The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

Northern Festival 2006

Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come. Apocalypse 12 v10

Angels abound in our stained glass windows whenever we try to capture a glimpse of heaven, and so they should. When, some seven hundred years before Christ’s birth, the Prophet Isaiah had his famous vision of God we are told that he not only saw vast numbers of angels surrounding God in worship. We are told that, as Isaiah watched in awe and wonder, so those angels sang Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts. Now, nearly three thousand years after that great vision was recorded, you and I come to this great Minster church and soon we shall sing those same ageless words of worship to our God: Holy holy, holy. The angels live in the ‘realms of glory’. Every time you and I gather for the celebration of the Mass, it is as if the doors of heaven are thrown open to us. You and I stand in the ‘realms of glory’ as ‘with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven’ we worship the Lord our God. If there were no other argument for keeping Michaelmas in the Christian calendar, then its continual call to proclaim God’s glory, to recall us to worship, would more than suffice.

Now the salvation and the power and the Kingdom of Our God and the authority of his Christ have come.

That famous story of S Michael leading his army to victory over the devil and all his angels speaks to us of God’s loving goodness being at the heart of our universe. The people who heard the good news of Jesus lived in a world in which angels and other heavenly powers were not usually to be regarded as friends. They could lead people into all kinds of mischief. Angels were even thought to be capable of taking over human minds and of binding people in slavery to them. Michaelmas tells us that the company of heaven is one of the ways through which God ministers to us His total love. Jesus’ death on the cross has defeated everything that is evil. Even in heaven, we are told, it is by the power of the Lamb, of Jesus, Himself, that Michael is able to banish Satan and his hordes from any position of power over us. For John The Divine, as he writes his Apocalypse or Book of Revelation, the authority of Christ has come to rule everywhere in the cosmos. Even heaven, with its angelic host, is not exempt. Now we know that the angels and archangels are to be unhindered sources of God’s goodness. Gabriel is to bring us God’s good news, Raphael is to minister to us God’s healing while Michael is to defend us with God’s strength. Deceit and corruption are no part of God’s plan. Satan is vanquished from heaven by the power of the cross.

You and I are aware of so many forces beyond our control as we seek to promote Christ’s kingdom. We may not always view the demonic in the literal way that Scripture speaks of it. We are, though, still challenged continually by forces that are seemingly far beyond our control. I doubt that there are many of us in church today who do not come from parishes where drug addiction is a real issue. That same demon of addiction that binds so many to drugs enslaves others to pornography or to the ceaseless quest for money or for power. Many of our parishes are actively involved in attempts to make to build a fairer world where our fellow human beings no longer, in large numbers, go to bed hungry each night. We have our Traidcraft stalls and do all we can to promote Fair Trade initiatives. And yet, we are all too aware that our world seems to be enslaved to economic powers from which it seems near impossible to break free. Our regular encounters with disease and with natural disaster make it hard for us to believe that we are, even now, free of demonic powers doing their worst in the world. How good it is, then, to be reminded by the story of Michael and his angels that there is no power in earth or heaven that is not subject to Jesus’ victory on the cross. It keeps alive our hope, not as some vague optimism that one day, against all the odds, something better is going to turn up. However difficult the circumstances in which you and I find ourselves and our world, however difficult it is to make any sense of them, you and I can still be secure. We can be secure in the knowledge that Christ has, as that popular hymn puts it so well: “The whole wide world in His hands”. Nothing ultimately will halt Christ’s progress. Even the evil forces that would heaven, itself, have been overcome by God’s saving power.

The last thing you and I want to do at a glorious festival such as this is to concentrate on the problems that divide and hurt our Church at the present time. Suffice it to say that confidence in God’s providence, that He is in control and, in His good time, will mend our brokenness and heal our hurt, is the only way to keep things in proportion and not give way either to uncontrolled anger or to despair. The patient recovering from a nasty accident, whoever is to blame for it happening, can do nothing more important than be in tune with the healing process, however long that takes. You and I can do nothing better.

The kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come.

Never forget that the angels’ work, be it battling in heaven or reaching out to earth, is work they do on God’s behalf for us. The whole point of their ministry is to help you and me in being the people that God has made us to be. “Gone to be an angel,” or similar wording, provides many a Victorian headstone with its inscription, especially on the all too sad graves of children. Well meaning as such headstones might be, they are entirely wrong. You and I are made human beings and not angels. Human beings we will remain even after our deaths. I am tempted, anyway, to say that there must be few in church today, who might even conceive of me as being an angel and, dare I say it, perhaps I even feel something of the same way about some of you!

One of the tasks of the angels is to delight in the wonderful thing God has done for each of us. He has made us in His own image. Indeed, Jesus has even been born among us. As the Letter to the Hebrews so tellingly declares, God never said to any angel: “You are my son.” The great medieval and renaissance artists so often display, in their paintings, angels performing dances of delight in heaven as Jesus is born in a stable on earth. God has shared his life with you and me. That is something wonderful which gives angels cause for dancing. Jesus took flesh and died for God’s creation, not least for us human beings. It is our flesh and bones that are raised gloriously in Jesus’ resurrection. He makes each of us a co-worker in building up His kingdom here on earth and not in some abstract spiritual world. Finally, God calls us to the completeness of His creation when heaven and earth are joined together. The realms of glory that the angels enjoy become one with earth. All creation, heaven and earth, join in the worship of our God. Meanwhile, you and I come once more today to this Mass and so we are privileged in being given a foretaste, a preview, of that wonder for which each one of us is destined.