Michael and All Angels
2 October 2011
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Propers: Genesis 28.10-17; Psalm 103.19-22; Revelation
12.7-12; John 1.47-51
Recently
I re-read some chapters in Margaret Guenther’s book, The Practice of Prayer. One of
her key convictions is that the God in whom we live and move and have our being
is a God who desires communication, who reaches out to speak to us, to touch us
and to converse with us through many and various means and agents.
I
find this to be a conviction that I share.
I remember reading a comment made by Albert Einstein to the effect that
God is mysterious but not malicious.
Mystery, that deep and unyielding intuition that there is more to know
and to learn than first meets our eyes and other senses, entices us into exploration
and requires us to be attentive. To
those who are attentive mystery sheds some but not all of its secrets.
How
many of us will acknowledge the mysteries that our partners, our children, our
kin and our friends are? I never cease
to be surprised at the new things I learn about and experience in those whom I
love and with whom I work. Just as I
think that I know someone, he or she reveals a new dimension of her or his
character I did not expect. It is, as C.
S. Lewis remarked, as if I am peeling an onion, layer by layer, only to
discover the onion is not growing smaller but larger.
What
is true about the mystery that we call a human being is also true of the One in
whose image and likeness we were made and are being re-made. Although God is mysterious, God is not
malicious and does not seek to cloak the divine self from us. In many and various ways God unveils the
divine presence.
Sometimes
this unveiling comes to us in dreams.
When we dream, we surrender the order our conscious mind imposes upon
the complex world of our thoughts, experiences, memories, intuitions and
emotions. New combinations, new patterns
and new interpretations arise that may help us come closer to understanding the
mystery that is ourselves and that is God.
Just recently I had a dream that conveyed a simple yet undeniably divine
word to me: ‘Stop talking and doing and just
listen!’ I am still trying to actualize
that word in my life!
Sometimes
God communicates to us through the agency of a prophet. Let me remind you that a prophet does not
predict the future. A prophet speaks
God’s word to us, sometimes a word of judgement, sometimes a word of hope. But it is always a word spoken to us in the
here and now, in the hurly-burley of our lives.
A prophet’s word is always compelling and demands a response, whether
that response is denial, opposition or acceptance.
Whether
climate change is a natural occurrence or a human-made event or a combination
of the two, there are prophets who are calling us to change our ways if we hope
to preserve some aspects of our life-giving human cultures. Whether we belong to the Conservative,
Liberal, New Democratic or Bloc Québecois or no party at all, there are prophets who are calling us
to embrace consensus for the common good of all rather than partisan self-interest
which serve no one.
Some of these
prophets are religious and others are not, but all, I believe, are speaking
God’s word to us now. God calls us to be
stewards of creation rather than consumers of its bounty. God calls us to seek the good of the other
rather than pursue self-interest at any expense. God refuses to be silent --- even in the
public sphere.
Then there are
moments when God speaks to us by means of angels, a word whose original meaning
was simply ‘messenger’. Over the centuries
Christians and other religious traditions have shared a common experience of
messengers who are neither dreams or prophets.
Greeting cards, school Christmas pageants and popular culture have
reduced these messengers to saccharine counterfeits, but anyone who has
experienced such a visitation knows that such messengers, whether visible or
invisible, never resemble a chubby-faced child or an androgynous figure with
wings. It is an experience of awe and
trepidation.
For some religious
believers, belief in angels is a relic of our more superstitious past. But if scientists can observe atomic
particles exceeding the speed of light, a phenomena that was previously
believed to be impossible, then it cannot be so difficult to believe that the
Holy One who created all things, seen and unseen, might employ the agency of
spiritual messengers. There have been
moments in my life when the presence of such messengers has been as certain to
me as your presence before me today. I
cannot prove their existence to you; I can only tell you about the
experience. It is left to you to decide
what to believe. Here, at least, we can
apply an old Anglican adage: All may
believe in angels. Some should believe
in angels. None must believe in
angels. My own experience places me in
the second category!
To believe in angels
is to believe in a universe in which neutrons move faster than light. To believe in angels is to believe in a world
in which every human being has the potential to surprise us by revealing themselves
to be more than we could ask or imagine.
Whether these angels
have names such as Michael or Gabriel or Raphael or Uriel or no names at all,
God’s messengers come to us. Sometimes
they bestow upon us that moment of insight that transforms doubt into action. Sometimes they show us a way through our
impasses by steering us onto unexpected paths that turn out to be the very ones
we have always sought.
To celebrate angels
is to offer thanks to the One who does not remain silent or distant. So, with saints on earth and saints in
heaven, with cherubim, seraphim and the hosts of heaven, let us glorify and
magnify the Holy One, creator all that is, seen and unseen, from this day
forward to the ages of ages. Amen.
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