It’s been ages since I preached, but not so long that I’ve forgotten to work out my sermon prep online. I’m on the rota to preach next Wednesday, on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (for whom Michaelmas Term is named). It’s a major feast, so we’ll be pulling out all the liturgical excitement in our bag of ceremonial.
Apart from the good stuff — the incense, the genuflections, the chanting, the incense — I’ll be preaching, on Genesis 28:10-17, Revelation 12:7-12, and John 1:47-51. I’ve preached on St. Michael several times, and the sermons have worked well enough that I feel obligated to come up with something new. This is made all the more difficult since the cultural atmosphere has become much more congenial to the notion of angels recently (at least, to “angels” of a relatively cloying and theologically imprecise sort). Where once I could speak firmly about angels as a notion that my auditors might not be expected to take seriously in the least, we’ve come to a moment when angels have come out of the cultural closet (so to speak). By the way, I haven’t seen Angels in America, not on stage (even though I was ministering among AIDS-affected congregations back in the day) nor on TV (since we don’t have cable), so I can’t plausibly introduce allusions to that momentous work. And no, that means I haven’t actually seen Touched By An Angel, either.
Which brings me around to what I was thinking for this particular homily (five-minute max, though I may stretch it a mite for a major feast). Instead of the “angels aren’t chubby and cute, they’re scary” angle that I’ve heard a fair amount over the last few years, I want to probe at the convergence of scariness and reassurance. The premise involves thinking of angels in the etymological sense as messengers; as they are God’s messengers, their function is invariably to communicate the truth. (This is partly why angels don’t, can’t have a sense of humor; the perfection of their existence in truth makes “incongruity” an empty category for them.)
When we’re confronted by the truth, it can terrify us, since we so often rely on the insulation of [self-]deception and superficiality to keep the true scope and depth of our condition at arm’s length, or further. By the same token, though, when the world deploys falsity, slander, manipulation to wound God’s people, the truth can serve as a bulwark and shield, a comfort and a consolation.
As angels represent the truth, though, we need to come to terms with the fact that (contrary to conventional assumptions) angels obtrude in our lives not simply on fabulously rare occasions, but always, inescapably. We can’t escape from the truth if we want to (as we so often do). It’s by releasing the anxiety that averts our eyes from the truth, it’s by learning to embrace and rely on the giddying prospect of assenting to God’s way and our part therein, that we learn to celebrate the welcoming witness of throngs of angels, and in their company to bear our own witness to the truth.
Something like that. Only I’ll take these points, make specific (if not always explicit) the biblical starting-points from which I inferred all this malarkey, and buff and polish the rhetoric so as to approach the majesty of the day’s liturgy, if that be possible.
Posted by AKMA at September 20, 2004 08:12 PM | TrackBackthe way i like to consider God's angels is AWE, that is, scary, but beneficent.
Posted by: enoch choi at September 20, 2004 08:55 PMSpeaking of angels, that leads me to Emmys which leads me to Cynthia Nixon who has been nominated before, but this time she won, causing a ripple of applause across this little corner of America!
Posted by: NTA at September 21, 2004 05:15 AMYou said:
(This is partly why angels don’t, can’t have a sense of humor; the perfection of their existence in truth makes “incongruity” an empty category for them.)
Umm...what is truth? I take it humour then comes from the sense of lack, a break in the perfection of reason, a rupture in order which the comic can tease into laughter. But there is too much modernisation of angels here. Are angels a recreation of the modernist ideal or are they antediluvian monstra, the bene adonai? And if they are the sons of God (i.e. in character, in form, in source) does this mean that God too cannot have a sense of humour because he is divine - the perfection of His existence makes incongruity an empty category.
But God does have a sense of humour (witness the Bible in both Testaments, Jesus', John 9 and American politics), and our sense of humour could be seen as a sign of our Godlikeness. So, if anges are bene adonai, then they too must have a sense of humour. What does it mean not to have a sense of humour. Have you seen the film (over here on satellite TV at the moment) where the future Tetragrammaton government makes people take emotion suppressent medication - it removes all feeling from humanity in order to eradicate war and violence. It don't work. It is godless - the Tetragrammaton (!) destroys humanity and humanity rises up to destroy the Tetragrammaton instead. Interestng post-liberal death of God stuff in the background..but I wonder whether this says something else about humourless angels. God forbid!
Pete
Posted by: Pete Phillips at September 21, 2004 05:17 AMMom — yes, I too was delighted to hear that Cynthia Nixon (a family friend, readers, whom I’ve never met) won an Emmy. Brava!
Pete — the argument that angels don’t have a sense of humor is, as best I recall, a scholastic argument (not a biblical argument, although I think one would be hard pressed to derive evidence from Scripture that angels laugh). I would differentiate angels from God at this point inasmuch as angels are of a different metaphysical order. Presumably, (a) anything is possible for God, and (b) God’s all-encompassing perspective provides a basis for humor as well as for compassion.
Angels are not subject to the contingencies of our human lot — but do not have the advantage of God’s omniscience. Hence, they’re messengers, representatives, emissaries, but do not communicate the image of God as do humans — who have the divine gift of perspective (perhaps, on this account, the Edenic “knowledge of good and evil”), without the unwavering resolute eternity of angels (or God).
But I’m bereft of the guidance of my beloved consultant on scholasticism, who may step up to correct me any moment now.
Posted by: AKMA at September 21, 2004 08:01 AMFor me, the most notable things about angels is that the first thing they generally say is: Fear not!
And that's a message with some deep implications, it seems to me.
Posted by: Pascale Soleil at September 21, 2004 10:05 AMFor me, the most notable thing about angels is that the first thing they generally say is: Fear not!
And that's a message with some deep implications, it seems to me.
Posted by: Pascale Soleil at September 21, 2004 10:05 AMToo bad that you have not seen Angels In America -- you've missed Emma Thompson's majestic (if not angelic) stutter, "I-I-I."
I am not sure why, and I'd like to know, but it seems to me that Renaissance artists particularly warmed up to paintings of the Annunciation, when the Angel brings news to Mary.
There is a fresco by Fra Angelico that is particularly beautiful and haunting that monks in his convent had to pass as they climbed the stairs to their cells.
Posted by: Don at September 21, 2004 10:42 AMI like your notion of angels as convergence between scariness and reassurance. I also like your observation about why they don't, can't, have a sense of humor. (As I wrote in my own sermon last week, in Judaism angels are literalists.)
Thanks for this advance glimpse into your sermon. Blogs are so neat that way.
Posted by: Rachel at September 21, 2004 11:35 AMYour wonderful post made me think of Jacob's dream in Genesis 28, in which he has the vision of angels descending and ascending the stairway to heaven. (There was no lady making bids to buy the stairway, best I can tell.)
After seeing the angels, God repeats to Jacob the Abrahamic covenant: "Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."
It is, on the one hand, a reassuring word ("I am with you and will keep you"). But in response Jacob is "afraid." And why not! The idea that God does not leave the people he calls alone until he is finished with them is as terrifying as it is comforting.
Posted by: Caleb at September 21, 2004 10:05 PMThat should have been, for you grammarians out there, "After seeing the angels, Jacob hears God repeat the Abrahamic covenant ..."
Posted by: Caleb at September 21, 2004 10:07 PMI am so devastated that it has been "ages" since you last preached. If you are interested in preaching more often. I wonder if you would do a preaching series at a baptist church in Virginia. If you are please email me.
It amazes me that the Church of Jesus Christ lets her best resouces lie in waste.
Scott
Posted by: Scott at September 23, 2004 02:24 PMINCENSE? Wait... In the Seabury Chapel? But, but... That's not allowed!
Posted by: Mark J. at September 23, 2004 04:14 PMMark — Buwahahahahaha!!
Scott — Well, strike me pink! One of the delights of online life is the wonderful people you connect with!
Few readers will know this, but Scott Erwin is a friend of mine from way back in Princeton Seminary days. Brother, if you’re offering opportunities to preach, especially opportunities near my beloved wife who’s studying in North Carolina these days, you need not ask twice. I’m there.
Posted by: AKMA at September 23, 2004 05:26 PM