Angels: Fearful and Friendly, through and through

 

Sermon. 28 September 2025 St Nicholas’ Ashill and St George’s Saham Toney

St Michael and All Angels [transferred]

 

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream, I Have a Dream

I Have a Dream, a fantasy
To help me through, reality
And my destination, makes it worth the while
Pushin' through the darkness, still another mile

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels…

(ABBA)

Words of… who knows?...

If any of you think that this is a relatively recent song, I have to tell you, it came out in 1979, which makes it just shy of half a century old. Half a century! Brothers and sisters, your lives are more precious than you realise.

 

It’s a pleasant song (many of us think). What is more, ABBA were ahead of their time, seeing something others could not then see. It is as if they knew how belief in angels was going to explode in the decades ahead. Do you remember when bookshops started having “Mind Body Spirit” sections? Well, books about angels soon became a significant part of that new genre. Angels as gentle, calming, encouraging, on your side, gently nudging you to feel better about yourself.

 

There is something good in everyone I see, including me!

 

It is all well and good. I believe it can be a good thing to attend to our self-esteem, and, yes, seek to have a healthy esteem for yourself. But! But it has to be said that this understanding of angels tells us nothing – nothing – about angels as we find them in the Bible.

 

It can be said bluntly: in the Bible, angels are scary. Angels are scary. I don’t mean, of course, scary like a horror story. Not that. I mean scary in the sense of awesome, and awe-some in the full sense. Today the word “awesome” is thrown around. People say: “that cup of tea was awesome; thank you”. But the original meaning is powerful.

It means: inspiring awe.

It means it is fearful and enormous and powerful and not altogether safe or comfortable. It means fearsome;

causing fear, even while it also draws you in.

This is who angels are in the Bible:

causing fear, even while they also draw you in.

 

How do I claim this? Precisely because…

What is that angels in the Bible most often say?

It is: “Do not be afraid!”

 

A moment’s digression. I warn you now: in Advent, I am going to be on the stricter side of things. I am going to discourage us from celebrating Christmas too much before it comes. However, today I am allowing us just a taste from Handel’s Messiah, to make the point I want to make here.

Remember:

There were shepherds abiding in the field,

         keeping watch over their flock by night.

         And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,

         and the glory of the Lord shone round about them,

and they were sore afraid.

         And the angel said unto them:

         “Fear not…”.

 

So, one thing we can do on this Feast of St Michael and All Angels – also called St Michael and All the Bodiless Powers – one thing we can do – and it is not a small thing – is calmly note that when we have to do with God we are involved in awesome things, with fearful things. A Russian Orthodox teacher, Metropolitan Anthony, once put it this way:

To pray is not to enter the cave of a pussy cat;

it is to enter the cave of a tiger.

We had better believe it.

 

But! But many of you will be ahead of me at this point. You will be thinking: all that is true, but I am only telling half the story. We have already heard the other half, and we had better take that seriously too. That is: the fearful angels say:

Fear not;

do not be afraid;

you don’t have to fear us, we are indeed here for your good.

This is indeed a truth as important as the awesome nature of angels.

They are fearsome, but/and/but/and they come from Loving God, from God who loves us. They come to us with messages from Loving God, God who loves us, God who brings us to better places. So the fear of awe is inevitable, but the angels do not want us to stay in the fear.  

 

So the second thing we can do on this Feast of St Michael and All Angels – also called St Michael and All the Bodiless Powers – is give thanks for the angels that are and will be among us. Give thanks for the angels that are and will be among us.

 

I say they are here, because Jesus himself implies that each one of us has at least one Guardian Angel. In Matthew 18.10, Jesus says that children (“little ones”) have their own angels. By the way, Jesus doesn’t give the details of the numbers. Children must have at least one Guardian Angel, but it might be many more; maybe each have 1,000 angels. And again, if we know anything – anything – about the faithfulness of God, of how God comes to us and stays, then we can have perfect confidence that children don’t lose their angels when they become adults. That would be against God’s ways.

 

Why do I say they will be here? We actually confess that angels will be here within this service. The claim is hiding in plain sight. Here are some words I think you will know:  

“Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the compony of heaven,

we proclaim your great and glorious name,

for ever praising you and saying

Holy, holy, holy Lord...”

 

Yes, when we gather around the bread and the wine,

to give thanks to the Father,

and to remember the Last Will and Testament of the Son,

and to call down the Spirit,

then we can be most sure that the heavenly host is with us.

So we sing the hymn of heaven, known both to Isaiah and to the writer of Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy!” Adoration. We adore.

 

Here is a prayer which acknowledges that the angels will be among us, a prayer from another tradition (from the Orthodox liturgy):

 

We, who in a mystery represent the cherubim,

and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity,

let us now lay aside all the cares of this world,

that we may receive the King of All,

who comes, invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts.

 

Let us make it our own.

[Prayed again, repeating each line.]

Amen.