul
Revelation 12:7-12 Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.
John 1: 47-51 You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending
and descending upon the Truly Human One.
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Daniel 10:10-14; 12:1-3 At that time Michael, the great prince, the
protector of your people, shall arise.
Psalm 103:1-5, 20-22 as above BCP
Bless the Lord, you angels of the Lord. (Ps. 103:20)
Revelation 12:7-12 as above BCP
Luke 10:17-20 Jesus said to them, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like
a flash of lightning!"
¶ Roman Catholic lectionary
Feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, & Raphael
Zechariah 8:1-8 And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and
girls playing in the streets.
Psalm 101 (Vulgate) = 102 Jersualem Bible - Prayer of the abandoned
Luke 9:46-50 An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the
greatest.
Gregory the Great, Bishop: A homily on the gospels. (1)
You should be aware that the word 'angel' denotes a function rather than
a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits.
They can only be called angels when they deliver some message. Moreover,
those who deliver messages of lesser importance are called angels; and
those who proclaim messages of supreme importance are called archangels.
And so it was that not merely an angel but the archangel Gabriel was sent
to the VirginMary. It was only fitting that the highest angel should
come to announce the greatest of all messages. Some angels are given
proper names to denote the service they are empowered to perform. In
that holy city, where perfect knowledge flows form 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. Thus, Michael
means 'Who is like God?' , Gabriel is 'the Strength of God' and Raphael
is 'God's remedy.'
¶ Christopher Smart, Mystic, Poet & Lunatic
(from A Song to David, verses 50 & 51) (2)
PRAISE above all--for praise prevails;
Heap up the treasure, load the scales,
and good to goodness add;
The gen'rous soul her saviour aids,
But peevish obloquy degrades;
The Lord is great and glad.
For ADORATION all the ranks
Of angels yield eternal thanks,
And DAVID in the midst;
With God's good poor, which, last and least
In man's esteem, thou to thy feast,
O blessed bride-groom, bidst.
Archbishop William Temple: Daily Readings (3)
545. September Twenty-ninth. SEEING ANGELS.
When men 'see' or 'hear' angels, it is rather to be supposed that an
intense interior awareness of a divine message leads to the projection of
an image which is then experienced as an occasion of something seen and
heard. That divine messengers were sent and divine messages received we
need not doubt; that they took physical form so that all who 'saw'
anything must 'see' the same thing we need not suppose.
Amma Theodora, Desert Mother (Egypt, 4th Century) (4)
She also said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of
suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that. There was an
anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and asked them, 'What makes
you go away? Is it fasting?" They replied, 'We do not eat or drink.' 'Is
it vigils?' They replied, 'We do not sleep.' Is it separation from the
world?' 'We live in the deserts.' 'What power sends you away then?'
They said, 'Nothing can overcome us, but only humility.'
'Do you see how humility is victorius over the demons?' '
The Holy Qur'an: 'Al-Qadr (The Night of Power) (5)
"In the Name of God, the Infinitely Compasionate and Most Merciful. We
have indeed revealed this during the Night of Power. And what will
explain to you what the Night of Power is? The Night of Power is greater
than a thousand months. Within it the angels descend bearing divine
inspiration by God's permission upon every mission. Peace! This, until
the rise of dawn!"
Years ago in Guatemala City, a young seminarian friend and I had occasion
to make a hospital call on Don Herlindo Hicho, in whose home we had been
guests for seven weeks while we studied Spanish at the Oscar Romerto
Institute in a secret location there. Don Herlindo had been one of the
leaders of a Guatemalan resistance group, which was made up of survivors
of the U.S. sponsored terror there in the seventies, who were still
looking for their disappeared family members. Don Herlindo's daughter, a
university student who took part in student organization, had been
"disappeared" by the death squads, and never seen again. We stayed in
her bed-room, surrounded by her childhood toys, and prayed together for
her and all the desaparecidos of the smitten country. Kevin and I went
to see Don Herlindo in the Social Security Hospital; twelve hours after
his operation he was sitting up in bed in a crowded ward of twenty four
beds, his gall stones in a little plastic bag hanging from the bedstead.
Hundreds of visitors shoved themselves into the ward during the one hour
a day permitted for visits, so the place was as busy as a subway station
at rush hour. The cranking device to raise Don Herlindo's bed didn't
work, so the nurse had stuffed a foot-stool between the mattress and the
bedsprings, to prop him up. The signs of poverty were everywhere, from
tattered sheets to soiled curtains. But in one corner of the corridor
outside the ward stood the polychromed statue of an angel, in a green,
red and yellow blouse and skirt, over blue breeches, holding a large
fish under one arm and a trident (a long, three-pronged pitch fork) in
the other hand. Around the angel's neck were dangling rosaries, medals
on their chains, amulets and scapulars. Candles burned around the
angel's feet, and flowers, real ones, silk ones, and plastic ones, in
little vases had been left there in hopes of the Angel's attention to a
particular visitor's prayers. Where medical care is chancy, the angels
are more likely to be called upon. This, I figured out after a bit,
might be the Archanel Raphael, mentioned in the Bible in the Book of
Tobit. Raphael means "God heals." All the names we have that end in the
letters "el" come from a Hebrew word for "God." (Rachel, Daniel, Bethel,
Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, Oriel, Joel, Muriel, Ezekiel, and so forth and
so on.) There are only four given names for angels in our Bible, and
Raphael is thought to be the one who troubled the waters in the fifth
chapter of John's gospel, at the Sheep Pool at Bethesda, where the man
who had been lying there for thirty six years still waited for the
waters. He never quite made it to the bubbles because others got there
before him and shoved him out of the way, so he never got help or healing
till Jesus came along and said "Don't depend on that pool, fool. If you
really want to be healed, don't wait for others to manage your health;
you are the subject of this story, not the sheep pool at Bethesda."
The other of the Big Four angels are Gabriel (whom we know from his
message to Mary of Nazareth on March 25, that she was pregnant with the
gospel revolution that would begin in nine months) and Uriel, about whom
little is known, except that one of Nicaragua's great liberation
theologians, Uriel Molina, was named for him. He is one of the seven
archangels of rabbinical angelology*. And finally Michael, the one angel
whose name is in the Anglican and Lutheran liturgical calendars, gathered
with "All Angels" for this day. They are all given the name "saint" here
not to mean that they were really neat Christians who got it all
together, because the angels are not human beings who won the prize and
got to be perfect.
Instead, they are pure spirits, of a different order of creature, and are
like us human beings in that they have (or are) intelligence and will,
but unlike us in that they can take up bodily form when they need to, and
let it rest somewhere when not needed.
The old African American spiritual, "Michael, row the boat ashore" is a
prayer to the Archangel, and seems to refer to the fact that Michael has
always (long before St Peter got the job) the angel who received the
souls of the dying, and protected them from the devil, and made sure they
got to heaven-haven. "Mich-a-el" is a challenge: "Who is like God?"
that is,
"Who dares to make themselves God's equal"? For Michael is the angel
who is mentioned in the book Revelation, as leading the war against
Satan, and is the High Sherriff who evicted the fallen angels from
heaven. (A religious sect in Iraq, the Yezidis, believe they've been
forgiven and restored to favor.) (6)
The word "angel" is a Greek word that means "messenger". Jews,
Christians, and Muslims have inherited and embraced the belief in angels
because we have always somehow felt that there are beneficent spirits
about us in the world, sent from God, to guide to hint, to suggest, to
prod, to give us good vibes as we might say nowadays, or to warn us with
bad vibes.
Sentimental pictures show perfect cherubic children being guided across
treacherous chasms in the forest by a bright blond angel with ample
bosoms. A caricature of the idea that there's a motherly creature
flying about to accompany us.
But the idea is that we are not alone. Angels will not do our work for
us--God's good spirits breathing in our world will not take over our
tasks nor do our homework whilst we are asleep. They will not turn
coleslaw into caviar for our supper if we rub the feet of their statues.
I would have tried it. They will not rid us of gallstones without the
help of medicine. But God's spirits, the angels, work in human history
through us. They are messengers, not mannikins, or puppets, or
inflatable toys. In the last of the Stations of the Way of the Cross of
Solentiname, the series of paintings made at the artists' colony in the
Nicaraguan archipelago in the seventies and eighties, there is an angel
of the resurrection there to shout "Presente ! " He's got a beard like a
macho Nicaraguan male, although angels are strictly speaking genderless,
so they have no need for primary or secondary sexual characteristics,
neither genitalia, nor big breasts nor big beards. The angels are pure
unbounded love and don't make new angels by an inter -angelic Anglican
congress, whether hetero- or homo- or bi- . But the Angel of
Solentiname has a face familiar to Nicaraguans--it is the face of Carlos
Fonseca, the firebrand revolutionary who founded the Sandinitas
Liberation Front, the FSLN, that brought Rsurrection to Nicaragua. He
was killed by the U.S.-sponsored Somoza dictatorship in 1978, on the Eve
of the Triumph, and his murdered body is buried in downtown Managua, in
the Plaza Mayor. Latin America is littered, from Mexico to the Isthmus of
Panama and on South to the Tierra del Fuego, with the victims of U.S.
tyranny, and yet at the end of these nation stations of the Cross are the
Angels of a Resurrected Patria Grande, young and bearded like Carlos
Fonseca, shouting out Patria Libre o Morir! and bosomed like Norma Elena
Gadea, singing out the good news of Guantanamera! Don Herlindo and his
daughter will stand together at the Resurrection of the Just, invited
there by the Angel of the Resurrection, to meet the One who will say to
them, "Come, ye blessed of my Father. Inherit the Kingdom prepared for
you from the foundation of the world." .
This is a good lesson about angels. In fact, messengers of
God--spiritual input from God, is all about us. The messages of God are
spoken in our friends and compañeros, in our political struggles, in our
social upheavals, where ever there's a workers' strike or a people's
struggle, wherever the truth is asserted and peace is being waged against
the ways of war. And the angels are struggling in us, along with
medicine and healthy habits, food and decent living space, rest and
workers' rights to sabbath. Wherever there's a war going on, in our
bodies, minds, and spirits, as individuals, and as the Body of Christ.
The metaphor of ANGELS is a way of reminding us that we are not alone in
our struggles, that spiritual power is all around us and accessible.
And we don't always recognize the angels when they move among us, when
the spirits of God assume fleshly form-- when in the Bethlehem story
choirs of angels gathered there and filled the air. God became One with
the human project in the lap of Mary, and it delighted the universe of
blessed spirits. We need not fear to call upon the angels, but we ought
never to expect them to do our work for us, ' though it is said that
they can be called upon to finish our prayers for us if we are too tired
from waiting on others to do so ourselves. Jesus said to the man at the
Sheep Pool at Bethesda, it's time for you to move on the matter of your
own health, and if you want to be well, GO FOR IT.
Do you want control of your life, do you want to have a hand in the
future of your neighborhood, do you want a part in the building of the
Reign of God in our time? Don't wait for the water in the pool to be
stirred by an angel-- they may all be busy helping those who make a run
for it, those who crash through the barricades, who push through to the
Line of March.
Do you want the Revolution now? The angels are ready. "They been
ready." It's now up to you-- GO FOR IT! .
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) Gregory the Great. Homily 34, 8-9 PL 1250-1251, from The Prayer Book
Office, compiled and edited by Howard Galley, New York: Seabury Press.
1980.
(2) Christopher Smart: The Religious Poetry. Edited by Marcus Walsh.
Manchester, Fyfield Books. 1997.
copyright by Marcus Walsh 1972 and 1979.
(3) Daily Readings from William Temple, compiled by Hugh C. Warner,
edited and abridged by William Wand.
New York & Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965.
(4) Amma Theodora. From The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and
Stories of early Christian Women. Laura Swan. New York: Paulist Press.
2001. Copyright Saint Placid's Priory.
(5) The Night of Power. From The Light of Dawn: Daily Readings from the
Holy Qurán. Seleced and rendered by Camille Adams Helminski. Boston &
London. Shambhala, 2000. Copyright Camille Adams Helminski. [ "The night
during which the Prohet Muhammad received the first revelation.
Tradition reports that historically it was one of the last ten nights of
the month of Ramadan, probably the 27th. The Night of Power is a night
when inspiration arrives and closeness with one's Sustainer. One must be
watchful for its coming." -- CAH. "]
(6) "Yezidis. A rare and esoteric religion, perhaps originally an
offshoot of some Gnostic Christian or heretical Muslim sect. Yezidis
believe that Lucifer, having extinguished the flames of hell with the
tears of his penitence, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as the
chief Angel, now known as Malik Tawus, the Peacock Angel, he superintends
the daily running of the world. Abused as devil-worshippers by their
enemies, the Yezidis get on surprisingly well with the Syrian Orthodox in
whose villages many of the Turkish Yezidis live, and whose saints the
Yezidis also venerate. The Yezidis can also be found in Georgia,
Armenia, and Iraq"--NOTE from Wlliam Dalrymple's wonderful book, "From
the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East.
New York: Henry Holt and Company. An Owl Books. 1999.. The Christian
Peacemaker Team with which I went to Iraq in March of 2003 visited the
Yezidi Church's hometown, and some of us prayed in their chapel, which
had to be crawled into through a very low arch, requiring great humility
to get inside. They have a reputation in Iraq among some people as being
devil-worshippers, but I found their belief system not really alien to my
own universalist, if not unitarian, opinions.--GMG
* Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable lists the others as Chamuel,
Jophil, and Zadkiel. According to the Koran there are four archangels,
Gabriel, who is God's stenographer, Michael, the champ, who fights
Gods'battles; Azrael, the angel of Death, and Israfel, who will sound the
last trumpet. In Milton's Paradise Lost, Uriel is the "Regent of the
Sun"and the sharpest sighted spirit of all in heaven."