St. Michael and All Angels

The Requiem Eucharist for Sharon Remmen 20 Pentecost

St. Michael and All Angels

September 29,20214

+ Well, a fewweeks ago we stepped out of our regular Ordinary green on Sunday morning whenwe celebrated the feast of the Holy Cross.

Today, we’redoing it again.

As I saidthen, I repeat now: we’re not really supposed to do this, but I really think it’simportant to celebrate some of these feasts that many of you don’t get to celebrateregularly.

But now we’restepping into the .

And we aredoing so to celebrate the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, or as it iscommonly known, Michaelmas.

Why? You mayask.

Well, we arebecause let’s face it: we don’t really give angels a lot of thought.

We justdon’t.

And, fromwhat it seems, the angels themselves would be just fine with that.

They don’tseem like they want a lot of attention brought to themselves.

But whetherthey like it or not, we are going to commemorate them today.

But first,let’s talk about our scripture readings for today.

We have thesethree very familiar stories featuring angels this morning.

Our first isthe really wonderful story of “Jacob’s ladder” (one of my favorites).

The second isthe story Michael, leading the “good” angels, who battle and then beat “the dragon” (we know dragon as “theDevil or Satan”) and his “bad” angels.

Finally, inour Gospel reading, which echoes our reading from the Hebrew scriptures, wefind Jesus telling Nathanael that he will see something like Jacob’s ladder, with angels “ascending and descending upon theSon of Man.”

Lots ofangels.

But let’s askourselves: what are angels?

I meanhonestly.

Angels, as weunderstand them, based on Scripture and tradition, are spiritual beings whointeract with humans—sometimes as servant and sometimes as messengers of God.

The word “angel”comes from the word angelos, which means messenger or envoy.

In Hebrew,angels are referred to mal’ak elohim (“the messengerof God”), or mal’ak YHWH (“messenger of theLord”) or bene elohim (or children ofGod”).

StephanieGarcia and I have a shared interest in something biblically correct angels, atrend on social media in which angels are depicted as we encounter them in theHebrew scriptures.

These are notsweet, nice, chubby little cherubs, or stoic, blond, white men or women withwings.

Biblicallycorrect angels are frightening—wheels with wings and eyes and a frighteningall-seeing eye at their center, which we find in the prophecies of Isaiah andEzekiel.

Angels are nothumans.

And we don’tbecome angels when we die, despite what popular culture says.

They aredifferent than us.

They aresomewhat divine—somewhat above us and beyond us.

But theproblem for us, good, rational progressive Christians that we are, is that allthis sems a bit fantastical, doesn’t it?

It’s like listeningto someone talk about the Game of Thrones or Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s seems tomythical. Or mythological.

And most ofus have a very hard relating angels to our own lives.

After all,WE’ve never encountered angels, right?

Well, we mayhave.

Sometimes,the right people come into our lives at just the right time.

And there wasone time in my own life when I think I actually did in fact encounter an angelin human form.

Way back inApril of 2002, I was recovering from cancer.

It was a darktime in my life.

I was sick.

And weak.

And about asdown and out as a person can be, emotionally and spiritually.

Well, one dayearly in that month, I finally finished my round of radiation for cancer.

I wasexhausted, but I was also relieved.

I decided,following that final treatment, to take a drive.

For somereason I don’t remember anymore, I was driving my father’s pickup.

Anyway, I hada fairly nice morning driving around in Minnesota in the cold spring weather.

I was lookingforward to healing and getting beyond my cancer.

Well, as Iwas driving home on a highway between Halstad, Minnesota and Hillsboro, NorthDakota, I hit a rock on the road that had been dragged there by some tillers,who were tilling the fields for planting.

It destroyedthe tire.

And I pulledover alongside the road in the middle of nowhere.

And I meannowhere.

Although itwas April, it was still bitterly cold.

And to makematters worse, the cellphone I had the time, which was not a very good one,died on me.

I had no oneto call.

So, I got outand was going to change to tire.

But I didn’tknow where the spare tire was on my father’s pick up.

Besides, Iwas sick.

And weak.

And I wasn’tcertain I would’ve even been able to physically manage it.

I panicked.

There was afarmstead a few miles away.

But I decidedto stay put and see if anyone stopped.

And no onedid.

No one.

Cars drove by,back and forth, but no one stopped, even when I got out and waved at them.

Finally, aftersome time, a car did pull over.

In it was amiddle-aged woman.

She asked ifI needed help.

I told herabout the rock and the tire and that I didn’t know where the spare was becauseit was my dad’s pickup.

She offeredto drive me to Hillsboro.

I wasgrateful and got in, but I did tell her that she should probably be carefulgiving rides to strangers.

“It’s allright, “ she said. “I have a gun under my seat.”

We madesmall-talk on the ride and it came out that I was studying to be an Episcopalpriest and that she was Jewish.

I thenconfessed to her that even if I had found that tire I wasn’t certain I wasgoing to be able to change it since I had just had my last radiation treatmentthat morning for cancer.

She said,“Oh, I have cancer too.”

She thenoffered me her cellphone and I called my mother to tell her what happened.

We then madeit into Hillsboro and she dropped me off a Goodyear Tire store there.

Weirdly, thenext time I was in Hillsboro after that, that tire store had closed.

I asked hername so I send her a thank you.

She said, no.that’s all right.

We bid eachother farewell. I thanked her again.

And off shewent into the snow.

I later foundout that she called my mother, since the number was on her phone, to tell mymom that I was all right and that she should be proud of me for some reason.

This namelessJewish woman, in the middle of nowhere between Halstad and Hillsboro.

What are thechances of that?

For me, thisis what angels are.

For me, thisis all the proof I need that angels exist.

For me, that’sexactly what angels would do.

I hope wehave all experienced angels among us in some way in our lives.

These angelsamong us remind us that we are not alone, that we are, ultimately, taken careof.

They remindus that God does care for us—that we are important to God.

Even in themiddle of nowhere between Halstad and Hillsboro.

But, itdoesn’t end there.

The messagefor me—and for all of this morning—is that sometimes, we too are called to beangels for others.

We too are,like angels, called to embody God’s goodness, God’s grace, God’s love in ourservice of others.