Episode Details

Opening“You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”Creation Is More Than What We Can SeeI would like to start this evening with a small bugbear about the modern Church of England. There is a lot of talk about creation in the modern Church of England. There is Creationtide, a season to do with creation. There is even a Festival of Creation now, which I think has already occurred this year. I must have missed it.The bugbear I have with these festivals and seasons is that a lot of the time, when the word “creation” is used in the modern Church, what is meant is only the natural and visible world: the world we perceive with our eyes, the world we interact with through our senses. That is actually quite a reductive way of thinking about creation.Of course, creation does consist of the natural world, the visible realm that we can see. But Scripture reveals to us also the invisible world of God and the angels—an awesome reality which, in many ways, is hardly imaginable for us. Even as Christians, particularly living in the modern secularised West, we can be unaware of this invisible world. We can be unmindful of this spiritual reality.Feast days like today—the Feast of St Michael and All Angels—exist to help us remember: to open our eyes to the reality that underlies the reality we see every day with our eyes and hear with our ears.“O Lord, Open His Eyes”I was reading this morning in my Book of Common Prayer lectionary a wonderful story from 2 Kings 6. Elisha and his servant are surrounded by the horses and armies of the king of Syria. Elisha’s servant is dismayed, lacking spiritual vision, and he says, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” Elisha replies, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then he prays, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” And his eyes were opened, and he saw: the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire.So, friends, as we gather together this evening, let us pray that God may open our spiritual eyes—that we would be like Jacob at the end of that reading from Genesis, and say: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.”Conflict in HeavenBut we also read in the Book of Revelation, our New Testament reading, not only about the invisible world, but about a disturbing element of that reality: there is conflict in the heavenly realm. There is conflict between angels who are loyal to the purposes of God and angels who are in rebellion against him.Those loyal angels are headed by the archangel Michael, whose feast we celebrate today. The name Michael is a beautiful name. It means “Who is like unto God?”—rhetorically meant: nobody is like God. That is the meaning of that great name.Against Michael we are told that the dragon—Satan, the devil, the accuser of the brethren, the deceiver of the whole world—and his angels fight, and are in rebellion against God.Scripture says various things about this being—Satan, the accuser, the devil—and we can piece a good deal of it together. But I think the heart of the issue is this: the great sin of this angel who rebelled against God was pride, and the desire to usurp the place of God.The great medieval theologian St Bonaventure said that the devil and his angels, being so great, so luminous, so lofty and exalted, became so dazzled by contemplation of their own perfections that they refused to worship God and worshipped themselves instead. They refused the purposes of God. They refused to be obedient, and so were puffed up with pride in themselves—Satan most of all.The Same Battle on EarthWhat that reading in Revelation reveals to us is that this cosmic battle between Satan and St Michael, which takes place in the heavenly realms, is also taking place in our world today. There is an interplay between the invisible world and the world we inhabit. And that great sin of Satan—the sin of pride, the desire to put ourselves in the place of God—is the same story