Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Genesis 28:10-17
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!" 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."
John 1:47-51
When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, "Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!" Nathanael asked him, "Where did you get to know me?" Jesus answered, "I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you." Nathanael replied, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus answered, "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these." And he said to him, "Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
About two weeks ago Michelle Heyne and I were walking out into the parking lot, when she said to me, “You know that my special day is coming up, right? I thought, hmmmm…special day….Michelle…what could she mean? Then it hit me, Oh, right—St. Michael and All Angels—Michelle’s birthday, Michelle’s name. I get it.
Then she flashed me one of those looks that tells me that she’s about to say something really interesting.
“I think it’s a little weird,” she said. “I understand feast days having to do with real people….but creatures with wings? I think it’s a little weird.”
Weird it is, and weird they are meant to be.
For angels in the church’s tradition are not the fat-cheeked cherubs that appear on note cards or on lapel pins. They are also not the leggy, pouting models strutting and preening with ridiculously large wings in a lingerie ad. They are not even the unruly, haloed, adorable children of the Christmas pageants of our youth.
Rather, in the church’s tradition, angels are creatures who terrify rather than titillate, who inspire awe rather than “oh, aren’t they cute.” Angels are messengers, usually on errands for the Most High, sometimes visible to human beings and sometimes not. When they are visible—usually on extraordinary occasions—their incarnate presence is fierce and powerful. Not surprisingly, then, “Fear not” are nearly always the first words an angel speaks.
Great art captures something of the energy and essence of angels, with the icons of St Michael, in the Orthodox tradition, coming as close as any to some sort of understanding of their presence. These icons show a large winged creature with a direct gaze and a fiery countenance.
This is the same thing that Charles Williams was getting at in his novel The Place of the Lion. In that novel one of the characters speaks of the danger of believing that angels are “All nightgowns and body and…sweetness… as in cemeteries, with broken bits of marble.” No, Williams’ character says, angels are not like this, but instead “are the principles of the tiger and the volcano and the flaming suns of space.”
These are the kinds of angels that appear in Jacob’s dream in our reading from Genesis, angels ascending and descending a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. They signal the announcement and breakthrough of a wild and gracious God into the life of an imperfect man who thought he needed to steal and cheat his way to the good things of life. Such a wild and gracious message, that God had all along intended to give him the blessings that he thought he had to steal could only be heralded by angels, by creatures whose presence is that of tiger and volcano and the flaming suns of space.
Likewise Jesus in John’s gospel comes to Nathaniel in the light of day with the ultimate wild and gracious message: the messiah, the one whose power is that of tiger and volcano and the flaming suns of space, is standing right in front of you. The wild and gracious love of God has come, arriving in the humble flesh of a carpenter from Nazareth. And the ladder, if you will, the connecting point by which the power of the messiah will come to all is the cross, the place where as Jesus tells Nathanial heaven will be opened and the angels of God will ascend and descend upon the Son of Man.
And this, of course, changes everything.
It means, dear friends in Christ, that our own imperfect flesh, has become the ladder, the place where earth and heaven meet and where the wild and gracious love of God is poured out upon the world.
In Richard Selzer’s collection of essays entitled The Exact Location of the Soul he describes an encounter with an angel that brought him in touch with someone’s life that struck him as doing just that.
While staying at a Benedictine monastery outside Venice, Selzer, a physician, spent a great deal of time in the church there and became quite familiar with its lovely statuary. One day, he noticed one of the angels near the altar. This angel, unlike the others in the church, had one wing that was not only much lower than the other but was also askew—too centrally rooted at the angel’s back. All of this meant the angel was misshapen, crooked, bent over. Equally strange to him, unlike the other angels in the church whose gender was indeterminate, this angel was decidedly female. Finally, rather than having an ample body and a serene expression, this angel was “stringy…all wrists and ribs” with a gaunt face, an expression less about ecstasy and more about endurance. “(It was a face), Selzer said, “that had witnessed, that had tolerated.” It was also a face he thought he had seen before.
Three nights later while still at the monastery, Selzer awoke and sat bolt upright. Throwing on his clothes, he made his way to the church in the dark. Once there, he lit a candle and found the same misshapen angel near the altar. And then he knew where he had seen that face before.
A few months before he left his hospital in New Haven, a recovery room nurse named Adele Cleary had retired. This is how Selzer described her: “For thirty-five years, each day, Adele Cleary had received into her care dozens of postoperative patients, each of whom shared the single condition of unconsciousness, being either fully anesthetized or in emergence from that state…..While one would flail about in danger of injuring himself, another driven by some drug-released urge toward violence, would strike out at those who tended him. I remember one of her black eyes. Part of the job, Adele had said afterward. Still another patient would vomit or choke or suffer cardiac arrest and so must be resuscitated by mouth to mouth breathing and receive a beating on the chest to coax back a heart in standstill. (Not) one of her patients (will) remember Adele….To all of this Adele presented an unruffled expression. It was more than tolerance or endurance: it was acceptance, it was obedience. Adele Cleary was a hunchback. Despite the fact of her crooked spine, which was ill-concealed and even accentuated by the thin blue scrub dress she wore at work, there was no awkwardness in her ministrations. In the recovery room, if nowhere else, she was graceful.”
It is wonderful and awes-inspiring to celebrate St. Michael and All the Angels tonight—to imagine their fiery presence, to hear stories about them as messengers from and a gateway to the fierce and untamed power of God, power that burns like a tiger or a volcano or the flaming suns of space. But it is Christ Jesus who shows us what this power really is: the wild and gracious flaming heart of God’s love, a love that accepts the world of the flesh, its misshapenness and its grace, a love that chooses to be obedient unto death for the sake of the wholeness to which God calls us.
Works Cited or Consulted
Cynthia McFarland and Brian Reid in their comments on Michaelmas at Anglicans Online mention the citation from The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams. I also drew from, paraphrased and in some cases drew direct quotes from a number of their comments on angels.
Richard Selzer, “Diary of an Infidel: Notes from a Monastery” in The Exact Location of the Soul
