Things Visible and Invisible: A Sermon for St Michael and All Angels

Preached at St Luke’s Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, for the Regional Ministry of South Georgian Bay, 29 September, 2024, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels.

Readings for this Sunday:  Genesis 28:10-17; Psalm 103:19-22; Revelation 12:7-12; John 1:47-51

This Sunday is serving triple duty for us.

First, because tomorrow, Sept 30,  is the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, it’s an opportunity for us to reflect on how we as God’s people have not always recognized our indigenous brothers and sisters as fellow Canadians and as fellow Christians.  As Bishop Andrew said in this week’s letter to the Diocese, we are called “to build together a country, and a Church, that – as we promised in our baptism – respects the dignity of every human being”. 

Second, today is an opportunity for us to celebrate the way we are starting to be church, which we call regional ministry.   Isn’t it wonderful to look around and see a full church, to see new people, and to think about how we can pool our resources, ideas, and talents?   As I’ve said this month, this is a new way of thinking that breaks with our old ideas of churches as siloes or as franchises.   One example of how we’ve been doing that lately is our Tuesday bible studies hosted by All Saints and ably led by Olivia Crowe from Prince of Peace, with a mixed group from both churches.   This shared project is a great example of how our churches can offer more when we work together.

Thirdly, today in the life of our church is the Feast of St Michael and All Angels.   While St Michael and All Angels would be a great name for our amazing regional clergy team, that’s not what we are celebrating today.    This feast, St Michael and All Angels, falls on Sept 29 in the church calendar and as our scripture readings have shown us, is an opportunity for us to think about those mysterious and wonderful creatures that we call angels, and also to think about their place in our faith and in Christian belief.

Now you may not think much about angels in your day to day faith life.   That wouldn’t be surprising, they don’t occur frequently in scripture, they aren’t mentioned in the creeds, and as part of the spiritual realm they are largely unseen and their role can seem unclear to us.   Indeed, for some of us, even for professing Christians, it may be difficult to believe in angels because we are so strongly influenced by rationalism and materialism.

And yet angels are everywhere in popular culture.   Think of:

Angels in the Outfield

Angels with Dirty Faces

Charlies Angels

Touched by an Angel

Angels in America

Angels are used to sell everything from cream cheese to lingerie.   We think of angels getting their wings, and we think of them as being cute and bumbling, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life.   It may well be that there are more people who believe in angels than there are people who believe in Jesus, which, if so,  isn’t surprising, because where as Jesus makes demands on his followers, angels in popular belief often seem like fairy godmothers.

So what if anything are we as followers of Jesus supposed to think about angels?   While they are mysterious, angels are in scripture and in the teachings of the church, and so we can say a few things about them.  We can start by saying that they are created by God who made the heavens and the earth.  So they like us in that they are creatures; they are not gods and we are not meant to worship them.    Unlike us, they are spiritual beings who are able to live in the presence of God, but they also have the ability to move between spiritual existence and material existence, which is why they can appear to humans as God’s messengers.   Indeed, the word angel comes from a Latin word meaning messenger.

The psalmist describes angels as “mighty ones who do his bidding, and hearken to the voice of his word” (Ps 103: 20).   The word “mighty” explains why angels can be terrifying when they choose to be seen, while the phrase “do his bidding” tells us that angels are obedient to God’s will and are agents of God’s purposes.  And God’s purposes for us are good and loving, which is why the first thing angels usually say in scripture is “don’t be afraid”, which tells us that their role is to bring us closer to God who wants to save us.

While the work of angels is largely invisible, we get a glimpse of their work in our first reading (Genesis 28:10-17), Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending the ladder from heaven to hearth, leads us to think that there are many angels (see also Matthew 26:53, when Jesus refers to “twelve legions of angels”.  So why are all these angels going back and forth between heaven and earth?    We don’t know, but if the holy angels exist to do God’s bidding, and if God’s wants to save us, then surely it’s safe to say that the angels are working on our behalf.

In a fascinating podcast, Fr. James Brent says that the work of the angels is to draw us closer to Christ.  Anything that prompts us to pray, any impulse that leads us to an act of charity, he says, might be an angelic influence.  Likewise, Fr. Brent suggests that the idea of the guardian angel is not just a childish story, but has a wholesome purpose that we should take to heart, because as the story of St. Michael suggests, angels can be seen as protectors.

Angels are thus opposed to the demonic forces who try to undo the work of God and who seek to pull us away from God.   Who or what is the demonic?  It’s something we should take seriously, but not live in fear of.  I’ve always liked what C.S Lewis said, which is that it’s a mistake to think too much or too little about the forces of evil.   But if we agree that evil exists as a force or power in the world, then we can also say that angels exist to help God save us from these forces.  The story of St Michael in our second lesson is an example of how the angels serve God’s primary purpose, which is to resist evil and death.  Jesus consistently opposes the forces of evil.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ first miracle is to free a man from an evil spirit.   Christ wishes that all of us are freed from the power of evil and death, and the angels exist in part to bring us closer to Christ.

I realize that much of what I have said may seem esoteric and far-fetched.  The idea of our world busy with invisible, divine activity is difficult for a materialist mindset to accept, and almost as difficult for those who see God as being far-off and detached from the world God made.  But why would a God who made the world out of love, and who wants what is best for us, keep a distance from that world?  As Archbishop Rowan Williams has written, the possibility of angels remind us that created world is actually more mysterious that we can imagine, “pulsing with something unmanageable, terrible, and wonderful, just below its surface”.   And surely, if the world is full of God’s activity and full of God’s angelic agents, then should we not strive to care for it, as God’s angels care for us?

So in this homily, I have suggested that angels are part of the Christian story, that we glimpse them in scripture, and that they exist to help God in God’s work of saving us.   It’s not childish to believe in angels.  If the idea of a guardian angel comforts you, then embrace it, as part of your faith.   It’s okay to ask our angel for help when we don’t have the concentration to pray, and when are sad or in despair, we can ask our guardian angel to quiet our troubled minds and lead us back to Christ.  If that is a comforting idea for you, then I encourage you to take it to heart.  After all, if God loves us, and if God created the angels to help us, then the angels must also love us.

It is not childish to believe in angels.  Their existence is testified in scripture and in the teaching of the church.   We may not see them, but we can draw comfort in their presence as a sign of God’s commitment to us and of God’s involvement in our daily lives.  And, as a final thought, we can see them as role models, for if angels exist to protect us, to help us, and to guide us, then we can initiate their work by protecting, helping, and guiding others.   In that way we can serve and love God in our earthly realm, as the angels serve and love God in the spiritual realm, for God’s will for us is that, when we are raised on the last day and perfected, we too may become angelic.

 

Without Partiality: A Homily on Hunger and the Epistle of James

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto,  8 September, 2024, the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.  Readings for this Sunday:  Pr 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Ps 125; Jas 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17; Mk 7:24-37

My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality. (James 2.1)

Today we continue to hear from the Epistle of James.  No book in the New Testament outside the gospels spells out our duty as followers of Jesus in such a clear and uncompromising way.   One of James’ key words is “partiality”, by which he means our human tendency to show more attention and regard to the rich and the well off than we do to the poor and the humble.    I’ll come back to this idea in James in a moment, but first let’s take a little trip down Highway 26 to see what  James might ask us to see in today’s world.

As most of you know, my wife Joy and I are from Barrie and we still maintain a foot there.   I moved there a decade ago, when I was posted to CFB Borden, and I got to know Barrie quite well because I was a runner.   One of my routes took me through Berczy Park, which is several acres of forest and trails just north of the downtown.  It’s surrounded by older homes and high rises.    Joy’s mother’s retirement home is on one side.   

Berczy Park is a case study for homelessness in Canada.   In the last few weeks it’s been in the local news because a homeless encampment has taken root there, with about a dozen tents according to the local news.   Local residents have raised concerns to the media about safety issues, and one home owner complained that she may not be able to sell her two million dollar house because it is next to the park.  As of several days ago, the City of Barrie had ticketed those camping in the park, but had not evicted them.

Berczy Park is just one small example of a problem that seems to be both everywhere and insoluble.   It’s thought that there are some six hundred homeless or underhoused people in Barrie, and as many as 1200 throughout Simcoe County.   The causes are various and complex:  drug  and alcohol addiction, a shortage of living wage employment, not enough affordable housing, and a mental health crisis.   It’s a toxic brew.

These problems often feed off one another and they create dangerous situations for everyone.   Several random stabbings have set Barrie on edge and have been blamed on homeless people, but talk to some of the people who come to our Friendship Dinners and they’ll tell you that the shelters and the encampments are dangerous for the homeless.   So homelessness is a problem that affects all of us because it degrades the quality of life for our communities.  So who should fix it?

The City of Barrie wants to ticket and evict the people in the park, but under Ontario law they can only do that if local agencies can provide shelter beds for the people being evicted.  In the longterm, homelessness and affordable housing are a problem for the County, and while Simcoe County wants to build more affordable housing in Barrie, that will take time.  So in the short time, it’s up to the nearby Busby Centre to operate more shelter beds.   Those of you with long memories will recall that Busby started off as a faith organization, founded by the Rev. David Busby, who was then the rector of Trinity Anglican Church in Barrie.  And that brings us to the role of churches in all of this.

Churches and faith communities have been helping the poor and the homeless from the beginning, and in part we have our second reading, the Epistle of James to thank for this.  Tradition holds that the James who wrote it was the brother of Jesus, so he may well have heard his brother say that “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me” (Mt 25.40).  Even if somebody else wrote the Letter using the honoured name of James, the message is clear.  As the Letter famously exhorts us, we can’t just hear the word of God, we have to put our faith into action and be “doers of the word” (Ja 1.23).    And the word that we must put into action s distilled into one of Jesus’ core teachings, as we heard today, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Ja 2.8).

The Letter of James is written with an acute awareness of the gaps between rich and poor.   As this letter was shared and passed between the first churches throughout the Roman Empire (“the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (Ja 1.1), those churches would have lived with those differences.   

The city of Rome itself at the time would have had one million inhabitants, and historians estimate that a third of that population would have been “desperately poor”, living in slums or worse.  We can imagine people of all social classes being interested in this new religion from Palestine, and James is clear that if someone with “gold rings and in fine clothes” were to visit a church, they should not get “partiality” or special treatment.

That word “partiality” does some heavy lifting in scripture.   One of the traditional readings on Easter Sunday is from Acts, when Peter preaches a sermon defending the baptism of the first Gentiles.   “I truly understand”, Peter says, “ that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10.34).   In other words, and this is the theology of the Epistle of James, all people are equal and valuable in God’s sight, and all can become citizens of the kingdom of God if they wish to be.

So our calling as the people of God is to see those around us without “partiality”.    At the same time, we need to be clear-eyed the challenges of our calling when it comes to homelessness.   As we noted earlier, this are massive social problems, and churches aren’t well-equipped to deal with them.    I mentioned the Busby Centre, and while it was started in the basement of an Anglican church, it soon became too much for that church to handle.  Similarly, many downtown churches across Canada tried offering winter shelter space but most ended these ministries when they discovered the challenges of keeping people safe and secure.    

However, there are many reasons to be encouraged.   Trinity Church in Barrie, where the Busby Centre started, has a new partnership with an organization called Care Without Borders.  They host a community nurse and a social worker who are working with Barrie’s homeless population.   Other churches in the area have plans to help build geared-to-income housing.  So the church still has a role to play.

Our approach at All Saints has been to focus on food insecurity.   We welcome all for our Friendship Dinners, and last Wednesday our Five Loaves program sent 100 hot and nutritious meals out the door.  Many of these were delivered to by our friends at the Collingwood Mobile Soup Kitchen, who know were the greatest need is in our community.    I’m very proud of the volunteers who make these programs possible.

This week we’ve taken another step to be doers of the word and to show love without partiality.   On Elgin Street, just beneath the kitchen, you will notice one of those little food pantries that more and more churches are offering.   Ours will be stocked regularly with non-perishable food offerings as well as hygiene items and some warm-weather items.   We will welcome contributions to keep the pantry stocked, and inside your bulletin today you will find a list of suggested items.    All contributions can be left in the  containers by the church doors and will be gratefully accepted.

A small pantry may seem like a drop in an ocean of need, but it’s a sign that we see the need and we hear our calling, to show our faith by word and deed without partiality.