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The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): II Kings 6:8-17; Revelation 5:1-14
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
II Kings 6:8-17; Revelation 5:1-14
✛
Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels
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A few years ago, a graduate student – a defensive species by nature – was explaining to a new acquaintance what it was that he studied. Theology, he said. He got a quizzical look in response. Christian theology, he said. About God. The Christian theological tradition.
Ohhhhh, groaned the new acquaintance. Eyes rolled and shoulders shrugged. That stuff? he scoffed. Isn’t that all talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Umbrage was taken; indeed, severe umbrage.
First of all, the student said, no one ever actually spent time arguing about angels on the heads of pins. That is not a thing that happened. That is just something that people who hate theology say happened but there is no record of theologians ever actually arguing seriously about angels on the heads of pins.
Second (and he was getting worked up now), the arguments that that is making fun of were actually about the nature of material and non-material substances, whether they take up space. That is a real philosophical discussion, and it has real-world implications, whether you care about angels or not.
Third, he started to say… but I’ll spare you the rest and we will leave the two of them there, with their minds already made up, each of them confirming the suspicions of the other.
Angels are found frequently in both the Old and New Testaments, though they aren’t depicted as dancing, whether on the heads of pins or otherwise. The feast day we celebrate today is officially called the feast of “St. Michael and All Angels.” Michael gets pride of place because of the tradition, in Old and New Testaments, of seeing him as the leader of all the other angels. Most dramatically we hear of him in the book of Revelation when he leads angels in heaven into an apocalyptic battle, after which the “great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9).
In our reading from Revelation this evening, however, the angels are fulfilling a quite different function. Found at the end of the Bible, angels are in the beginning, too: multiple times in the book of Genesis, but also all through Exodus, the prophets, psalms, and wisdom literature. Angels are mentioned over 100 times in all. They provide assurances of God’s favor, communicate God’s promises, lead the people to where God wants them to go, and protect them from enemies.
In this, they are mediators of God’s presence. The appearance of angels in the Old Testament particularly is one way of showing the people of Israel that God is with them. These angels are visible manifestations of the invisible God so that they know that they are never alone. This, I think, is the point of today’s first reading, from the first book of the Kings. The king of Syria was at war with Israel; a great foreign power bent on destroying their Israelite neighbors. Elisha, however, with prophetic insight, was protecting Israel, hiding them from the king of Syria. This, understandably, infuriated the king, and he realized that the person he needed to destroy first and foremost was Elisha the prophet.
So one night the king of Syria sent his soldiers, his horses and chariots, to Dothan, where Elisha was, and, in the darkness, they surrounded the city. Elisha was defenseless, without weapons, without an army, unprotected, accompanied only by a servant. When the sun rises, Elisha and the servant see the enemy arrayed there: a great power outside the city walls; soldiers in formation, preventing their escape; weapons raised; chariots poised for invasion; all ready to attack. Inside: Elisha and his servant.
The servant is understandably terrified. He is not a soldier, and he is not a prophet either. He sees the entire army ready to destroy them. In the morning light, what is now as clear as day is that the entire weight of the Syrian empire is descending on the two of them and it won’t stop until they are crushed.
As panic no doubt sets in to the city’s residents, Elisha says to his servant what a later angel will say to Mary: “Fear not.” We may seem outnumbered but fear not. It may look hopeless right now but fear not. In a deeper reality, there are more forces on our side than there are on theirs.
Then, in response to Elisha’s prayer, the servant’s eyes are opened, and he sees what had been hidden. All around the mountain on which Dothan was founded, surrounding the attacking Syrian army, there were horses and chariots of fire—the army of the Lord. It had seemed that Elisha and his servant had no hope, but the heavenly host was there the whole time. They just couldn’t see them. God was present with them, protecting them, the whole time.
There was no battle after all. The Syrians were struck with blindness and Elisha directed them to Samaria, saving the children of Israel and sending the Syrians on their way. The angels had been there the whole time. They were not alone. The battle ended before it even began.
Do you ever wonder if God is present? If God is present when danger is all around? Is God present when the menacing army is outside the city gates, bent on destruction?
Angels in scripture don’t dance, that I know of, but here on earth they are the local assurances of God’s ongoing care for his people, the assurance of his protection. They are one expression of his love.
Centuries after Elisha, in another moment of hopelessness, a woman named Mary Magdalene went into a tomb, where her Lord and master had been buried, but he was gone. She wept. Then she saw, according to all four gospels, that there were either one or two angelic figures there, that Easter morning, with their message: Fear not. God is not absent. They are not alone. The Lord keeps his promises. Even in the tomb itself, with death all around, bent on destruction, the Lord keeps his promises.
In Old and New Testaments, these particular Biblical portrayals of angels are about the assurances about God being given to a people who need assuring, or promises being made to them. These are the jobs that angels are given to do, these messengers of the Lord.
But in and of themselves, when not dispatched to be about the Father’s business, they spend their time differently, as tonight’s second reading from Revelation describes to us. On the earth they are at work, but in heaven their occupation is praise, freely given, exuberantly offered. Since the great dragon was cast out by Michael, there are no chariots to ride in formation, no messages to pass on to the fearful, no people to lead through the wilderness. Just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of angels blessing the Lord in song. They gaze upon the face of God without mediation. They have the immediacy of his presence. They are able to see what we are not: the fulfillment of the providence of God; the scrolls of history read; the seemingly arbitrary vagaries of time made sense of in the final and ultimate victory of the Lamb that was slain.
And so they praise, and they sing. Knowing of the final defeat of enemy, knowing that the wilderness wandering will one day come to an end, knowing that the Lord will bring his people to the heavenly Jerusalem, just as he has promised… Knowing all that, the great heavenly chorus lifts its voices in the sublime harmony of heaven. And yes, maybe they dance.
Down below, of course, we all continue to grapple with the surrounding enemies, deal with uncertainties, and fear the absence of God. Our songs of praise, down below, are sometimes discordant, sometimes incomplete, interrupted.
May we not forget, though, Elisha’s servant. May we pray that our eyes can be opened like his were, and that we can see, as he did, that even in the valley of the shadow of death, we need fear no enemy, because the horses and chariots of fire of the Lord’s army fill the land around us. With the clear eyes of faith, that we can see that the invisible God is present, even when it seems otherwise: guiding, protecting, keeping his promises. And one day, by God’s grace, may we also sing our praises with the angels, in celestial harmony, as together with them we gaze upon the face of God.
