AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones

Well, I had forgotten that I was supposed to participate in Seabury’s team-taught introductory class this morning, so the time that I thought I had allotted to walk the dog and burnish the timeless prose of my half-done sermon yielded to a hasty apology to Beatrice and undeserved clarity about how I wanted to make the transition from the hook to the body of the sermon.

I’ll say more about transitions later in the afternoon, but now Bea is demanding my attention.

(Sermon, as usual, is appended in the extended entry below, to shield readers who want to avoid encountering sermons.)

By now, the rookies have had time enough to discover what the veterans have long since known: these solemn choir stalls are a great deal more scenic than they are comfortable. We may account this a mere accident, the effect of unquestioned tradition on institutional architecture. This morning’s lesson, though, invites us to imagine that these hard wood pews, these straight-back stalls benumb our buttocks and stiffen our spines as a reminder of Jacob’s headrest, of the rock on which he laid his head that night. On this feast of St. Michael, we can dedicate our discomfort to the Lord, and in our uneasy chairs we can look around all the more vigilantly for any heavenly visitors who might be ascending and descending among us.

Of course, you don’t have to be uncomfortable to see an angel; sometimes you may be doing all right in your world, and God reveals an angel just to shake things up a little. But Scripture suggests that we perceive these messengers from God most often, most readily, when affliction prods us out of our habits, out of everyday upholstered predictability. Our daily life demands that we tune out much of the explosive kaleidoscope of feeling and meaning in which we’re immersed — no one can take in all that beauty and sorrow, that pungency and harmony. We filter our world just so that we can get by; no one has the time or energy to register every sound, every option, every possibility, every vision.

That filtration system gets us by, day to day, but when hard times come we can’t hold circumstance at arm’s length by the strength of denial or ignorance, by a willful refusal to hear, to choose, to see. When extremity disrupts comfort, when unease dislodges ordinariness, our blinders fail us. Our capacity to build a limited, safe, protected, comfortable, world of our own flickers and halts. There’s a glitch in the Matrix.

Stripped of the comfort behind which we can try to hide, naked before God, we’re ready to recognize a messenger from God. We’re ready then, because angels, God’s messengers, can only communicate the truth, and when we’re content with a theme park simulation of real life, the truth makes no difference to us; truth-bearing angels would only distract us. But when we’ve been thrown out of the amusement park, sitting at the curbside with empty soda cans, discarded bubble gum, wrappers from someone’s McSnack, not sure how to get a ride to a home we don’t even know if we have, then our cracked world opens a fissure into which some truth can infiltrate itself.

“Behold!” The angel message directs our gaze, our heart’s-eye view, away from the falsehoods and disappointments by which the dragon torments God’s children. “Don’t be afraid!” The flaming sword of truth frightens the vestments off any who dare to listen to the angel’s call — but that same call is always, entirely, a promise of assurance that God is with us, that our flimsy complacency cannot separate us from the love of God. There’s no escaping the truth, not in our home parish, not in seminary, not in our apartments, not off the block, and especially not in chapel — and that truth cuts away fond illusions, and that same truth heals us with unwavering fidelity.

So shimmy in those choir stalls, wince and squirm and open your eyes to see not only Michael and Gabriel, seraphim, cherubim, watchers and holy ones, but the multitude of the saints who brought us here this exquisite morning, the communion of our sisters and brothers around the world, the glimmering hope of generations yet to arrive here, stretch and see angels! For behold, this is indeed the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!