Curate’s sermon. 29.9.24 St Michael and All Angels. Revelation 12. 7-12

East Anglia, with its abundance of outstanding medieval churches, is a great place for church crawlers. I know this because I was one of them when I lived there. And one of the popular stops on church crawls is Wenhaston in Suffolk, the home of Wenhaston doom. The doom is a medieval panel painting depicting the Last Judgement. It was accidentally preserved under layers of white wash and discovered in the 19th century. It shows Christ seated in glory on the rainbow, the dead rising, the saints crowned, St Michael weighing the souls of the dead with a couple of demons waiting to get hold of them and finally a gigantic dragon consuming those who haven’t lived lives worthy of salvation. This picture is not unique to Wenhaston. Although few remain, the so-called Doom paintings still can be found in churches around the country, reminders of the final judgment to anyone coming into the church who is facing a choice of following God or turning to the Devil.
This day and age, images like this one are mostly associated with outdated folk tales, and speaking of demons or, God forbid, the Devil, is likely to be perceived as something medieval! It is not just that we don’t use this sort of language anymore, other than perhaps at Baptisms – we no longer think in these categories. And so today’s reading, which also introduces us to Satan, is not exactly easy, let alone due to the fact that it comes from the book of Revelation that no one understands. Today we mark the day of St Michael and All Angels, and this is one of the texts this tradition goes back to. A cosmic battle in heaven, which results in Michael’s victory but ultimately lands us with the greatest evil that has ever existed. One way of thinking about this narrative and all of the book of Revelation is in fact in a very earthly one. The book can be read in the context of the young Christian church’s struggle against the Roman authority in the 1st century. The dramatic imagery serves to express the frustration of a people trying to resist oppression, but it is predominantly metaphorical. This is how some very learned people would choose to interpret this and other similar passages in the Bible. I had an amazing Old Testament professor at university, who loves the Bible but treats the whole book as allegorical and a product of historical processes and influences.
We too could agree that any Biblical talk of judgement, heavenly battles and Satan falling down from the sky are nothing more than metaphors, because anything else would be too medieval or too farfetched or frankly too weird. We could agree on this and go home. But we could also note that such an interpretation is somewhat simplistic and betrays a limited nature of our own thinking and stay here a bit longer. I invite you to stay, and you tell me afterwards if it was worth it!
So here are, I think, a couple of the stumbling blocks when it comes to reading texts like one we have before us today.
Firstly, I don’t think we are good at treating a narrative as many simultaneous possibilities. We like to be exclusive and precise. It is particularly evident in the academic world, where scholars would be disagreeing on different hypotheses and conclusions because very often only one can be accepted as valid and final, meaning that the rest are plainly wrong. Our minds, informed by precision of sciences, don’t like ambiguity – they like answers. Much of the Bible, however, is written in the spirit of ‘not only a, but also b’. Multiple possibilities coexist and layer onto one another. Even in this little passage, the earthly resistance against Rome and the heavenly triumph over Satan should not be mutually exclusive. The rather fantastic narrative of the heavenly battle is intertwined with the news of Christ’s sacrifice and its power to defeat evil. They too are not expected to be mutually exclusive.
Secondly, I wonder if we, as a society of people increasingly preoccupied with our inner lives and personal identities, struggle to accept anything existing outside of ourselves. I wonder if this might be contributing to an explanation of the western struggle with faith in God in general, but I also think it hinders our faith in existence of any objective kind of evil. We are happy to agree that people do evil things guided usually by some challenges to their psychological state, but we are hesitant to admit that evil might exist as an independent entity that just can find its way into people’s minds. So it is indeed almost unnatural to us to read, think and talk about the Devil or any other kind of evil that is not contained within ourselves.
In the light of the above, I would like to suggest that this passage is more than a metaphor, the fall of Satan and the battle in heaven is more than just a story and the Devil dwelling among us is more than a medieval nightmare. And a great – and fascinating – testimony to this is the work of deliverance ministers, also commonly called exorcists, clergy who deal with different manifestations of evil that very much surpass any ‘earthly’ explanations. My latest holiday read was the book called ‘Deliverance’ by Jason Bray who has been a deliverance minister for years. In the book he described lots of stories, some were of people who had some trouble with their mental health, others experiencing tensions in their family life, which apparently can lead to some properly supernatural events. Some stories were of what we would call ‘hauntings’ – place memories that find very physical expressions; very few stories were of actual possessions, because apparently they are extremely rare. Some stories were funny but others described feelings of terror brought on by something inexplicable with chilling clarity. Some of it I could even relate to, having lived in a very scary ‘haunted’ flat as a child. Two of the stories are Bray’s personal encounters with things that have definitely come from the outside. The bottom line is that there is something that does indeed seem to exist outside of ourselves, and even if it is linked to our emotional or mental state, it brings fear and terror that we have not invited. It seeks to sow disorder and confusion, not anything good. This is why we call it evil.
I am now on to my next book about deliverance, led by a desire to know more about what evil looks like as an objective reality rather than a subjective intention. But returning to my observation of the somewhat exclusive nature of our thinking and our struggle to accept multiple truths at once, there is one thing I would like to note. I don’t want to say that all evil is external and therefore we don’t have to take any responsibility for doing evil things or turn to using the proverbial ‘the Devil made me do it’ excuse. Instead, I think it is both. Jesus said that evil comes from within and defiles a person from within. But Jesus also met the Devil face-to-face in the wilderness. As the chief enemy of the Devil, alongside Michael, he also appears in today’s passage about Satan and the heavenly battle. We read, ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah’, the blood of the Lamb led to the heavenly triumph. Christ’s sacrifice is the victory over evil and it is through him that we also are invited to resist it. He has enabled us to live free of sin and gave us the strength to turn away from the Devil.
One of the things we do in any Eucharistic service is precisely this: we confess our sins, we accept Christ’s sacrifice and we choose to follow him and turn away from all evil, both within and around us. In a few minutes, when we receive communion, we will experience this again. But another thing that will happen today is the act of anointing and the prayer of healing which I also invite you to receive.
When I was reading Jason Bray’s book, I noticed a theme that seemed to have run through lots of the stories. The theme is that of healing and release from whatever was limiting and constraining a person’s life. On many occasions, Bray would anoint those he met. We often think of healing in physical terms, and that it certainly is, but there is another dimension to it, that of freeing us from evil, releasing our potential for good and keeping us safe with God.
So it looks like evil is real, whether it takes the shape of a dragon and his angels or a destructive desire of someone’s heart. Paul dramatically says in Ephesians 6 that our struggle is both against the rulers and powers of this dark world but also against the spiritual forces of evil. But the sure defence against the temporal and the spiritual manifestations of evil is Christ himself. As real as the forces of evil are, his power is just as real, and this is where our hope is. Amen.