Listen to an audio version of this sermon by clicking here
Sermon for September 29, 2024
St. Michael & All Angels
Revelation 12:7-12; Luke 10:17-20
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
It’s like a Marvel superhero movie, what we hear in Revelation chapter 12 today—a great cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. The book of Revelation is full of symbolism, and it’s often written in a kind of “secret code”; it was written for Christians in the late 1st century who were a persecuted minority because their faith was illegal in the Roman Empire. So if the Roman authorities figured out what the writer of Revelation was really saying, he and his fellow Christians would be in a whole lot of trouble. So the writer, whom we know as “St. John the Divine” has all of these code words and symbols.
The cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil playing out in heaven and spilling over down to earth, which is described in Revelation 12, is not a literal description of something that did happen or will happen, but a symbolic or mythic way to describe the struggles, difficulties, and persecutions that the earliest Christians experienced—and even that we experience—and most importantly, it speaks the message is that God is thoroughly victorious, both in the end and actually already, right now!
Still, the imagery of good angels and bad angels, dragons, the Devil and Satan, might seem far away from how we often think about things today. But maybe not. Revelation 12 is not that much different from just about every Superhero movie that’s ever been made—and there have been a lot of them. Take your pick—the Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, or (my personal favorite) Spider Man. Sure, all of these movies explore different themes, they’re set in different places, the characters have different personalities and motivations, they fight against different kinds of villains—but they are all basically about the fight between Good versus Evil, and the struggle for justice to prevail.
The superheroes in Revelation are Michael the archangel and his band of angels, who fight against a supervillain, the dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan. The name “Michael” itself means “one who is like God”. He is not God, but he has God’s backing, and therefore he wins. Michael and his angels throw Satan (the dragon) out of heaven, and they throw him out for good, never to return. There is simply no place for the devil when you are completely in the presence of God.
The word “Satan” itself means “the accuser”—and he deceives the world by leading believers away from the path God has set for us, and by accusing us of our sins so that we do not feel worthy to stand before God and ask for his grace or mercy, or for justice to prevail.
So, Michael throws the devil and his angels down to earth. And this is a symbolic way of explaining why we face so much difficulty, injustice, sin, and brokenness in the world. Satan “knows that his time is short”, which is why he’s trying to sow as much chaos and destruction as possible in the little time he has left. He’s kind of like the bad guy in the movies, who knows he’s a goner and threatens the hero by saying “If I’m going down, I’m taking you to hell with me!” But in the face of Satan’s threats and accusations, Revelation gives us one big “spoiler alert”: God wins! In fact, in spite of any appearance to the contrary, God has already won the victory! But how? The book of Revelation tells us: it’s “by the blood of the Lamb” (that is, by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross—what looks like losing actually becomes a great victory), and by “the word of testimony” of faithful Christians (that is, people who speak God’s Word—something so simple, yet so powerful).
And because Christ is already victorious, the world with all its suffering and sin and death is not going to end—it is going to turn. And this is the promise we hear from God again and again throughout the book of Revelation—the promise of a new heaven and a new earth where sin, death, and evil are turned into new life, healing, forgiveness, justice, love.
This is the point where we get to enter this great cosmic Marvel movie. Because God has won the victory in Christ, therefore God sends angels to help us, and encourage us, and pray for us, and speak God’s Word to us. The word “angel” in both the Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek means “messenger”. An angel is a “messenger from God”. And throughout the Bible you can see how God sends angels to speak messages from heaven to people on earth—usually messages of encouragement and hope.
Many of our popular ideas of what angels look like come from the continuing influence of Medieval Christianity. But in the Bible there is no consistent description of what angels look like. They might look scary. They might look bright and shiny. They might even look like normal people. What they look like doesn’t really matter—what matters is what they do, which is to speak messages from God.
And so in our gospel today, from Luke 10, I found it interesting that this passage assigned for the festival of St. Michael and All Angels does not use the word “angel” once! And I wondered, “why is that?”, until it occurred to me that the passage begins with these words: “The seventy returned with joy.” “The seventy” refers to the seventy disciples whom Jesus sent out ahead of him, to all the towns around Galilee and the surrounding region where he intended to visit. He sent these disciples to do his ministry, to speak his Word. So they go out and are really successful, and then they return with joy and they share their excitement with Jesus saying “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” Jesus responds saying: as you disciples of mine were ministering in my name, “I was watching Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” In other words, Jesus is saying “I was watching Satan be defeated because of your ministry.”
God was using these people as “angels”—as messengers of God’s hope and encouragement! The joy the seventy disciples found in sharing the grace of God teaches us that we can also find hope in the midst of our struggles, because Christ is victorious. He is always with us, and therefore we are not alone in our struggles.
We have a member of House of Prayer who was recently visited by an angel. Todd Vance suffered a very painful and scary injury at work when a 2,000-pound battery he was inspecting fell off a forklift and his ankle got pinned between the battery and a pallet. Right after his ankle got pinned, a woman who worked in I.T. came running out of her office and took hold of Todd’s hand and kept speaking words of encouragement to him, “Don’t worry, Todd, everything’s going to be alright.” For 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, she kept encouraging him until the other coworkers could figure out how to lift the battery, free Todd’s ankle, and send him to the hospital. Miraculously, and with the help of his sturdy Red Wing work boots, Todd’s ankle was only bruised, not broken.
And it goes to show, any one of us God might use to be an angel, to speak his Word of hope and encouragement. There are angels all around us—and sometimes, without your even realizing it, the angel might be you! Amen.