“War broke out in heaven.”
Well, I certainly am glad to hear that. It is time. There are many dragons, about and abroad, and we are at war with them.
For this war, we will need powers. Four powers, by my count.
First, we will need to be mighty in battle: perhaps we don’t need to be physically strong (though for some of us, perhaps we do: sometimes fighting evil requires physical stamina). Whatever our health and abilities, all of us will certainly need courage; strength of character; a willful determination to take up the conflict with our dread foe, to endure, and finally to overcome. In all of this, we call upon the Archangel Michael to empower us: we hail him as the strong warrior who slays the great beast, the one who defeats the accuser, the one who wins.
Second, we will also need to be happy warriors, mighty in hope, strong in spirit, glad bearers of the Good News. These are desperate times; that is to say, these are times when despair threatens us almost as much as those who menace the world with their misdeeds and malign intentions. We need the Archangel Gabriel to fill us with hope, to make our hearts glad, even to say to us, “Rejoice, favored ones!” just as they said one day to a young woman in Nazareth. We hail Gabriel as the one who greets God’s people with the Good News, the one who lifts up our hearts, the one who rejoices, the one who teaches us to sing, the one who trains our souls to magnify the Lord and our spirits to rejoice in God our Savior.
So: we need courage, and we need gladness. And third, we need the power to heal, to bind up wounds, to care for the injured and the dying and the dead, to console those who mourn, to mend the deep tears in the fabric of our communities. These are grievous times. We need the Archangel Raphael to heal and console us, and to form us into healers and counselors, too. We hail Raphael as the one who stirred the healing pools of Bethesda, the one who imparts God’s power to relieve suffering, the doctor and the nurse on the battlefield where good overcomes evil.
So: we need courage, gladness, and the power to heal. And finally, fourth, we need the power of wisdom, the tremendous, dazzling power of insight. In matters of wisdom we hail the Archangel Uriel, known among the hosts of heaven as a wise, brilliant elder. Uriel’s name means “the Lord is my light,” or “God is my flame,” evoking the flame of a lamp that enlightens God’s people, illuminating our path, guiding us out of the cave, dispelling the gloomy clouds of ignorance. In this time of epistemic closure, when everyone is sealed inside information bubbles (and disinformation bubbles), reading the news from outlets that never challenge our pre-existing beliefs, Uriel opens minds, Uriel poses unsettling questions, Uriel surprises us with new perspectives, new takes, new ideas. We have been wrong about so many things, down the ages. What might Uriel teach us next?
Courage and strength: Michael;
gladness and hope: Gabriel;
healing and recovery: Raphael;
wisdom and insight: Uriel:
four powers, four archangels.
Yes, this is what we need as we take up the battle, as we wade into war.
Now, we praise the Prince of Peace, and when we gather to say our prayers we often emphasize gentleness and lovingkindness in our reflections on the nature of Christ, on the Dominion of God, on our calling as God’s good and self-giving people. So maybe all this war talk is bumping on you; maybe it is bringing you up short.
But consider this: yes, we praise gentle Jesus, the Good Shepherd; but we also praise Jesus who cleansed the temple with righteous anger; we praise Jesus who ran low on patience, finally, with his followers when they continually failed to understand his identity and mission. (“You faithless and perverse generation,” he rants in a moment of exasperation. “How much longer must I be with you?”) The risen Christ converts our patron Paul by knocking him off his feet in a blaze of glory, and his presence with the disciples in their locked room is frightening. And so, inspired by his fearsome strength, the first members of the Jesus Movement bravely took up the battle against evil, accepting their fate as martyrs, as witnesses, as those who were willing to confront the powers of the world.
I can find no good use for Angels, therefore, except to fill our quivers with arrows, to fill our hearts with confidence, to train us as doctors who tend the wounded, and to sharpen our minds to meet the baffling challenges of these hard times.
Without these powers, Angels devolve into knicknacks, into the fey subjects of saccharine poems, into faintly comical characters in whimsical movies. They become fluffy pillows in a time when we need spiritual weapons. This is beneath their dignity, and worse, it dishonors the Holy Trinity, the ultimate Source of all the powers we know, all the powers we are given, all the powers that come to our aid. So let the Angels rise triumphant in your hearts and minds; recognize them towering over you. This is how they appear in Holy Scripture: without fail, their presence is unnerving, even terrifying. These are serious times, but the strong forces of strength, goodness, healing, and wisdom are by our side; they ride out before us; they form our rear guard.
Our faith is like this: it is challenging, daunting, and frightening, even as it fortifies us. God stirs us to action, but that stirring is terrible, knocking us off our feet only to push us out from here in passionate, and compassionate, mission.
But maybe it is difficult for you to appreciate this — to appreciate the wondrous power of goodness, the fearsome glory of the Angels, the majestic might of God. Perhaps it is far easier for you to appreciate the terrible powers of evil; after all, they appear everywhere, and they seem truly awful. They are truly awful. You say there’s a terrible housing crisis, and I counter with “yeah, well there’s also the climate crisis.” You feel despair about racist violence, and I throw up my hands about our sclerotic political institutions while cities languish and heat waves oppress whole continents. It’s bad out there.
But it’s good, too, out there and also in here. Goodness is more powerful than evil, not less. Substantially more powerful. In fact evil draws what little power it has from the corruption of the good. The writer C.S. Lewis, a literary scholar and lay theologian in our own Anglican tradition, reflects on good and evil in a little book he wrote about heaven and hell called The Great Divorce. Here is what Lewis says: “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to [God] and bad when it turns from [God]. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.”
“It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.”
And so as bad as things seem to be, and as bad as things actually are, all the worst forces in the world owe their existence to the good, which ultimately prevails. A corrupted archangel doesn’t stand a chance against a good one, as we see when Michael overcomes them in the final battle. Gabriel announces Good News that beggars belief – how can such good news stand against all the bad news we hear day by day? Yet Gabriel’s encouragement inspires a young woman to change the world just by saying “Yes” to her mission. She gives birth to God-with-us, and she sings our best song, the Magnificat, a song of triumph over the powers of evil. We can follow her path, here and now.
Raphael and all the forces of healing and health that flow around and within us may not save every life from disease, or fully close some of our deepest wounds, yet I have seen myself the immense power of God’s healing love when humans are experiencing extreme need. And finally, the wisdom of God, burning like the flame that blazes from Uriel, endures through every generation: ignorance will not endure; you and I can see to that.
So do not despair. Be of good courage. It’s bad out there, but we have help. And I have you; and you have me. All of us will taste death, but before and after that moment, for each and all of us, we will see the salvation and the power and the dominion of God.
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Preached on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), October 1, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 103:19-22
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51