Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of St Michael and Angels 2026

Two children are sent off into the woods together. With no food in the house, the mother tells them to go and pick strawberries and not to return until their basket is full. As children do, they tarry, and they play until night starts to fall and they are lost. Afraid of the dark and the noises in the night, the benevolent sandman appears to help send them to sleep, but before they go to sleep, they must pray:

When at night I go to sleep,
fourteen angels watch do keep:
two my head are guarding,
two my feet are guiding,
two are on my right hand,
two are on my left hand,
two who warmly cover,
two who o'er me hover,
two to whom 'tis given
to guide my steps to Heaven.

As the children fall asleep and music plays, the fourteen angels appear around the pair fast asleep on the ground and surround them in a protective embrace, until the dawn fairy comes to wake them.

This is the end of the Second Act of the Opera Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck (the 19th-century composer, not the 20th-century singer!) This scene became one of the most popular moments in one of the most popular operas of the 19th century, and you can see why! What could be more adorable than these two innocent children who have said their prayers before bedtime, being protected by a hovering host of angels? There are no angels for the hungry and exhausted parents (no villainous stepmother in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel); indeed, no angels are mentioned or seen when any adult is onstage. Instead, they are partnered with the Sandman and the Dawn Fairy and are, ultimately, just for the children. It’s notable that, in many productions, the angels themselves are played by children.

Humperdinck’s opera reflects a wider cultural trend that persists to this day. That, somehow, angels are for kids. The association started centuries before, with winged cherubs and little putti appearing in paintings and stained glass – we have some here in the Abbey – but over the last two hundred years the phenomenon has grown apace, helped by children dressed as angels for Nativity plays, the kiddification of Christmas, and Victorian sentimental pictures. We put them on the Christmas tree, we fill in online quizzes to find your Guardian Angel, we ice them as gingerbread. Believing in angels has become a bit like believing in fairies – very cute, up to a point. But thinking about angels in this way not only diminishes them, it diminishes us.

The angels we meet in the Bible are far from cute. At best, they are difficult to recognise (the letter to the Hebrews, for example, warns us that we may entertain angels unawares), at worst they are wheels within wheels all covered in eyes. It is no accident that when angels appear, so often the first thing they say is “do not be afraid.” They are awesome and awful, not least because each angel we meet in the Bible has some task that it is to accomplish, some role it is to play. The Cherubim and Seraphim sing ceaselessly around the throne of the Almighty – we join with them every Eucharist when the Sanctus is sung. Gabriel brings messages of incarnation, of a child to be born. Raphael brings healing. Michael guards and fights and defeats the dragon, which is thrown down. Every angel is an action, and those actions aren’t to benefit the angels themselves, or born of some angelic whim. Every angel is caught up in an action of God, communicated to us. God wants to communicate with us, God wants us to be healed, God wants to defend us and sends his ministering spirits to us that he might do so. As the Letter to the Hebrews writes: ‘Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?’

And who is to inherit salvation? When we make angels only for little children, we risk positioning ourselves as incapable of receiving God’s loving purposes for us – we risk trying to write ourselves out of the story. Jacob, when he has the vision of the ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending is a grown man, who has tricked and lied his way into his brother’s inheritance and is now running away. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, Jacob is entirely to blame for his predicament. He is running and is reassured that God will remain with him – the angels will continue to ascend and descend. Centuries later, Jesus meets another man, Nathanael. A man whose initial response to the news of the Messiah is a cynical put-down about people who come from Nazareth. Just as God knew Jacob and reached out to him, Jesus shows Nathanael that he knows him, and Nathanael responds with the epiphany that Jesus is the Son of God. Jacob is shown the ladder; Nathanael is shown that the ladder is Jesus. The angels still ascend and descend, God still reaches out no matter who we are, and his angels are sent to serve us. As Jacob says, ‘surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.’

All this can feel very difficult at a time when we might feel we could do with a heavenly host descending to proclaim peace on earth, and healing, and the wiping away of evil. It’s all very well to say that angels minister to us, but when we are curled up in desolation in the forests of our darkness, it can be very hard to begin to understand that any comforting presence might be there. But if we take the idea of angels seriously, the idea that God wishes to communicate with us seriously, we must also take seriously what the angels say to us about such darkness. It is no accident that this feast, since the sixth century, has been placed as a bulwark against the darkness of the year. St Michael the Archangel, defender in battle, faces the ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, and the serpent is thrown down. To take angels seriously is to take seriously the fact that love wins. Love on the cross, the blood of the Lamb, conquers the powers of darkness, so that we might join with the heavenly host in praising God.

Hansel and Gretel wake at dawn, and the angels are gone – no adult ever sees them. But the church has never believed that angels are just for children. Every night, Christians across the world pray the ancient office of Compline, the last service of the day before the long, dark hours of the night. In that service, they pray Hansel and Gretel’s prayer: ‘Visit this place, O Lord, we pray and drive far from it the snares of the enemy; may your holy angels dwell with us and guard us in peace, and may your blessing be always upon us.’ It is not only a prayer for the “innocent”; it is a prayer for all those who find themselves lost, for those (like Jacob) who are running from what they have done and those (like Nathanael) who believe that nothing good will ever come to them. It is a prayer for those who take seriously that God wishes our reconciliation, our healing and our peace. We are not diminished by believing in angels, we know ourselves to be loved.