Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.
27.09.20
Feast of St Michael and All Angels (transferred).
·
Genesis 28.10-17
·
John 1.47-51
Anknüpfungspunkt.
An – knüp – fungs –
punkt.
Anknüpfungspunkt.
Normally, you’ll have guessed, I would be
saying: “Repeat after me”. But we are not supposed to raise our voices
unnecessarily. So you’re spared.
Still, aware that we have not had a linguistic
detail in a sermon for a little while, today I bring you:
Anknüpfungspunkt.
Anknüpfungspunkt is the German for “point of contact”.
“Contact point”. The background here is that over very many years Christian thinkers
have been debating what kind of point of contact we human beings have with Gd.
Is our point of contact with Gd something natural, or is it something Gd
Gdself must bring about? That may sound like a an overcomplicated question
(at best), but theologians have seen that quite a lot follows on from how you
answer that question - about the whole business of relating to Gd. And, because
of lot of those theologians have been German, the debate was often in German,
and so the German word for “point of contact” has stuck. In German. Anknüpfungspunkt.
Today I want us to reflect on Anknüpfungspunkt
in a different way.
I want to ask what kind of Anknüpfungspunkt
– what kind of point of contact – we as a particular Christian community – a
worshipping community - might have with people around us. Do we have anything
in common – in common, that is, if we ever want to try to talk about the things
of Gd?
Here’s an idea. We do have an Anknüpfungspunkt,
a point of contact, with those around us, and that point of contact is…
our very own St Michael, whose Feast we
mark today. Or rather, since we are “St Michael and All Angels” the
point of contact is with all angels, among them the Archangel Michael.
I say this because it has been suggested that
angels have scarcely been more popular than they are in our society,
now. If we start talking about angels to those around us, it is not too unlikely
they will be receptive. There are different layers to this.
·
First, there are
more Christians around us in the UK than is sometimes suggested.
·
Second, there are
many more who are “residual Christians” (they don’t call
themselves “Christian” but they may tend to “think Christian”).
·
Third, among those
of other world faiths, including those represented in our locality, many
also believe in angels, or angelic or heavenly beings of some kind.
·
And fourth, think
of all those people who say: “I’m spiritual but not religious”, or, more
simply: “I don’t know what I believe”. Among them are many people who
believe in angels, or who are open to belief in angels.
The last
survey I could find (from 2016) showed that a third of Britons believe
not only in angels, but specifically in guardian angels.[1]
That may not sound like a huge number, but think it through: it suggests at
least every third person you meet may have some kind of sense of angels. That
is not nothing.
What do people believe in, when they believe
in angels? Are they just fond of and open to suggestion from ABBA? Or Robbie
Williams? Or whoever it would be these days (it won’t surprise you that I don’t
know)? I think it’s a little more than that.
It seems when people believe in angels, they
believe in mostly-hidden beings, who are there to support them in some of these
ways:
·
they will keep
them away from danger;
·
they will bring
them help;
·
they will run
their angelic fingers through their hair;
·
they will wipe
away tears;
·
they are there
for them;
·
they think the
world of them.
Lovely. But are we not compelled to ask: is
that the biblical view of angels?
It is not hard to show that it is not.
We know – but for completeness’s sake I will repeat
– that “angels” in the Bible are simply “messengers”. We need context to
see if they are heavenly or human or other creaturely messengers. But, much
more important than that, let us remember the two most important roles of
angels in the biblical account, more important than the bringing of comfort to worried
people.
Firstly, angels exist to praise Gd.
To worship Gd constantly, joyfully,
beautifully, unhesitatingly. From Psalm 103 [vv21-22a]:
Bless the LORD, you angels of his;
You mighty ones, who do perform his
word;
Listening for the voice of his word.
Bless the LORD, all his hosts…
And, if we can think of not only the heavenly hosts but the cherubim and seraphim as
kinds of angels (as we may), then let us note that it is the seraphim who sing the heavenly
song, into which we are drawn [Isa 6.3; cf. Rev 4.8]:
Holy, holy, holy! Lord Gd of hosts!
Heaven and earth are full of your glory!
And
again from the Psalms [148.1]:
Hallelu
Yah!
Praise
the LORD from the heavens!
Praise
him in the heights!
Praise
him, all you his angels!
Praise
him, all his hosts!
We can think also of the angels who came to the
shepherds after Jesus’s birth:
Glory
to God in the highest! [Luke 2.14a];
and it continues: from the Letter to the Hebrews [Heb 1.6b]:
Let all Gd’s angels worship him.
Secondly, in the Bible’s way of seeing things,
angels, more than they are blond-haired beauties, are efficient and
effective warriors.
- They bringing a plague upon Israel (2 Samuel 24:16–17);
- they smite the leaders of the Assyrian army (2 Chronicles 32:21);
- they patrol the earth as God’s representatives (Zechariah 1:10–11);
- they strike King Herod dead because he did not give God glory (Acts
12:23
- They carry out war against negative forces (Daniel 10:13;
Revelation 12:7–8).
- they pour out bowls of God’s wrath on the earth (Revelation 16:1);
That’s quite a military career!
So really angels are messenger-soldiers/soldier messengers. And, when they are messengers, their message is not one of vague comfort. No angel in the Bible ever says: “There, there” or “You’re doing really well.” No.
Their message is concrete, new, shocking, and typically scary. “You’re going to have a baby” (to pick the obvious example) may be good, excellent news, but it’s a promise of risk and change. Which is why angels often begin: “Do not be afraid!” Because, in the first place, we are afraid [Dan 10.12, 19; Matt 28.5; Luke 1.13, 30; 2.10; Acts 27.24].
So do we have, in angels, an Anknüpfungpunkt,
a point of connection, with those around us? It turns out we may well not.
·
On
the one hand, for some, angels are cuddly comforters who smooth our way in life.
·
On
the other hand, for those of us formed by the biblical and Christian tradition,
angels are fierce warriors, whom we meet when they bring us news which disturbs
all our plans.
Where do we go from here?
Well, I will suggest that there is something about the more general cultural idea of angels that is right. Both wider society and our own Christian framing of things insist that angels are around; they are here; they are among us.
And there is something in today’s texts which
stresses that angels are around. It’s something easy to miss. Angels appear in
a dream to Jacob in the First Reading, and are promised to Nathanael by Jesus in
the Gospel. But notice the direction of travel:
…
the angels of Gd were ascending and descending…
…
you will see heaven opened
and
the angels of Gd ascending and descending…
You see? The angels ascend first, and only
then descend. So the angels are with us all the time. They worship Gd directly
in heaven, sure, but their task is here on earth. They start with us. Here with
us. Angels are around. And they are around, because at heart they are here
to help us.
We can say that
angels are fearful,
but they tell us not to be afraid;
angels bring a message which disturbs us,
but they disturb in order to comfort.
They set us on an adventure which is the making
of us,
which will make us who we truly are.
I don’t know if any of us will in real life get to
say such things as these to those around us who are “spiritual but not
religious” or who “don’t know what they believe”. We may; we may not.
But in truth we may be the ones who most need
to hear about angels, who need to be clear who angels are and who they are not.
Angels
are fearful,
but
they tell us not to be afraid;
angels
bring a message which disturbs us,
but they
disturb in order to comfort.
They
set us on an adventure which is the making of us,
which
will make us who we truly are.
.
I wish you a blessed Feast.
As for whether I wish you your own encounter with
angels,
well, I’ll take a step back,
and invite you to consider if you yourself want
it,
if you want that particular, particularly challenging
point of contact,
that particularly revolutionary Anknüpfungspunkt.
My hope us that some of us, some of the time, will.
Amen.
