Michael and All Angels
Sermon
29 September 2024
Michael and All Angels
The Reverend Devin McLachlan
Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted the ministries of angels and mortals in a wonderful order: grant us that as your holy angels always serve you in heaven, so, at your command, they may help and defend us on earth.
One of of the legends which I love about St Bene’t’s is that in the early Middle Ages, there was an owlery in the tower.
It’s such a charming thought, and it explains the peculiar little windows — the small, round holes above the belfry, built to encourage owls to nest in the tower, that they might hunt mice and rats at night. Tawny owls, most likely, or barn owls; soft muttering and hooting during the Latin mass, feathers and bones and pellets in the churchyard, invisible and silent as they drift over the low, thatched buildings of medieval Cambridge.
I was thinking of those owls this week, whilst meditating on the winged messengers of today’s Michaelmas feast: invisible almost all the time, hidden but yet still present, not nearly as soft and cuddly as they seem in popular art, a source of terror to vermin, ascending and descending up and down the Saxon tower. Medieval scholars, supposedly, argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.[1] We might argue today over how many angels are depicted in St Bene’t’s — mostly because of the wonderfully ambiguous scroll and shield bearing figures along the ceiling of the north aisle. I like to imagine that the rector asked for angels, the churchwardens asked for kings, and the Fellows of Corpus asked for elders, so the architect gave them all three.
Scripture and tradition are ambiguous on how to describe angels. Sometimes they seem quite human, at other times they have six wings, or wheels covered in eyes, or even their backs, hands, and wings covered in eyes,[2] limbs like the gleam of burnished bronze[3] bearing swords, sometimes of flame.[4] It’s disorienting to visualise, and even the sound of angels is less than … angelic. Isaiah tells use “At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke”[5] [that the sound of angels is overwhelming is found throughout the Abrahamic faiths: in Islam, the sound of angel wings is not gentle rustling, but “like chains being dragged on rock”[6] ].
(That’s true of owls as well, by the by. I went onto my ornithology app Merlin, to hear what the tawny and barn owls sound like. They’re not soothing. They’re terrifying.[7])
It is telling that, more often than not in scripture, the first words uttered by angels to human beings is: “Be not afraid.” Whatever it is that angels look and sound like, the scriptures struggle to put that experience into imagery which the human mind can grasp. Terrifyingly strange, shining, reality-breaking multitudes.
But there they are, patrolling the boundaries —
between Eden and exile,
between the fleeing Israelite slaves and the pursuing Egyptian armies,
between Abraham and the knife.
They are obtruding, unlikely messengers of Good News. Sometimes astounding, world breaking Good News —
Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.[8]
And sometimes they are messengers with the most prosaic good news. When the prophet Elijah was at his lowest, fleeing from the persecutions of Jezebel and Ahab, it was an angel that led him to nap, and drink water, and eat a proper meal.[9]
I don’t know yet how many angels are in the architecture here, but I do know that angels are present in our midst, not simply drifting past the owlery but gathered in their multitudes, that when we sing out our sanctus at the altar table, we join a heavenly chorus singing out in a threshold-shaking sound of voices: Holy, Holy, Holy.[10] There are worse models for a church to have than the angelic one. For the Holy Spirit has revealed to the Church, as First Peter reminds us, “things into which angels long to look!”[11]
Neither angels nor churches are objects of worship — they are creatures which offer worship, night and day, to the one upon the Throne, Jesus Christ, who was made lower than the angels for a time, that he might raise fallen humanity above even the angels. For that is the first role of God’s angels, their ministry of praise and wonder,
Like angels, can we be a place that sings of wonder, love and praise? Like angels, can our very existence open a glimpse to a heaven opened, a numinous wonder that overwhelms the senses — and yet with loving confidence say “Be not afraid.”?
Like angels, can we patrol the boundaries and walk along the edges, guarding against evil and oppression, from within and without, and walking along the roads and lanes, inviting the outcast and poor to the great supper of the Lamb?[12]
And like angels, can we find calling in the prosaic as well as in the earth-shattering? To make drudgery divine by seeing our Christian calling both in these clouds of incense but also in the small things, as the angel tended Elijah: Have a little cake while you’re here. Get some sleep and stay hydrated, you have a long journey before you.
There are angels all about us, messengers beyond our mortal ken, ascending and descending, as busy and invisible and implausibly constructed in the divine plan as muons and quarks are in the material realm of this creation, as the silent owls are wonders in the night-time world of nature.
The physics and the metaphysics of it all should lead us to rejoice in the One who loves and tends it all, filling our hearts with wonder at the grace of living in such a world, and blessing us with the life-giving humility that in serving the least of these, we serve the one to whom angels sing, Hosannah in the Highest, heaven and earth are full of your glory.
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[1] See, for example, Peter Harrison, Notes and Queries, Volume 63, Issue 1, March 2016, pp. 45–47, for the Protestant history of this supposed dispute — which he argues may be mere rhetorical punning on pinpoints and ‘pointless’ speculation in Scholastic theological debates. “ the reason an English writer first introduced the ‘needle’s point’ into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for a clever pun on ‘needless point’ ” The dancing is a later, Cambridge, addition.
[2] Ezekiel 10
[3] Daniel 10:5-6
[4] Numbers 22:23, Genesis 3:24
[5] Isaiah 6.4
[6] Al-Bukhari, 324
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9ZNz8GCSc
[8] Luke 2.10-11
[9] 1 Kings 19.1-8 (full disclosure: Elijah napped on his own — but the angel made sure he ate and drank.)
[10] The Sanctus draws on Isaiah 6.3 and Revelation 4.8, as well as Matthew 21.9
[11] 1 Peter 1.12
[12] Luke 14.21