Lord, take my lips and speak through them; take our minds and think through them; take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you and for your world. Amen.
If I am to be totally honest with you, then I must admit that I really wasn’t looking forward to preaching here this morning. Now, please don’t take that personally, it isn’t about you and it really is a pleasure to be here with you this morning – in fact, it’s the third time in less than a month that I have been here, for a variety of different services, and it’s been a place of welcome every time.
No, the reason I didn’t look forward to preaching here this morning was because it is your patronal Sunday and therefore that meant that in this sermon, I would have to say something about angels. And even if I was to wilfully ignore it, then well, our Gospel reading set for this morning doesn’t leave much choice. I suppose you can always expect Jesus to throw a spanner in the works!
If there is something I rather not think about, let alone have to preach on, then it is angels. Do a Google search for “Angels” and you are bombarded with a multitude of ideas and understandings of these creatures. It is all about superstitious folk religion, fairy godmothers and odd-looking winged creatures.
Similarly, looking at Amazon’s bestselling books on angels can only drive one to despair. The Sunday Times bestselling paranormal author, Theresa Cheung promises to tell us ”The Truth about Angels: Decoding the secret world and language of the afterlife”. If you like the sound of that, it is only £2.97 at the moment. Or if you think that surely such wonderful knowledge must cost a bit more than that, for a mere £8.07 you can buy “Connecting with the Angels Made Easy: How to See, Hear and Feel Your Angels” from ‘The Hottest Name in Spirituality’ and ‘Angel Reader’, Kyle Gray, who has also written extensively on ‘how to raise your vibration’ – we will leave it at that.
All this stuff; all this cheap, sham spirituality has one thing in common – there is very little in about the God of the Bible, and even less so about Jesus as the Son of God. Which is why, I realised, I don’t like thinking about angels and why I was a bit wary about preaching today. But, having prepared this sermon, I now know I was wrong – not necessarily about the popular angel nonsense, but about letting that stop me from seeing the place that angels do have within the life of the church.
Because as much as Jesus may have thrown a spanner in my works with his talk about angels in our Gospel, He -of course- provides the answer also.
In our short Gospel reading we hear a lot being said about Jesus. He is the ‘Son of God’, he is the ‘King of Israel’. That is what Nathanael exclaims. Jesus doesn’t dispute it, but he does add to it. Jesus refers to himself as the ‘The Son of Man’, which draws the focus sharply to his ministry here on earth and emphasises the point John wants to make in the opening chapter of his Gospel.
John’s Gospel is all about the coming of God to humanity, not in a proxy form but in the fullness and mystery of the incarnation where Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human. Jesus adding the title ‘Son of Man’ to Nathanael’s faith in Him as the ‘Son of God’, returns us to what John wrote at the start of the chapter: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory”.
Jesus is the fulness of God coming down to earth. Yes, the Son of God, but also the Son of Man. And as part of this statement about the incarnation, Jesus gives us this image of heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending upon him. And this image gives us a clue as to what we are to make of angels and how we are to interact with them.
In the Bible angels are messengers of God. And their messages always witness to the same reality: God is not far away or inaccessible. God is not a Deist God, a distant creator who no longer is involved in the world, leaving it to run its course. And this we find ultimately expressed in Jesus Christ. In Jesus we find that God is not distant, far removed, or uninterested in humanity. In Jesus heaven and earth meet. And as God’s messengers, angels are there to remind us of that.
But as much as angels help us to see that heaven and earth do meet, that God is not far away or inaccessible, John makes it clear that it is never about them. This is all about Jesus; the angels and their movement can only ever be Christ oriented. In Jesus Christ, the Son of God is also the Son of Man. On Jesus Christ the angels ascend and descend. And through Jesus Christ heaven and earth are united.
But the incredible thing is that in Christ are we are not only to experience God coming down to us, the image of the angels ascending and descending points us to something else. The movement of the angels reminds us that as God comes down to us in Christ, we are also through Christ pulled up out of our darkness into the very life of God. The angels are messengers of that, and they only exist because of it.
The writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton once said that “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”. That is a clue for how we are to approach angels. Angels are merely signposts, there to point us to Christ, the fullness of God.
I started my sermon by making fun of the sham spirituality around angels you can literally buy into for a few quid on Amazon. But deep down, it actually isn’t funny; it preys on people’s spiritual hunger and offers them something that will never satisfy. And even if people were to somehow connect with angels, it is missing the point or more importantly: it is missing Christ and therefore the fulness of God.
But this is the thing, as much as we can make fun of or despair at what this so-called angel industry offers people, we need to recognise that there is clearly a spiritual hunger out there.
I think that too often as the church we forget this. Faced with decline and churches that are closing their doors, we think that there is no longer an appetite for God. But there is! There is a spiritual hunger and whilst the Church doesn’t see it and is increasingly inward looking, others do see it and attempt to fill the gap with all sorts of new spiritualities.
But to try and satisfy that spiritual hunger with something which is never going to satisfy it, and very often exists only to generate profit for those who sell it, is nothing other than evil and wicked. How fitting it is then that St Michael is the angel who fights the spiritual war against evil and comes to the aid of those who join him in this fight.
Because as the church, that is part of our vocation: to fight against the spiritual forces of evil. That may sound grand and violent, but actually on this your patronal Sunday, St Michael and All Angels point us to a very simple reality.
To with Michael stand against the spiritual forces of evil, is to oppose the sham spirituality which leaves people hungry and instead point them to Christ. We, with the angels as our example, are to be messengers; we are to point people to Christ, so that in Christ they are taken up into the life of God and have their hunger truly satisfied.
So today:
may you look to the angels as a reminder of your mission here in this part of St Albans: to be messengers who point people to Jesus Christ, the bread of heaven who alone can and will satisfy the hunger of our hearts. And may you know that St Michael and all the Angels are there to come to your aid.
Fr Corniel Quak
Assistant Curate