Dear All,

Please find attached this Sunday's sermon as we celebrate the feast of St Michael and All Angels!

Don't forget to come down to our 11am service, or to our 4pm, family friendly 'Closer' service, as we learn about God through crafts, prayer and song.

We're also starting to prepare for our Christmas fair, on Saturday the 14th December at All Saints' Church, if you'd like to be involved and run a stall let us know! Or if you'd just like to come down, make sure you put it in your diaries asap (it's coming around quick!)

Find this week's sermon below:

Rev 12:7-12

7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have come the salvation and the power

and the kingdom of our God,

and the authority of his Messiah.

For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,

who accuses them before our God day and night,

has been hurled down.

11 They triumphed over him

by the blood of the Lamb

and by the word of their testimony;

they did not love their lives so much

as to shrink from death.

12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens

and you who dwell in them!

But woe to the earth and the sea,

because the devil has gone down to you!

He is filled with fury,

because he knows that his time is short.”

In my job I end up having a lot of really strange conversations, particularly about angels. Sometimes people come up to me and they don’t want to talk about God or faith but they do want to tell me something that they felt once happened with an angel. Now I’ve read about angels a fair bit, partly because I’ve preached in this service before, and it’s interesting looking at the passages in the bible and then hearing what people say.

In fact, I once went to visit someone and we were sat in her living room chatting. She said something like ‘I’m not really very religious’ and that she hadn’t been to church in a while, which I told her is pretty normal these days, but that I was still happy to be there because I’m not just here for the people who come to church on a Sunday. As an aside, we can make the mistake as ordained people, sometimes, of thinking we’re the chaplain to the congregation rather than the priest of the parish, so I reminded her I was there for her. She said “I don’t believe in God but I do believe in angels”, and actually I didn’t say this but that’s pretty normal these days too. If you go on amazon you’ll find thousands of spiritualist books about angels and guardian angels that they sort of talk about as though they’re fairy God mothers… Anyway, the woman said that since she’d lost her brother, her brother had been a huge fan of a particular reality TV programme, I think it was I’m a celebrity, and they’d watched it together loads. But since the brother died she’d come down stairs twice and the TV had been on when she’d turned it off and it was on I’m a celebrity and she said ‘it was an Angel telling me he’s okay in heaven’. Now, the more sceptical part of me did wonder what the Angels, the same angels that St John saw slaying Satan and his armies, I did wonder what they were doing putting Ant and Dec on this woman’s TV. It seemed a little below their pay-grade, but really what I noticed was that, instead of this woman being able to see angels as the representatives of God, she saw them as a bit like a nice ghost.

I’m not saying that angels don’t do weird things, and I’m not making a judgement on that woman really, but a lot of people these days think weird things about angels, which come more from cartoons than from the bible; which all goes to show what happens when you lose the bible as the point of focus of your faith. I have actually heard some amazing stories about people who gave up addictive lifestyles or saw miracles after seeing an angel so I’m really not saying it doesn’t happen, but rather what an angel does do, usually, is point to God in some way, not just turn on a TV.

So to help us understand angels a bit more let’s just think about what the bible says about them. The Greek word “angelos” can be translated as messenger, so they’re God’s messengers, but that word alone isn’t the full picture, there are other types of angels in the bible, seraphim and cherubim, and we get this powerful image of archangels as in the gospels and in the book of Revelation we read a few minutes ago.

In particular, there’s Archangel Michael (Michael meaning warrior or God-like in some cases), and we celebrate him today at Michaelmas, which in years gone by was the time that autumn officially started. The days were going to get shorter from here and night was getting longer but people remembered this reading, particularly from Revelation, that the darkness was not going to win. That’s one of John’s great themes, of course. Then you get this great few verses, probably meant to be said by St Michael, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah…” he says “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

What’s St Michael doing there? Actually he’s delivering the gospel. So the angels are beings that fight for God and deliver the message of his good news. The Angels act out God’s will, wherever they go. So when we look at the angels and when we pray for the angels to be around us, we shouldn’t just be asking for a good night’s sleep, we should be asking to become better evangelists and messengers for God, when we ask for the help of the angels it should be to see God’s kingdom come.

Of course, we can ask for God’s help in anything big or small and it’s the same with the angels, but the main purpose of invoking the angels should be to see God’s kingdom come and his will being done on earth as we stand against the devil.

There’s an old Jewish saying which goes “God is not a kindly uncle, he is an earthquake,” and I think in our readings today we can probably safely say something similar about angels. It’s not that they don’t do little things, but that they don’t just do little things.

And I would say that the same should be true of our faith, too. Our faith can influence lots of little moments in our lives where we do nice things, and that’s great. But we need to be proclaiming the gospel in some way shape or form. We can’t just hide away behind the niceness of our faith without ever really asking those big questions… Do you believe that you’ve been forgiven for all your sin and shame, because Jesus died for you? Do you believe it enough to make a stand for it, enough to tell others about your faith, to invite them here, to church? To proclaim the gospel as the angels do. Do you want to make our earth more like God’s kingdom, as we follow him, or do you want nice things to happen every now and again and feel like that’s enough for you? Ask those big questions and maybe this week you could commit yourself to just taking one step forwards. Maybe you could invite one person to church who hasn’t been in a long while. Maybe you could tell them what faith means to you, how it’s real and important and has changed your heart. Like the angels, maybe your faith could have a big impact, not just turning on a TV, but declaring the kingdom of God. Amen.