A Sermon for Michaelmas
September 29, 2024 at Holy Communion
Revelation 12:7–11, Matthew 18:1–10
“Now are come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God” (Revelation 12:10). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
In the JRR Tolkien’s fantasy masterwork, *The Lord of the Rings*, you always need to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing. When the wind is from the east, blowing out from over the mountains of the Black Land, it is a day of danger, and it calls for sobriety and resolve, but it gives no encouragement. But when the West Wind blows out of Valinor across the Western Sea, the realm of light and the abode of the servants of the Most High, the darkness lifts just enough for heroism to breathe. Although the West Wind is never more than a breeze, when it blows even just a little no eastern gale overcome it. The woes of Middle Earth melt away before the merest suggestion that the powers of the West are watchful and compassionate.
Today the church celebrates Michaelmas, the commemoration of the holy angels, and of their captain, St Michael the archangel. Everything our readings have to say about angels springs from the last words of our Gospel: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father” (Matthew 18:10).
Jesus’ disciples have asked him who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven (v 1). Jesus answers not only that one with the humility of a child is the greatest in the kingdom (v 3), but that without childlikeness no one will enter at all (v 2). But then Jesus’ words take a dark turn: “whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (v 6).
Nothing is so precious, nor so often trodden under foot, than the fragility children. In their weakness, they suffer the worst when their grown ups are broken or fighting. But since Jesus teaches that every person must have the humility of a child, and since he calls them “these little ones *who believe in me,*” what he says about the trials and temptations that children face is not just for the young. He’s telling us about those who are converted and become like children, about every child of the heavenly Father who is weak in this world so that he may be strong in the next.
Jesus proclaims woe on everyone who “causes to sin” any of the heavenly Father’s children—on anyone who by deceit or pressure pulls a humble soul who believes in him off the path of truth and meekness. Why? Because “their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven” (v 10).
And so we have our Epistle. The “deceiver of the whole world,” the prince of darkness and the original author of all the evil he pressures men to do, was thrown down to the earth from his original place next to the Most High (Revelation 12:9). That explains the darkness of the world here below. But the point comes next: a voice in heaven proclaims, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down” (v 10). There is a kingdom on high in which there is “there was no longer any place,” we’re told, for the principles of deception, violence, and pride (v 8).
So throughout the Book of Revelation, “conquering” or “overcoming”—it’s a repeated theme that the faithful are “overcomers”—means valiantly remaining true to one’s citizenship in the realm of peace on high, by refusing to leave the path here below, even in the face of extreme pressure to conform. We hear that “they loved not their lives even unto death” (v 11). In our Epistle, martyrdom becomes victory, and death a birth into life. Death is entry into the kingdom where the spirits of all the childlike are borne back to their Father’s knee. Every suffering child here below has an angel above. Each child’s angel is his true and final self; that angel is the anchor holding him fast in the depths of God while the winds toss him on surface.
There’s an old poem by Henry Vaughn, made famous by a piece of choral music:
My Soul, there is a country
Afar beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skillful in the wars;
There, above noise and danger
Sweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles,
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
The poem’s title is “Peace.” It concludes:
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flow’r of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
For none can thee secure,
But One, who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
What I find so taking about this poem is how simply its images unloose the stress of living in a world of violence towards those who meek-spirited. I love the “wingèd sentry all skillful in the wars” solemnly standing watch over the small earth below, the “rose that cannot wither” gently bending to the heavenly breeze. In a few words, the poet breathes out from his belly a gust of that West Wind, and all the eastern gales of our Middle Earth are still. Just a whisper of hope—“if thou canst get but thither”—is enough to proclaim the victory of our God and show for deceit every form of violence which crushes the meek.
The legions of heaven have already won their kingdom. There is a realm of light in which the holy ones of God on this earth are citizens in exile. Every suffering child has an angel ready to bear him away. A single word of this Gospel is enough to put the powers of cruelty to shame.
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