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St Michael and All Angels
St James Church Halifax, October 3, AD 1982
by Rev Dr Robert Darwin Crouse
O Praise the Lord, ye angels of his, ye that excel in strength:
ye that fulfil his commandment, and hearken unto the voice of his words.
O Praise the Lord, all ye his hosts: ye servants of his that do his pleasure.
O speak good of the Lord, all ye works of his, in all places of his dominion:
praise the Lord, O my soul.
- Psalm 103, 20 – 22
We celebrate this week the great festival of angels: the great festival of Michaelmas – St Michael’s Mass. It is first of all a great festival of praise, for, as our collect reminds us, the angels are they who serve God everlastingly in heaven; and we, “with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven,” we too are caught up in that everlasting song of prayse. “O speak good of the Lord, all ye works of his, in all places of his dominion: praise thou the Lord, O my soul.”
First of all, this is a great festival of praise: secondly, it is a great festival of Christ in fortitude and hope, for, as our Collect also reminds us, the holy angels are messengers of God, appointed to “succour and defend us on earth.”
But who, or what, are these angels, and what do they have to do with us? I could begin to answer, I suppose, with the definitions of the great philosophers and theologians of older times: angels are pure intellectual substances; movers of the heavens, pure spiritual beings. Such definitions are true, but perhaps not immediately enlightening. We try to imagine pure spiritual beings, and inevitably we fail, for they exceed all those material forms which imagination draws upon. Artists, of course, have carved and painted angels: beautiful creatures: usually in human form, with wings to show that these are creatures who belong to a higher sphere than ours. But, in reality, they exceed all imagination, and all material representation.
Perhaps best to say that they are the everlasting principles by which the universe of God’s creation is governed and sustained, by which the power of God, his justice, and his mercy, are diffused through all creation. I’m afraid we’ve come to regard the world pretty materialistically, as though it existed primarily to be exploited for material satisfactions, and I’m afraid also, that we reap increasingly the consequences of that shallow view. But this festival of holy angels should remind us that the ground and purpose of the universe are spiritual, and that the principles that finally govern it are spiritual.
This festival should remind us that the universe exists to praise the Lord. “O praise the Lord of heaven”, sings the Psalmist, “praise him in the height.
Praise him, all ye angels of his: praise him all his host.
Praise him, sun and moon: praise him all ye stars and light.
Praise him, all ye heavens: and ye waters that are above the heavens.
Let them praise the Name of the Lord:
for he spake the word, and they were made;
he commanded, and they were created.”
And in the end, that praise cannot be thwarted; the whole creation groans with pains of travail, says St. Paul, and we ourselves, we who have the first-fruits of the Spirit in Jesus Christ our Lord, we await with eager longing the fulfilment of redemption. Though angels fall, though wicked men seek to pervert the good purposes of redemption. Though angels fall, though wicked men seek to pervert the good purposes of God, the devil “hath but a short time”; creation can have no other end than the worship of that unutterable beauty, truth, and good which is its very source.
Therefore, this festival of holy angels is a festival of Christian fortitude and hope. “Angel” means “messenger”; and we are sustained by these messengers and messages of God: they “succour and defend us on earth.” Sometimes, in Bible stories, angels appear in dreams; but they come – these messengers and messages – in many other ways as well, and often we entertain angels unaware. As Francis Thompson puts it:
The angels keep their ancient places
Turn but a stone and start a wing:
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
Could we but open our spiritual eyes, surely we would see ourselves surrounded and upheld on every side by the powers of spiritual good, the innumberable company of angels. “They that be fore us be more than they that be against us.” “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof rage and swell, and though the mountains quake at the tempest of the same.”
Angels do not occupy much place in modern Christian piety, and many modern theologians regard all talk of angels as obscurantist and irrelevant. But I think that view must be mistaken.
In the early centuries of the middle ages: when Christianity was making its way into the hostile wilderness of Northern Europe, deeply conscious of its conflict with the world in which it moved, a favourite dedication of Christian churches was to St. Michael and All Angels. Michael, “the warrior primate of celestial chivalry” seemed the appropriate patron of such undertakings.
Nowadays, of course, our circumstances are very different. And yet, what more virulent paganism and barbarism can there be, than that gross materialism which would denude our life of all spiritual purpose and significance? We need the patronage of Michael and all his angels to recall us to a vision of the spiritual dimensions of our life and destiny, to lift us up into the heavenly song of everlasting praise, lest we lose ourselves in hopeless vanities.
“Praise the Lord, for his Name only is excellent:
and his praise above heaven and earth.”
Amen +
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