Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of St Michael and All Angels 2025

The saints of the peninsula monastery, Mount Athos, are many and varied. One recently canonised priest-monk, a master of prayer and a spiritual guide to many pilgrims, was sometimes overheard speaking to the angels as he censed the altar, walking around the iconostasis, the great icon screen that separates the altar area from the rest of the building in orthodox churches. Some testified that he could be heard apologising for getting in the way of the angels, or excusing himself as he walked around them. Our western, rational, post-enlightenment world doesn’t really know what to do with stories like this, apart from to smile, and perhaps raise our eyebrows.  But the fact is, the idea that we pray alone is not found anywhere in Christian theology, nor is any sense that when we worship, we do so only alongside those whom we can see. The praise of God is first the preserve of the angels – those created, spiritual beings, who have a will and an intelligence. Whenever we worship, we join our voices with the church across the world and throughout time: this, we understand. There is a fellowship, a communion, which exists between Christians, to the extent that there is never any such thing as truly or absolutely private prayer. But we sometimes find it harder to understand that worship is firstly a heavenly reality. The praise of God is the existence of all things in relation to God, and our worship is truly worship when it joins the perfect worship of heaven. In fact, heaven is worship, a total loving participation in, and recognition of, the life of God himself. Later in tonight’s service, the celebrant will make that very explicit just before the choir sings the Sanctus. That is the song of angelic worship, and we join our voices with theirs as we hand ourselves over to that beautiful and rich fellowship of love which we cannot see. We join the angels in bowing down in awe and wonder at God’s presence here among us, as we are bound once again into Christ’s self-offering of love and life.

St Augustine teaches that the word ‘angel’ is in fact the name of their office; the name of their nature, Augustine says, is spirit. The word angel is translated ‘messenger.’ Angels are servants of God’s will, and carry out aspects of God’s own mission. Traditionally, Michael the Archangel is the leader of the heavenly host, with a special role in battling evil, as we heard in the colourful vision of John the Divine in tonight’s first reading. The imagery contained there is what we often call ‘apocalyptic’, that is relating to the end of all things. Our culture today is frequently described as increasingly secular, one in which religion has been squeezed out into carefully managed margins. But angels, and in particular the sense that the battle between good and evil is not only a physical one, but also has invisible facets, still has resonance for many people today, including those who might describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious.’ The key thing for Christians to remember is that the ministry of the angels is a ministry of service to Christ and to his Kingdom – therefore, any sense that archangels and angels are involved in the struggle between good and evil is not an abstract or spooky one, but rather at the service of everything we see and hear in Christ. The angels are not at will or whim of some kind of abstract good, but rather at the service of the living God, whom they worship day and night.

Gabriel the Archangel is perhaps best known in the tradition for being a messenger. It is Gabriel who appears in the Temple to Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, to announce the birth of the great forerunner, and it is Gabriel, of course, who bears to our Lady Mary the news that she is to be the Mother of Jesus. In the Hebrew tradition, to see an angel was often believed to be a premonition of death. That is one reason why Gabriel tells Mary not to be afraid. But in the Christian tradition, from this moment on, angels are messengers of Good News, messengers of the Gospel.

Raphael the Archangel is traditionally believed to be the angel of healing. In Salley Vickers’ beautiful novel Miss Garnett’s Angel, which is a playful and beautiful retelling of the apocryphal book of Tobit, perhaps surprisingly, Miss Garnet remembers Raphael most from her Baptist upbringing. At the beginning of the novel, Miss Garnett cannot be doing with the image of the Virgin and Child above her hotel room bed – she deals in certainties, patterns, and order, the result of an unhappy childhood and an all-too predictable life. During the novel, she discovers the surprising healing that comes from playfulness, from art, from friendship, and from love. It is a tale of wholeness that emerges at some of life’s hinges: age, the death of friends, the passing of time, and the courage to step into new experiences. But at its heart is a learning to wonder, to look at realty, if you like, with the eye of faith, and to be open to what that Good News might give you.

Each of these archangelic figures and the stories which surround them require some willingness to engage with a cosmology, that is a structure of the universe which includes space, and existence beyond this world. The opening prayer for today’s liturgy declares that God has ordained (intended) and constituted the ministries of angels and mortals in a ‘wonderful order’ – that statement is a commitment to a particular kind of cosmology, with structure, intention and relationship. It is an ancient prayer. It reminds us that we are not alone in the universe, and that the intense, unquantifiable, and limitless energy behind creation which is the will of God, is creative far beyond our knowledge and perception. It points towards a mutuality in creation, as well as order. The service of God in angelic worship finds a kind of mirror in the ministry of the angels among human beings, unseen, and yet part of the ongoing Christian story in the life of the world. They are spiritual messengers of the Gospel, proclaiming the Lord’s message of peace, battling against evil, and ministering the balm of healing where it is needed. But before anything else, theirs is a vocation to worship the mystery of the Living God, the origin and source of all that is, the wisdom which created all things, visible and invisible, serving the love which will wrap all this up into a great final symphony of consummation at the end of time.

Proclaiming the message of God’s love, combatting evil, offering healing: these are all key components of Christian life on earth. The angels assist us in this from the heavenly realm. They are God’s ambassadors, messengers of creation restored, whose delight is in the worship of heaven, just beyond the limits of normal sight. They stand among us here, invisible, at the Lord’s command. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, says Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Visible and invisible, the Lord’s creation is united in worship and witness, not at the service of any philosophy, ideology or strategy, but rather at the service of the perfect love which seeks out and saves. May the angels accompany us, and open the eyes of our faith by their message.