Sermon Archive
Angels
Sermon preached by John McLuckie at Holy Communion on 29 October 2002
I met an angel once on Piccadilly. It was just opposite the Royal Academy and the sun was shining. It was a bright day in mid-summer but I was stuck in one of those self-pitying, aimless moods that often strike you in the middle of a big and lonely city. As I walked along, a man came up to me from nowhere and said; 'Ere, it's better than being in prison, innit?' That bizarre annunciation caught me so off-guard that it was enough to shake me out of my mild despair and bring me to an awareness of the sun above my head and the blessedness of life. My angel bridged the gap between my narrow horizons on that day and the broad horizons of possibility that were always there, waiting to be uncovered.
I think that is what angels do. They bridge the gap between heaven and earth, between vision and unseeing, between the managed images of the media and the glorious sight of the kingdom of heaven. Throughout scripture, angels appear to reveal what cannot be seen because of our limitations. They go up and down ladders for the sake of Jacob, they give clear sight to the prophets, they tell a virgin of a coming Messiah, they bring letters of encouragement to struggling churches.
I sometimes wonder if we really believe there is a gap to be crossed. We can often seem miserably contented with the flat contours of a superficial glance. We can resign ourselves to a small-scale, flat-packed heaven - an achievable consumer commodity. I believe there really is a gap. It is a gap which traditional religious language describes in the vocabulary of sin. We might also describe it in ways that talk of a lack of clear sight. Often, we can see no real alternatives to the way things are, we can have no clear sense of who we are or where we belong, no vision of beauty that is not clouded by a painful sense of disorder lurking very close by.
Perhaps angels are God's way of reminding us of the possibility of bridging that gap between what we see and what we can envision. Angels are always described as part of God's creation. God cannot help but create bountifully - it is an expression of his selfless love. Angels are the dimension of that creation which exist to offer a ceaseless ministry of praise in the heavens and to offer visions of that praise in the darker moments of human experience.
Our Christian forebears in these islands were well acquainted with this realm of existence and it may be time to reclaim some of their insights to the place of angels in our created order. Their insight is vital not only to restore some of our sense of the wondrous unity of God's creation, but also to challenge the limitations of our sight. Tonight's reading from Daniel illustrates what I mean very well.
The prophetic visionary is confronted with a clear sight of what is to happen to his people and he can hardly bear the awfulness of that clarity. The prospect of the violence that threatens the people is utterly terrible and the burden of the knowledge of what is to come feels just too much for Daniel, even if the message is one of ultimate survival. The angel offers two things to Daniel: a sight of what is written in the book of truth, as the text has it, and the strength to bear its message. It is right for the angel to be the bearer of the news of coming violence because what we humans do to each other is of crucial importance to God. Indeed, as the pacifist Jesuit Dan Berrigan has said, ?The clash of arms penetrates the heavenly court; God is the prey - the God of peace, and God's peaceable disciples. War is a spiritual reality, it is always and everywhere and chiefly a demonic assault on the God of peace, the Lover of creation."
Angels come to us as bearers of alternative visions. They remind us that the gap between heaven and earth is not inevitable. It can be bridged and in the bridging can come a radiant vision of the unity that God intended for creation and the strength to pursue that vision. We need strength like that in this moment. I wonder if my angel in Piccadilly might pay a little visit to those who threaten war in our day, just to remind them that there might be something better. And I wonder if he might bring another cheerful message of encouragement to those who, for the sake of the unity of all things, resist any assault on the God of peace, the Lover of creation.
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