I'm Loving Angels Instead (Revelation 12.7-12, John 1.47-51)

 


In the words of the great twentieth century mystic and spiritual writer, St Robbie Williams;

I sit and wait, does an angel, contemplate my fate? And do they know the places where we go, when we’re grey and old?

Yes that’s right today’s sermon is on my specialist subject, cheesy pop music from the nineties.

No today we’re going to have a chat about angels, as we’re celebrating Michaelmas, or as the CofE calls it Michael and All Angels. Why are we talking about angels? Why do they matter, what’s important about them, I hear you cry, well buckle up, because hopefully we’re going to explore some of that over the next few minutes.

The word angel appears in the Bible over ninety times. Can anyone tell me some times when angels appear in the Bible?

·         Appeared to Gideon

·         Visited Abraham  

·         Took Elijah up to heaven

·         Appeared to Hagar the mother of Ishmael

·         The Angel of Death during the plagues on Egypt.

·         Announced the birth of JTB to Zechariah

·         Announced the birth of Jesus

·         The Annunciation

·         Angels ministered to Jesus while he was tempted in the wilderness

·         Angels rolled the tombstone away

·         Angels encouraged the apostles after Jesus’ ascension

·         An Angel led Paul out of prison

·         An Angel stood by Paul during the shipwreck.

·         There are all sorts of appearances in the Old Testament too.

Jesus talks about angels as well. He said that the guardian angels of children always see the Father’s face[1], that they rejoice over the penitent, that they bear souls up to heaven. The New Testament doesn’t question the existence of angels, it just states that they do. And what we see from the examples we’ve come up with is that actually, they play a pretty important role in the Bible.

Thinking about preaching today has encouraged me to take a leap of faith and try and find out a bit more about Angels. It’s something I’ve not really thought about, what are they, what are they for? Do they really exist? These are questions that’ve been going through my mind this week, in between what’s for tea?

Angels are messengers. In early Hebrew thinking angels were the agents and instruments of the will of God on earth. They did his will and delivered his messages. [2]

In the Bible we see that they carry messages from God to all sorts of different people. The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Prophets, the People of Israel, they are agents of God’s word. By that I mean God’s action in the world. That’s what the Bible is talking about when it refers to the word of God, the action of God. What God’s doing.

So the angels are part of that, a bit like a heavenly Facebook Messenger, they tell us mortals what God wants us to do. Angels existed in pre-judaistic times, for centuries before Jesus people felt guided, protected by the angels. My Grandma still believes that there’s a guardian angel that looks after her, and me and everyone else.

I’m not sure I’d go quite that far myself, but if that’s something you believe that’s okay and wonderful.

Many cultures have some form of them, some form of messenger from the divine. Many people when someone has died, even though they have little or no specific belief will say, she’s with the angels or she’s an angel now.

There’s something powerful about Angels. Something written deep in many of us. That sense of needing to be protected, to feel safe, to have something or someone watching over us. Perhaps that points to a greater truth, that the angels do actually watch over us. Or perhaps it’s a way of expressing God’s presence and protection.

That’s another thing they represent. The protection of God.

My friend works in a parish near the Welsh border, there are loads of churches around there dedicated to St Michael. Michael the leader of the armies of God, the protector. The reason being that in the early medieval period hordes of the Welsh like my Mum, would rampage across the border and steal English sheep, and pillage. And that unfortunately still happens today.

Dedicating churches to St Michael was kind of an attempt to invoke God’s protection against the enemies of England.

Michael is the protector of Israel and the protector of the faithful. Which brings us nicely on to our reading from Revelation.

Revelation is an interesting and dare I say it confusing book of the Bible. There are four main ways that people have tried to interpret it. And there will be a test on this at the end of the service alright?

1.     Preterist – The prophesies only talk about John’s day and his time, not the future.

2.     Historicist – The prophesies and stories are a preview of history from the writer’s time to the end of the world.

3.     Futurist – That the visions seen are about aliens. That was a joke. Futurist is about that everything talked about will happen at the end of time, and has nothing to do with John’s day.

4.     Poetic – That it’s a bunch of stories and poems about God triumphing over evil, and there’s an artistry involved in what’s being said.

So we can see that there’s a variety of different beliefs and ideas about what’s going on here. I personally look at Revelation both as Poetic, and probably a bit Preterist too. I think it’s probably about John and the persecution that the church was facing at that time.

Like much of the Old Testament, I think it’s trying to create a reason, a justification for their suffering. If God does protect us, then why are we suffering? It’s an age old question, and I don’t think it has an easy answer.

I think that ‘The Devil’ here represents evil and ‘Michael’ represents God.

The triumph over evil in this battle brings about ‘The Kingdom of Our God’. We know that the Kingdom is wonderful, and peaceful. We know that in the Kingdom there is justice, and everyone is drawn to it.

How has this victory over evil come about? ‘They triumphed over him through the blood of the lamb.’ It’s through our faith, through Jesus’ loving sacrifice on the cross that the victory over death and destruction, over evil has been won.

What this passage is saying is that God has power over everything, that he is faithful, that those who trust in him can be assured that evil will never win. That the problems and sufferings that we take on, that the evil we see is only temporary. God has victory over it.

It’s God that protects us. It’s in God we trust. Perhaps Angels are an extension of that. My prayer is that we know God’s protection in our homes and on our families. It doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen. It does mean that God is with us in it.

So may Michael and all the angels protect us, may God protect us, and may we know that he has got us now and in eternity. Amen.

 

[1] Matt 18.10

[2] Ronald Brownrigg, p.313

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