With angels and archangels

St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
Saint Michael & All Angels
29 September 2024

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At every Eucharist we affirm our place alongside the angels and archangels as the priest says:

Therefore, with angels and archangels,
and with all the company of heaven,
we proclaim your great and glorious name.
for ever praising you and saying:

Today—on the feast of St Michael and All Angels—we pause to think about what we are saying and what we mean by those words.

Do we really believe in angels?

And if so, what do we believe about them?

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IN THE BIBLE we see diverse traditions about angels.

The Hebrew word malʾaḵ occurs about 200 times, usually in the singular for and quite often (58x) in the phrase “the angel of the LORD” where it seems to be euphemism for “God.”

In the Greek New Testament, despite being a much shorter set of documents, the word angelos occurs 178 times. Again, these are mostly singular, and the phrase “angel of the Lord” occurs frequently.

Alongside angels we also find cherubim and seraphim, as well as a whole cast of non-human spirits and demons. Even Satan is understood to be one of the angels gone feral, so to speak, as we shall see in the readings from Job starting next week.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from caves in 1948 and immediately afterwards, we find a whole host of good and bad powers. In some of these texts, the leader of the forces of light is Melchizedek (king of righteousness) while the leader of the forces of darkness is Melchiresha(king of evil).

In our readings today we hear of the war between the forces of evil led by Satan (here called the great dragon) and the forces of good led by Michael.

BTW, none of these spiritual entities have feathered wings or dragon-like body parts in the Bible. Those are much later artistic concepts, although the representation of Satan as a serpent or dragon reflects ancient legends where a dragon (an exaggerated crocodile) is an existential threat.

Indeed, the famous scene of St George slaying the dragon is a variant of the scene from today’s reading in Revelation 12, although both go back to ancient myths of the conflict with the dragon/crocodile.

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IN OUR WORLD we can now explain so much of the cosmos as well as the inner system of the human person, whether physical or psychological. Have we deprived the universe of its angels?

Maybe not.

On the door of our fridge, we have a small magnet with the words:

Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”

This saying is attributed to the Talmud, a major source of Jewish thought dating to around 500 CE but with some later additions.

This version is very popular online, but when we look for the source in the Talmud, the nearest reference seems to be:

Ben Sira said: God caused herbs to spring forth from the earth: with them the physician heals the wound and the apothecary compounds his preparations. R. Shimon said: There is not a single herb but has a mazal [constellation] in the heavens which strikes it and says, “Grow!” Bereshit Rabbah 10.6

That is a rather more complex piece of teaching, although it preserves the idea that growth here may be helped or hindered by extra-terrestrial powers.

On the other hand, “striking” is a rather more severe form of nurture than “whisper”!

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RE-ENCHANTMENT of the vast universe is a spiritual project for our times. It may be the mission of St Paul’s Church to help the people of Ipswich reimagine our world as “enchanted,” rather than a mechanistic system driven by chemicals that shape our moods.

We are slowly learning to move beyond mechanistic explanations of reality to embrace the dance of creation as both an expression of cosmic energy (what people of faith describe as divine love) and as a dynamic process that responds to our attention (or lack of attention).

On this final Sunday in the Season of Creation, we are invited to widen our concept of creation to include everything we know and understand, as well as all the rest of reality that we are yet to discover and explore.

Angels and archangels, along with the cherubim and seraphim, are symbols that speak to us of the depth dimension in life and the constant loving presence of God in and through it all.

There is no place—and no circumstance—where the angel of the Lord cannot bend over us and whisper, “You are blessed. You are loved. Grow. Flourish. Become who we intend you to be.”

Call them what you will, these expressions of cosmic love are profound and powerful.