Dear Friends,

I am excited to celebrate the Feast of St. Michael & ALL Angels with you this coming Sunday!

While the Archangel Michael gets top billing in our parish name and celebrations (and, with Gabriel, in church art and literature, too), I have been thinking lately about ALL those other angels without names and faces in our stories. We are celebrating them and their ministry, too!

During this month we have been joining in the ecumenical celebration of the Season of Creation, to renew our own relationship with God and the created world through prayer, advocacy, and action. Angels are integral to that relationship, active in bringing God’s good to us and the whole earth.

In Christian theology, angels are described as part and participant of creation. The origin myth of Genesis tells that God created both the heavens and earth. “Christian tradition understands these heavenly beings as attending to creation — messengers and intermediaries between God and the world we see and know. Early theologians explored the role of angels in creation as a way of understanding more about the nature of God’s own self. “For the angels were created by God who is above all creation, and they are not eternal, but came into being by the will of the Word” (St. Athanasius, 4th c).

The Psalms and Prophets attempt to describe the ministry of angels to God (103:20, Isaiah 6:2-3) and to the world/us (Psalm 34:7; 91:11-12).
Now, I will admit that for my own mind, conditioned by education in the modern western world, the notion of angelic beings and heavenly battles is a bit beyond my willing imagination. But it does inspire a measure of wonder and hope.

Perhaps our own occasion of extolling the ministry of Michael and all the angels is a way of drawing us toward hope that God’s good is at work even we cannot readily perceive it. We might be challenged by the notion that angels are ministering to God and to us, even now, engaging in action on our behalf. I even wonder if the idea of angels and their ministry could call us beyond passive ponderings into faithful participation, with trust that we are not alone in contending for God’s good in all of creation.

With you,

Scott+
The Rev. R. Scott Painter, Rector