Michaelmas
St Michael and All Angels, Sunday 29 September, 2002
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Yesterday morning, while preparing this sermon, I watched the parade of devotees walking past my window on their way to the great spectacle at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Even allowing for the media exploiting the situation for purely commercial purposes, there has been, and is increasingly, an air of unreality about the AFL finals season. Witness the drama surrounding a young 20 year old named Cloke. Whatever happened to the old Australian virtue of copping it sweet? Now we rush to have a battery of costly lawyers at our elbow. It is only a football match after all... or is it?
If it is more than a football match, why and how? How do we explain the adulation given to young men, frequently from humble backgrounds, but gifted footballers? Why does football, or any other sport, soccer for instance, become a parody of religion, with its high priests, its acolytes, and the devotees gathered around?
Surveys tell us, assure us even, that although people no longer go to Church very much, a surprisingly large proportion still believe in God; but not Jesus Christ apparently – well, not enough to join others to worship him.
What sort of God, we may ask? In the shape of a football, a dollar sign, motorcar, house? In fact, we live in a world where men and women are gods, hence the emphasis on the body and fitness.
Or on the belief that embryonic stem cell research, the tampering with human life, is justified because it might enable us to overcome various diseases and disabilities, so that we might be perfect again, live for ever even!
Man is the measure of all things, man is superman, woman is superwoman. In the end, this idolatry becomes narcissism – our world becomes increasingly focussed on our desires, our determination to control, to play God.
We decide what is possible, what exists. Thus there is no God with a capital G, because he would be bigger than us, above us, a greater god than us.
Today's Feast of St Michael and All Angels – Michaelmas – challenges idolatry, this introversion. There are over 170 references to angels in the Old and New Testaments, 68 in the Book of Revelation alone. Angels are present at many major moments in the Scriptural story: when Moses saw the burning bush; when Gideon despaired for the Hebrew people; when Elijah was called to prophetic action.
When Mary was told of her vocation to be the Mother of Jesus, Man and God; when the shepherds were sent to Bethlehem; when St Joseph discovered Mary's pregnancy, or was warned to flee with Our Lady and the child Jesus to Egypt, and later to return.
After Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, was arrested in the garden; and when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb on the first Easter morning.
In the infant Church of the Acts of the Apostles, angels set the disciples free from prison on one occasion, and St Peter on another. The Letter to the Hebrews warns us to welcome strangers, because we might entertain an angel unaware – a motto for our breakfast programme volunteers. Angels may come in unorthodox ways and may not even be clean!
And of course in our Second Reading today, the epic battle between Michael, protector of the Church and his angels, and Satan and his angels.
What do we make of all this? We cannot simply dismiss angels because we cannot believe in them. They will still be there. The Hebrew and Greek words for angel both mean and agent or messenger, in the Bible from God.
An angel could indeed be of a different level of being from human beings and the rest of creation, with an appropriate part to play in it. Or an angel could be simply a pictorial way of describing the actions of God. If one is earth-bound, the measure of all things, then angels are merely part of the whole picture language which is God-talk, theology.
Yet angels are a challenge to our earth-bound view of creation, of the world around us. They indeed set a limit to our existence, and challenge us to consider other levels of existence, and to contemplate the one the angels serve, Jesus Christ, God and Man.
Jesus lived on two levels of existence, earthly and heavenly, and he came to call us out of ourselves to follow Him. We live on two levels of existence already, the physical and the spiritual/mental/emotional. I stand before you physically, and speak to you physically; but I also speak to you with my mind, my spirituality, and I hope, with passion.
We are called from the merely creaturely to become sisters and brothers of Jesus by Holy Baptism, to share in the life of God in so many ways. not least in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and to enter His heavenly Kingdom.
But our fallen desire is to control our destiny, to be gods, to deny angels, to deny God. Our Second Reading portrays for us the underlying spiritual conflict in which we are involved, and which so many of us deny, (Revelation 12:7-12a).
The struggle in Heaven between Michael and Satan and their angels is the spiritual counterpart of the earthly struggle between the forces of evil and Jesus, Son of God.
A struggle which Jesus won, not by trying to control, to dominate, to deny, but by letting go, by sacrificing his own life. In this mystery of the crucified God, as Moltmann describes Him, Jesus and his angels are challenging us to let go of the idolatry which is at the heart of the world's tragedies today, that we all may have life.
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