All Angels

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

September 29, 2013; The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 1:47-51)  A When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, "Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!" Nathanael asked him, "Where did you get to know me?" Jesus answered, "I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you." Nathanael replied, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus answered, "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these." And he said to him, "Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

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oday we have the good fortune that the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels falls on a Sunday, and we’ve chosen to celebrate that rather than our ordinary Proper 21 readings for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost.  I want to start with a couple of stories, one full of coincidence that some might call divine, the other a simple visitation that pushes the envelope a bit further.

Earlier this month parishioner Michelle Trumbo went to the University Medical Center for a rare and dangerous surgery.  She had a brain aneurism.  These things are silent killers and disablers, and 90% of people who experience one die or suffer brain damage.  Michelle was one of the lucky 10%.  By good fortune they found her aneurism before it could act out, and we happen to have one of the planet’s foremost surgeons for these things at our state university’s hospital.  Some might claim a touch of divine presence in those circumstances. 

But while he was visiting Michelle in the hospital, her dad Don Hornsby suffered a heart attack.  It was one of the big ones; they call them the “Widow Maker” – 99% blockage.  The doctors said had it happened anywhere other than in a hospital where he could be treated immediately, he would have died.  Tests afterward show no heart damage.  Luck or something else?  You decide.  But Michelle wrote this in a phone text:  “The gratitude we have for the experience and the outcome is hard to put into words.  It sounds crazy to wish it for others, but I would.  It’s given me joy in abundance.”

Story number two.  Almost twenty years ago before she was a priest, Suzanne was in recovery right after surgery.  She heard the sound of an anxious nurse leaving the room crying, “Doctor, Doctor, come quick!  This lady is in trouble.”  Suzanne suddenly became aware that she felt like a fish on land trying to breathe.  Her mouth was opening, but nothing was happening, no air was coming in.  She was alone in the room, and she couldn’t breathe.  But a voice, very close and intimate, spoke to her, clearly into her good ear. (I particularly like that detail; so incarnational – you see, Suzanne is deaf in one ear.)  The intimate voice said with gentle authority, “You are safe.  All is well.”  Suzanne describes the sense of well being that she experienced then as greater than any earthly sense of peace she has ever known.  Absolute, indescribable well being.  Utterly real.  A quality of being alive that was fuller than anything she has experienced before or sense.  That voice was even more real than the signals from her body that she couldn’t breathe.  Suzanne learned later that without the doctor’s quick intervention, she would have died.

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he word “angel” means simply “messenger.”  Today we celebrate the messengers of God.  Some messengers seem supernatural.  Some seem so very ordinary. 

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 believe that there is much more than the merely material.  That there is something rather than nothing implies a source.  And consciousness comes from consciousness.  I believe that there is a fulfillment for our implanted desire for truth, beauty and goodness.  And we get hints of the fullness from time to time.  Those who practice contemplation and prayer visit this transcendent territory from time to time.  We even taste it in ordinary moments when we give our whole selves in creativity or kindness or love.

It is an amazing and thing for me to look around at each of you and to wonder.  How marvelous each person is!  How mysterious!  What is going on inside each of you? 

Right now you have within your being the consciousness of the whole history of your life – all of your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences.  You bring all of that with you as you listen to my words and as you look around at this evocative room.  We all are hearing the same words, and we all sit in this same room, but every person’s thoughts and feelings are uniquely theirs and ultimately incommunicable. 

We could never document what is going on is this room right now in this moment.  It is incomprehensible.  If I were to interview each of you in depth about your experience of this sermon, none of you would be able adequately to make me understand the fullness of your individual reaction and your particular experience.  As hard as you might try, none of you could communicate to me the totality of what is going in within you.  And every one of those interviews would be unique, different, and infinite. 

Yet we all participate in the hearing of the one word; we all share in the breaking of the one bread, the drinking from the one cup.  There is among us a unity, grounded not only in our shared humanity, but also in our experience of so much more:  the ineffable qualities of joy and love and bliss; the mystery of knowing and of wonder; the physicality of taste and touch and sound and sight and smell.  All of it stirred into a fascinating energy of thought and feeling that passes in an instant, opening to the next infinite moment of possibility and sensation.

All of that is going on within each mysterious life in this room right now as we do this one thing together.  And if we are aware and open, we realize that as worshippers gathered to share the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, we are opening to the infinite possibilities of divine communion. 

Annie Dillard writes, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  …The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ” [i]

Or, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God,

But only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round and pluck blackberries. [ii]

I’ve heard too many compelling stories about something greater than my imagination breaking into our earthly experience and opening us to Something More.  As Hamlet said to Horatio:  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt in your philosophy.[iii]  I delight in these intimations of immortality, and I try to keep one spiritual antenna up for their possibilities whenever I can be so conscious.

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 am also a believer in the Incarnation.  I believe in a God who becomes fully human.  I believe in the revelation of the divine in “the trivial round, the common task,” as we sang three weeks ago from John Keble’s fine hymn.  These mundane things, he says, “furnish all we ought to ask.” [iv]

There is something in me that likes the plain and literal understanding of an angel as a simple messenger, a messenger from God.  In that context, every common act of kindness or consideration is the touch of an angel.  Every encouraging word or compassionate gesture is the beating of an angel’s wings.  We are all messengers of God.  We are all angels.  Every human being is a Word of God to the world, and we all have our parts to sing in the great angelic hymn of the universe. 

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o today, leave from this holy and wondrous place empowered as an angel of light, ready to be the subtle, almost invisible messenger of God, doing your duty with the diligence and kindness of the heavenly beings.  As Keble’s hymn invites us:  “If on our daily course our mind be set to hallow all we find, new treasures still, of countless price, God will provide for sacrifice.” 

Raise your spiritual antennae outward.  Any act of kindness toward you – a word of encouragement, a glance of care – could be the angelic visitation of another one of God’s messengers.  Hear Keble again:  “Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be, as more of heaven in each we see; some softening gleam of love and prayer shall dawn on every cross and care.”

And finally, if I can borrow from one more hymn.  For it seems to me that in many ways the angels of God are much like the saints of God that we sing-a-song-of in that old familiar favorite hymn.  For if an angel is simply God’s messenger, then each of us can most certainly be a divine messenger each time we offer a touch of grace or truth or love or sacrifice.  We sing a song of the saints of God whom you can meet “in schools, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea.”  And we sing that “the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” 

Well, so are the angels.  The angels, the messengers of God, are here in this room, sitting next to you and around you, bringing heaven to earth in every act and word of kindness and of grace.  You are an angel too.  You are a messenger of God.  Let the light of God shine through you in simple acts of grace and duty, and you incarnate God’s light and presence within creation. 

And keep your antenna up.  You never know when some other kind of angel may come to whisper in your good ear, “You are safe.  All is well.”

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[i] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982.

[ii] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse, Nicholson & Lee, eds., 1917

[iii] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.166-7

[iv] John Keble, The Hymnal 1982, Hymn 10