Solemnity of St. Michael and All Angels
Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 103:19-22
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
THIS has been a weird week. Just watching the evening news was a surreal experience. This week I’ve felt acutely just how much fear swirls around us in our daily lives. I am sure, if there were a scale to measure the anxiety level of a nation, there were more critical times in our country’s history, but the post-9/11 world has been marked by a palpable uptick in our fear factor. Skirting economic crisis, fighting two wars, facing uncertainty about climate change and resource depletion, the disorienting process that is globalization – ask a lot of people on the street and they’ll tell you: If you’re not nervous, you’re just not paying attention. And it’s not just at the national or global level. This weekend at the vestry retreat there were some candid conversations about fear right here in the parish. Anxiety about change, about ceremony and ritual, about meeting the budget, the uncertainty about parish growth and incorporating new people and ideas into our parish culture. And please don’t think priests are immune to fear and anxiety. We’ve got families and bills, we watch the same news you do, and if you think it’s not scary some weeks writing a sermon for this audience, you’re out of your mind.
St. John’s Apocalypse was written to first century Christians besieged by crisis and fear. It’s interesting that Jesus didn’t hand down a syllogism, 10 new commandments, or a treatise on systematic theology to reassure his persecuted people; he showed John a series of visions. Revelation is “a collection of images that persuades not by appealing to ‘our logical faculties but to our imagination and emotions.’”[1] To translate or interpret it pushes the boundaries of language because “the medium is the message,” so I want us to sit for a time with these images John saw on Patmos because they are all about the “struggle to make sense of what it means to be God’s people in the crucible and vortex of history.”[2] And this vision recounted in Revelation 12 is the key to the rest of the book. What did John see?
He saw a war. “There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon . . . .” (Rev. 12.7) The OT book of Daniel had introduced Michael the archangel as a “great prince” who defends and fights on behalf of God’s people (Dan. 12.1). The dragon is the devil, a figure present in the first book in the Bible as well as the last, the personification of evil who would enslave the world to fear. The battle between God and evil is ancient, dating back to the story of the Garden of Eden. Michael and his angels defeat Eden’s “original snake,” effectively ending the conflict that had begun between Eve and the serpent, and continued between her offspring and his, and raged throughout history until one decisive moment.
But when exactly was the moment? John often does a curious thing in this book: When he relates his visions, he sometimes sees the same events from different vantage points. In the passage we read today, John saw a war from the vantage point of heaven, but in the first half of chapter 12 John saw what the battle looked like on earth.
A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that there she can be nourished for one thousand two hundred sixty days. (Rev. 12.1-6)
The decisive move in the battle was when the child was “snatched away” to God and to his throne. To be precise: The coup de grâce was the cross. Just when it seemed the dragon struck a killing blow by crucifying the son of God, Jesus actually reigned triumphant from his cross, taking into himself all the assaults of hell and the devil, leaving us nothing to cower before anymore.
And yet – we still have to do with evil and with fear because the devil is beaten but still at large. Woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short. (Rev. 12.12)
Jesus told us to expect trouble in this world, great trouble . . . . Until the end Satan will spew a river of evil at us, but God will protect and provide for us. He will never leave or forsake us. How different this perspective is from much of what I see among Christians in our American culture. On the one hand I see so much doubt, fear, suspicion, sensationalism, and uncertainty, one wonders if the news ever reached us that Jesus has already won the victory over Satan. That first great promise of the gospel . . . has been realized. Satan is a real but a defeated foe. We overcome him now by the blood of the Lamb, by the once-finished work of the Lord Jesus upon his cross. We overcome him by the word of our testimony. When the gospel is believed and lived out every day until we are in heaven. We prevail because Jesus has prevailed. This truth is meant to sink deep into our souls.
But as many Christians err on the side of unbelief and fear so many others err on the side of naïveté and presumption. To affirm that Satan is our defeated foe is not to say that he is no longer a mighty adversary. He has been dethroned, not annihilated; conquered, not eradicated.[3]
Michael’s victory is now ours to complete, and the path to our victory was brought home to me on Friday night in an offhand comment by our vestry retreat leader, Fr. Martin Smith. Fr. Martin said: “The opposite of faith is fear.” Often we swim in a sea of fear. It’s as present to us as air. What happens to my children if the economy collapses, if we lose our home? What if I lose my job or my health insurance? What if people see through me, if they catch on that I’m barely holding my life together with both hands? What if I find myself alone? What if, what if, what if . . . ? The dragon still longs for us to fall to his fury, and he assails us with accusations on every side, whispering that we really aren’t up to being good parents, that we can’t flourish as a vibrant and growing parish, and ultimately that we really have no hope, none of us, of standing confidently before a righteous God.
But the corollary to what Fr. Martin said is: The opposite of fear is faith. Faith. Audacious trust in the God who holds us, trust in the story that this ancient book tells, trust in the promise that Christ scored a resounding victory at the cross. That is the truth that has to sink deep into our souls. My friend Les Newsom said once in a sermon: “The very heartbeat of protecting yourself against Satan is by realizing that it cannot be done as long as you’re gripped by a slavish fear and wondering whether God is really on your side or not.”[4] A commentator wrote: “Divine protection is the basis for real security and self-worth. There is no human nurture that can ultimately be relied upon or any defensive strategy that will ultimately protect. To be secure in oneself is to be secure in God and to accept oneself as worthy and glorious in the sight of god; to accept that we are loved even if we may not always be able to feel it . . . .”[5]
Do you know that? Do you really? The things we fear are very real things, but so is the cross that stands as a constant reminder that that God is on our side. We win if we admit our vulnerability to Satan’s accusations, yet hold ever more doggedly to the promise of God, the promise that God is for us. And if God is for us, then what have we to fear?
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Christopher C. Rowland, “The Book of Revelation,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. XII (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1998): 560 (citation omitted).
[2] Scotty Smith and Michael Card, Unveiled Hope (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1997): 150.
[3] Smith and Card, 154.
[4] Les Newsome, “The Woman and the Dragon,” preached at the University of Mississippi Reformed University Fellowship on 10 October 2007, available for download at (http://www.olemiss.edu/orgs/ruf/rev08.mp3).
[5] New Interpreter’s Bible, 652.
© 2008 Samuel Wood
