Angels and Hellions

Eighteenth Week after Pentecost: Season of Mission

You may have trouble believing this, but I was a pretty normal kid. (Please, tell me you have trouble believing I was not a perfect angel.) I was one in a family of five kids, and we all had our personalities and our unique ways of driving our parents crazy. Do not ask me how this is possible, but I even irritated my siblings pretty regularly. We had those proverbial warnings from parents. You know: Mom is driving; kids are loud in the back seat. Mom shouts, “Do you want me to stop this car and deal with this because I will. I will pull over and stop this car!” I knew she would, because she had before, and it was not pleasant. So that straightened me out for at least four minutes, usually enough time for us to finish the trip. 

This exchange played out time and time again in childhood, set me up to be amused by my favorite stack of sticky notes. I have a little stack that has the following across the top: Of course, God did come down here, in the person of Jesus Christ. Still, we work and work to hold it together in conformity with God’s ways and the Body of Christ looks forward to the return of Jesus or the consummation of God’s kingdom. Anticipating this, we see ourselves in a sanctifying process with Christ, to become in action the faithful servants he redeemed. It reminds me of this Collect from the season of Lent:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found. Amen. (BCP, p. 219)

We are not immune to struggles. We are fully involved in a battle: a struggle to have our unruly wills and affections brought into order with the life-giving nature of God. God is not the enforcer of rules; God woos us into the ways that give life. We are the ones who make a battle of everything. We are the ones who call for the commandments in this world of swift and varied changes. God is the one who is calling us to find true joys. In the right context, God’s ways and laws are not the oppressive yoke, but the treasure and the sweetness of our existence. As the psalmist says of the judgments of the Lord, “More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold, sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (Psalm 19:10)

As in the Hebrew writings and prophets, notably Isaiah, Jesus speaks of the covenant with God in terms of the vineyard of a landowner. He tells a parable of servants in the vineyard so greedy, so twisted in their perspective, they shockingly kill the messengers and couriers of the landowner. They turn themselves into hellions: they even kill the son of the landowner sent to bring their unruly wills and affections into order. Humans are prone to make a battle out of everything. We turn what is designed to be a peaceful, harmonious, beautiful thing into an ugly destructive thing. It happens perpetually. Wait, there is good news: the Son the real Landowner actually sent, was killed, but in our killing of him, he astoundingly triumphed over sin and death, such that we can be won over to that other way. We can come to fix our hearts on true joys. Because of the resurrection-life of the Son, we can cooperate with God and find life as treasure and sweetness, as spiritual gold and honey in the comb.

The feast of St. Michael and All Angels, observed in late September, serves to dramatize just how cosmic is the battle between creatures who flow with God and creatures who rebel. We can think of how we rebel: a terrible matter all too familiar to us. We can also think of other creatures of God, angels, about whom we know virtually nothing, who have the same reality of free will and have the tendency to choose horribly. The big story of the battle between faithful, angelic servants, and notorious, rebellious servants is very like the big battle story within and among human creatures of God. We do have battles within us, we do have battles among us; I am certain of that.

The language concerning angels and the narratives show up in various places in the scriptures: Genesis, the Psalms, the Gospels, Hebrews and Revelation, for example. We know next to nothing in our personal experience about them. So absorbed in our empirically-driven existence, why would they ever come to mind? Still, it is encouraging to consider ourselves in a campaign to align with God, and not rebelling against God. Our story of struggle and Michael the Archangel’s story, are correlative, especially concerning the outcome. In the end of our struggles, guess what. God wins! Shall we not, in the meantime, jump to God’s side, rather than jumping back and forth across battle lines?

Think again of the previous vineyard metaphor: hadn’t we rather cooperate fully with the messengers and Son of the Landowner, than to drift into some heinous destructiveness? If angels are in some kind of ministry to us and for us, I welcome the help. We should all straighten up and listen when God looks in the rearview mirror at us in the back seat and says, “Do I need to stop this car, come back there and give you a talking to?” I am counting on there being hope yet for me to edge away from “hellion” and toward “angel.”

Dear Michael, I could use your spear

to pierce my foes which lurk about

Your aim is true to strike my fear

to trounce my shame, my ire, my doubt.

These enemies sneak in to lie

of my end in the struggle long;

with gifts from above come, supply

truth of him to whom we belong.  —DWP+ Sept. 2020