Sermon: St Michael and all Angels - Evensong

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 29th September 2013

Service:

Choral Evensong

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 15.1M)

The angel of the Lord encamps about them that fear him and delivers them. O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusts in him.
Psalm 34, verses 7-8.

The feast of St Michael and all Angels marks time. It tolls the curfew on departing summer and announces the advent of autumn. As the sun withdraws its light we are asked to think of angelic presences and to have faith that God is ready to succour all those who are ‘in sorrow, need or any other adversity’. That puts quite a strain on faith because the succour often takes a very long time to arrive and sometimes never seems to arrive at all. It also makes us question whether belief in a fail-safe insurance against ‘all disaster’ is not really bad faith. To think of heavenly hosts battling against demonic forces on our behalf and toppling the principalities and malevolent powers is to shuffle off personal responsibility for the past and the future. It is to externalise the evil and the good that really lies within ourselves. The unearthly powers we project out there are really our own internal battlefield. No wonder Martin Luther said ‘I more fear what is within me than what is without’. As for fail-safe insurance, Scripture itself at one moment assures us that ‘the angel of the Lord encamps around about them that fear him’ and at another moment cries out in despair ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’

That oscillation between succour somewhere, some day, and despair that God seems indifferent to human suffering here and now, is very evident in Simon Schama’s TV history ’The Jews’. Simon Schama stands in the abandoned synagogue of Kosice on the borders of Slovakia and Ukraine, contemplating the protective angels and remembering the Shekinah of the divine presence. He also contemplates the mass murder of the Jews in Odessa and in Lithuania before turning to the Promised Land of the United States where at last they could build impressive facsimiles of the temple in ‘a good land’ and one of them, Yip Harburg, could write ‘Some day over the rainbow’. But when I tried to find the synagogues of Lv’iv in Ukraine and Bratislava in Slovakia ‘they were as though they had never been’. It would have been scant comfort for the Jews of those places that there was a Promised Land far away and in the future.

Christians share the Jewish hope and over the last century have increasingly shared at least something of the Jewish experience of abandonment in Eastern Europe, and now all over the Middle East. Two weeks ago we were in Russia as guests of Moscow State University and the Moscow Patriarchate in a monastery restored to the church after being expropriated by the Soviets as a juvenile prison. We observed the change from a period of seventy years when the state tried to eliminate Christianity in a brutal campaign of persecution and destruction the shadow of which still haunts the landscape, and even the sound-scape because the agents of scientific atheism made sure above all else to destroy the bells. Yet there are now more monasteries than before the Revolution. In the Tretyakov Art Gallery we stood in front of the icon of St. Michael leading the heavenly host and the Church Militant to victory over demonic principalities and powers. A revived Church is now close to the seat of political power, many think too close for comfort. When you remember that the Church was destined for the rubbish dump of history this restoration defies all expectation, but we still have to ask whether the restoration of former glories at the heart of political power is really what the Scripture promises to them that fear him. We have to ask what comfort the rebuilding of the waste places is to the millions who died in the gulag. At the Orthodox Eucharist we attended as guests in one of just a hundred churches never closed in the communist period we followed a text that looked forward to the kingdom of Christ and a new creation. That kingdom seemed a very long way from the Patriarch taking offence at a forty second protest in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour that ended with young women in the contemporary version of the gulag.

Our lessons from Old and New Testament are about the clash between faith and power and about the power of faith faced with a faith in power. In the story of Belshazzar from the book of Daniel the reckless emperor believes he can do whatever he wishes with whomever he wishes but then he sees the writing on the wall and finds himself that same night doomed to destruction. All human power and the glory of it crumbles into dust, ours now like theirs then. As Kipling wrote in his Recessional ‘Far called our navies melt away/On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.’ The scene as it unfolds in the fifth chapter of the book of Revelation resembles the court ceremonies of the Roman Empire: it portrays everyone prostrate before the power of the one who sits on the throne. But then comes the question: who is able to open the scroll that contains the secrets of the future? The writer breaks down in tears because it appears that the future remains closed. The scene is like those familiar children’s tales where the once and future king is the only one who is strong enough to draw the sword form the stone, except that this is a very different kind of king from the warrior hero. Only the stricken Lamb is able to open the scroll. The power of the sword wielded by the warrior hero becomes the sword of the spirit in the hands of one who still bears the marks of the nails and shows the wound in his side. The ways of the world, its will to power and its resort to violence, are weighed in the scales and found wanting.

 Of course, recourse to the power of faith rather than faith in power does not mean we are relieved of responsibility for our own security or the security of our neighbour. We live in the same world as everyone else where we lock doors, make sure the cat is fed, and the larder stocked, and where we are glad to know some people are charged with the duties of ensuring public safety. The incautious generosity recommended in the Gospels does not relieve us of responsibility for what happens or the necessity of making dangerous choices that may have morally ambiguous consequences. We still have to cultivate the cardinal virtues of prudence and foresight. But the Gospel and the horizon it opens up ought to change the way we estimate what really matters. It does not provide a fail-safe whatever happens but it does point to first things. Paul put it perfectly when he said ‘and now abide faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love’.

We have here ‘no abiding place’ but if we had faith (and I put it as a question rather than something we possess for certain) we would be assured that beyond the changes and chances of a fleeting existence, the city of God stands unharmed  on the eternal rock.  A Jewish colleague, Gregory Baum, who became a Catholic priest, once asked me how I had changed my theology since Auschwitz and I had to reply ‘not at all’. A faith that begins at Golgotha also begins at Auschwitz. God did not save his people from exile or the temple from destruction, though his people always sang of rebuilding the temple and hoped for the day of return. If an angel was present in Gethsemane it was to strengthen Jesus for the time of trial not to avert it. No angel appeared at Golgotha to spirit Jesus away from shame, suffering and death, and it even seemed as though God had forsaken his own son. The abyss can open up at any moment. We can only wait in patience trusting as T.S. Eliot put it ‘All the way in a dark wood....there is yet faith. But the faith, the hope, and the love are all in the waiting... So the darkness shall be light and the stillness the dancing’.

Amen.