A Prayer for St. Michael and All Angels

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

About St. Michael and All Angels

On the Feast of Michael and all Angels, popularly called Michaelmas, we give thanks for the many ways in which God’s loving care watches over us, both directly and indirectly, and we are reminded that the richness and variety of God’s creation far exceeds our knowledge of it.

The Holy Scriptures often speak of created intelligences other than humans who worship God in heaven and act as His messengers and agents on earth. We are not told much about them, and it is not clear how much of what we are told is figurative. Jesus speaks of them as rejoicing over penitent sinners (Lk 15:10). Elsewhere, in a statement that has been variously understood (Mt 18:10), He warns against misleading a child, because their angels behold the face of God. (Acts 12:15 may refer to a related idea.)

Read it all.

Gregory the Great: What Makes an Angel?

You should be aware that the word “angel” denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message. Moreover, those who deliver messages of lesser importance are called angels; and those who proclaim messages of supreme importance are called archangels. And so it was that not merely an angel but the archangel Gabriel was sent to the Virgin Mary. It was only fitting that the highest angel should come to announce the greatest of all messages.

Some angels are given proper names to denote the service they are empowered to perform. Thus, Michael means “Who is like God?”; Gabriel is “The Strength of God”; and Raphael is “God’s Remedy.” Whenever some act of wondrous power must be performed, Michael is sent, so that action and name may make it clear that no one can do what God does by his own superior power.

Homily 34 on the Gospels 8-9

From the Morning Scriptures

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

–Luke 5:27-32 (TNIV)

Imagine you meet one who can heal you of all that ails you, who can give your life meaning and purpose, even in the most daunting of circumstances. He invites you to leave all that is familiar and comfortable to you and follow him. Would you?

Levi was a tax collector, a member of one of the most despised and hated groups of people in Israel in Jesus’ day. He made a living from extortion and exploitation. But Jesus called him to heal him and Levi’s response was immediate and dramatic. Later, Jesus affirmed Levi’s trust in him by telling the Pharisees that he had come to heal the sick.

When we realize that we are just like Levi, suddenly everything changes for us. No longer do we read this story with puzzled bemusement. No longer do we see life as a series of “dos and don’ts.” Rather we see the God of this vast universe reaching out to us in our waywardness and rebellion to offer us forgiveness, healing, and purpose and meaning for our lives, the kind that will never end. We are amazed because we realize just how unlovely we are and how much God wants to change that in us so that we can really begin to live life to its fullest.

John Keble: A Nation Like Saul

Today we continue with our featured Anglican theologian this week, John Keble. This excerpt is from his sermon, National Apostasy, in which he discusses what happens to a nation that turns away from God. Keble wrote about 19th century England. Do you say any of 21st century America in what he has to say?

God forbid that any Christian land should ever, by her prevailing temper and policy, revive the memory and likeness of Saul, or incur a sentence of [damnation] like his. But if such a thing should be, the crimes of that nation will probably begin in infringement on apostolical rights; she will end in persecuting the true church; and in the several stages of her melancholy career, she will continually be led on from bad to worse by vain endeavors at accommodation and compromise with evil. Sometimes toleration may be the word, as with Saul when he spared the Amalekites; sometimes state security, as when he sought the life of David; sometimes sympathy with popular feeling, as appears to have been the case, when violating solemn treaties, he attempted to exterminate the remnant of the Gibeonites, in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah. Such are the sad but obvious results of separating religious resignation altogether from men’s notions of civil duty.

Quenching Your Thirst

Listen to my words. You are going to hear something that must be said. You quench your soul’s thirst with drafts of the divine fountain. The Lord himself, our God Jesus Christ, is the fountain of life, and accordingly he invites us to himself as to a fountain, that we may drink.  May we drink him with the fullness of desire, and may we take pleasure in his sweetness and savor. For the Lord is sweet and agreeable; rightly then let us eat and drink of him yet remain ever hungry and thirsty, since he is our food and drink. It is right that we must always long for, seek and love the Word of God on high, the fountain of wisdom. If you thirst, drink of the fountain of life; if you are hungry, eat the bread of life.

–Columbanus, Celtic Abbot (d. 615), Instruction 13, on Christ the Fount of Life, 1-2

Sabbath Means Peace

The third commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.” Here is sanctification because here is the Spirit of God. Well, here is what a true holiday, that is to say, quietness and rest, means. Unquiet people are those who recoil from the Holy Spirit, loving quarrels, spreading slanders, keener on argument than on truth, and so in their restlessness, they do no allow the quietness of the spiritual Sabbath to enter into themselves.

–Augustine, Sermon 8.6

Carlo Carretto: Night of the Soul

When we come out of Egypt we are called by God to freedom, total freedom, true freedom, eternal freedom. But in order to become free–what a task, what a struggle, what a purging! Liberation from the clutches of the senses is no small thing for sensual creatures like us. To reach the “night of the senses”–the time when we become rulers of our passions and are able to to resist the extravagances of taste and physical pleasure–that takes some fasting!

But this is nothing yet. This is only the beginning–baby stuff, you might say.

There’s more to come! There’s another darker, much more painful night. It is the “night of the soul,” the night in which we chatterboxes have to learn to keep still. We who are so ready to ask for things–now we shall not dare to ask. We fall silent, thunderstruck with the grandeur that confronts us: God.

The night of the spirit is the mature ability of the human being to love God in the dark, to accept the design even without seeing it, to bear the distance without complaining, even when love thrusts us toward him until we writhe with longing.

Why, O Lord?