St. Michael and All Angels

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

St. Michael and All Angels
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Genesis 28:10–17, Psalm 103, Revelation 12:7–12, John 1:47–51

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.

In the name of the living god, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen Today is Michaelmas or the feast of Saint Michael and all angels. If you’re from a non-liturgical tradition, that sounds really confusing. Michaelmas is the English contraction of Michael mass, the mass of Saint.

Michael just as Christmas, is the Christ mass. And this feast of the angels originated in the Christian East with the veneration of saint Michael somewhere in the third century. It began to spread to the west in the fifth century, and it is culturally associated with the beginning of autumn in school, many religious institutions and English institutions have Michaelmas Term rather than the rather pedestrian false semester.

Father Doug mentioned the blackberries, the other thing that Michaelmas is known for is eating goose. I could find no particularly good reason for this except that gooses have wings. It started as the feast of Saint Michael, but grew to include all angels, those messengers of God that appear in scripture and tradition.

Saint Paul, as we know, talks about principalities and powers. Scripture also mentions thrones and dominions, angels, and archangels. These are apparently beings who guard, who deliver messages, who protect, who lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, they console our Lord after his temptation in the desert, and also in the garden of Gethsemane.

They are even responsible for the jail break of a couple of apostles, and they have roles in the final consummation of all things in revelation. By the late Middle Ages, there is a particular focus on four archangels. Michael, the protector or warrior, he can first read about him in in Jude one nine, Gabriel, the messenger found in Daniel and Luke, Raphael, the healer found most extensively in the apocryphal book of Tobit. I think chapter 12 and then Uriel, the angel of the afterlife or the the angel of death found in the apocryphal book of second Esdras. These became the focus of the feast and they’re kind of a holistic focus. We have protection.

We have communication, we have healing, and we have the last things. angels that surround all these key events in our life. So that’s kind of what we celebrate today. It’s a major feast.

It used to be a holy day of obligation in the Roman church. That’s what we celebrate, how we celebrate it is another matter. I don’t know if you remember what CS Lewis said about the devil.

He said the problem with the devil is you can either pay him too much or too little attention too much or too little. I think the same can be said of angels. Sometimes we can spend too much attention on them.

I think of two things that I’ve experienced in my own life around that speculation and the desire for power. um speculation, in other words, we can spend an awful lot of time saying, well, just what are angels? What are they? I kind of had this question.

Many of you know I was an an atheist and a in a convert from scientific materialism. And when I began to accept the idea of God that was one thing, but then there were these additional creatures and I love Jesus pretty well, but but I didn’t know what to do with these additional creatures. They seemed superfluous to my materialistic mindset.

So I ran around and I came across things like Mortimer J Adler, the founder of the Great Books curriculum who said that the best way to think about angels was as was to think of them as minds without bodies, not very helpful to a former materialist. There is the Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides who seems to collapse angels just into the material world. If you read Maimonides long, he seems to be saying that angels are just things like gravity and planetary rotation.

It’s it’s just the strings behind the creation that we don’t see. All that stuff is angels. Well, if that’s the case, science has erased angels.

And then there was new age thought that said that angels were everything from demigods to the lost people of Atlantis to ancient aliens. In other words, the more I read about what angels were, the more uncomfortable I got, the less impressed I got. And I had the overwhelming question, what does this have to do with Jesus?

An offshoot of that, of course, is I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and particularly coming out of that new age thought it wasn’t just trying to understand angels that was important. It was ...