With Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven

+ May the thoughts of my mind and the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

My text is taken from the Gospel, “You shall see the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

The collect which we heard a few minutes ago—the specific prayer for this feast of Saint Michael and All Angels—says that God has “constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and of mortals,” and that the “holy angels always serve and worship him in heaven.” The idea is thaty we, the mortals, and they, the angels, have really, basically, the same duties, the duties of service and worship—but for now, they serve and worship God in heaven and we serve and worship God on earth. Yet the prayer insists that these two scenes, the heavenly worship of the angels and our earthly worship, aren’t two different things. The duty of the angels and our mortal duty are both parts of the same “wonderful order.” Our worship and theirs is all part of God’s one plan for creation.

Twenty-seven hundred years ago, when King Solomon’s temple was still standing on the holy mountain in Jerusalem, one of the temple priests was doing his daily duty. The windowless building was full of smoke from the oil lamps and the incense and the burning sacrifices. Suddenly, the clouds of smoke seemed to come together, making what seemed to be the bottom edge of a huge robe that filled the whole temple, and the dimness of the lamps vanished in a light that was brighter than the sun. Whatever it is that ordinarily keeps earthly worship and heavenly worship separate from each other had vanished, and the priest saw all around him the seraphim, the six-winged angels, singing “Three times holy is Yahweh the God of Armies: heaven and earth are full of your glory.” That moment of seeing the worship in God’s heavenly temple called the priest Isaiah to his special ministry as a prophet, but it has also become a central part of Christian worship. For almost as long as Christians have celebrated the Eucharist, we have repeated that angelic song that Isaiah heard, and in fact in just a few moments we will say it ourselves, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts: Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Glory be to you, O Lord most high.”

So, then: our worship is all of one piece with the angels’ worship, and sometimes, even, like the prophet Isaiah, we may have a chance to see the two pieces together. We call this association of lay ministers Saint Michael’s Guild to recognize that our worship is also the worship that the angels render in heaven. We know, when we come here and put on these costumes with designs that reach back more than a thousand years, when we come here and say these words that reach back two or three thousand years—we know, when we do these things, that we aren’t just gathering to hear a lecture or put on a play. We know, when we come here, that we come before the throne of Almighty God, the throne where even the angels cover their faces as they cry out in wonder and praise.

We call this, though, not just the Guild of the Angels, in general, but the Guild of Saint Michael the Archangel, in particular. One reason is that Michael is patron of the various defenders of society, including the armed forces. Then, too, as you’ll see from the bulletin when we get to that stage, one of the traditional prayers at the eucharist pictures Michael as a kind of heavenly acolyte, who “stands at the right hand of the altar of incense.” For both these reasons, Michael seems an appropriate patron for us at AMA as we join in the angelic worship of God.

There is one legend, though, about Michael, that makes a more important point, one that bears on my text from the Gospel, and I want to tell you about it, even though it is only a legend. It has to do with how Michael got his name, a name which is, in Hebrew, actually a rhetorical question, one of those questions whose answer is obvious. According to this legend, God, after creating the angels, revealed to them the rest of his plan for creation. Part of that plan was to create human beings. From the angels’ point of view, of course, human beings sounded like they were going to be pretty pitiful: the angels were immortal creatures of pure spirit, unimaginable in their power, wonderful in their understanding, and terrible in their beauty. These human beings, in contrast, were to be nothing more than a handful of red clay. To an angel, it could easily have seemed to be a foolish plan on God’s part. But then, the legend says, God revealed the real surprise. God’s intention was to give human beings, these mere handfuls of dust, a share in God’s own divine life. The angels would forever be just what they were as angels, but the human beings would one day become divine. Their mortal bodies of clay would somehow put on immortality, and even a little peasant girl from Nazareth would become higher than the cherubim and more glorious than the seraphim. And just to top it all off, God announced to the angels how this was going to happen, how human beings would get a share in God’s own divine life: God would bring all this about by becoming a human being himself and, as Jesus said to Nathanael in our Gospel lesson, angels would be seen ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

According to the legend, that was the last straw. The two very greatest, most beautiful, most powerful of the angels were standing closest to the throne of God when they heard this divine plan to make human beings greater than the angels themselves. When the first of these two heard the plan, he turned away in disgust and became Satan, the accuser, the one who is eternally pointing out to God how foolish God’s plan is and how unworthy human beings are of God’s gift of himself. The other angel fell on his face before God in worship at the very idea that the Creator would plan to humble himself to become a part of the creation, and in his worship the second angel cried out “Who is like God?” (the answer of course being “No one is!”). And so that cry of worship, that rhetorical question, became the angel’s name: for in Hebrew, Micha-el means “who is like God?”

Now here’s why I think that legend is important for this Guild of Saint Michael, and for everyone who serves at the altar, and indeed for the whole baptized people of God. I said, when I was talking about the prayer, the collect for the day, that for now the angels serve and worship God in heaven and we serve and worship God on earth. “For now” is the most important part of that statement. Many people, when they think about that “for now,” think that the other half of it, the “but eventually,” is “but eventually we will all worship God together in heaven.” For now, the angels are in heaven and we are on earth, but eventually we will all be in heaven together. That’s the idea that you see in cartoons and movies and even old Led Zepplin songs. But from the Christian point of view, that idea of “eventually in heaven” is unimportant. It may be true or it may not, but it’s not a big deal one way or the other. The Christian reply to “for now angels worship in heaven and we worship on earth” is “but eventually we and the angels will worship God together on earth.”

The Christian “but eventually” is not, “but eventually our souls will float around on clouds with the angels.” It is, rather, “but eventually the dead will be raised incorruptible” and “God will make his dwelling place with human beings.” If God had merely planned to bring puny human souls to join the great angelic spirits, after all, Satan would have had nothing to rebel against and Michael would never have gotten his name. But no, the plan was that angels would ascend and descend upon the Son of Man. The wonder of God’s plan is that God will bring heaven to us, that God will make his name be hallowed and his will be done on earth, not just in heaven. God’s will will be done, by human beings with real bodies, as real as the body in which Jesus Christ, risen from the tomb, appeared to the Apostles eating and drinking despite the wounds in his hands and side and feet.

The fact is that our worship is different from the worship of the angels in heaven. Indeed, we don’t know, and can’t know, what worship is like for the angels. All that stuff that Isaiah sees is, after all, just for Isaiah’s benefit. Angels don’t really have six wings, and they don’t look like this icon, nor like Michael Landon, nor like Roma Downey, nor even like the clumsy guy from that old Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie. That was the point of the old question about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin: the answer was “as many as want to.” If you thought that angels took up space, you obviously didn’t have the right idea.

We don’t know anything about what worship is like for angels right now. But we do know something about what worship will be like, eventually. We know because this worship right here is that eventual worship, already present. This worship right here is what caused Satan to rebel and Michael to fall on his face in wonder. For here and now, already real though not yet realized, this action with bread and wine is something the angels cannot take part in. This is already the divine banquet at which they are the servants and we are, not merely the honored guests but the adopted children. Worship in the great “eventually” is not simply the majesty of the angels crying “holy, holy, holy”: it is also the mystery of our being made holy, of Jesus Christ the Passover lamb who was sacrificed feeding us with his own body and blood to make us what he intended us to be before the foundation of the world. My brothers and sisters, this is the feast of our adoption, the wedding supper of the Lamb, the banquet of the King Messiah, and Michael and all the holy angels stand in wonder, veiling their faces as we creatures of dust eat and drink with the Son of Man, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

--John Wm. Houghton