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?

From the Morning Scriptures

While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” And immediately the leprosy left him. One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

–Luke 5:12-13, 17-20 (TNIV)

What a wonderful story here. Let the scene arise in your mind. Imagine you are the one who comes to Jesus, desperate for healing. Imagine he looks at you as you cry out to him for help. Hear him say to you, “I am willing!” If you do not think he can (or will) do this for you, then read the story of the paralytic and learn from it. Jesus may not heal you in the way you want, but he will heal you if you have faith to allow him. You don’t have to wait until you “go to heaven” to enjoy his healing touch. You can have it now. Why? Because he is alive and he loves you and wants the best for you. But he will not force himself on you. He will wait until you invite him to heal you in faith. Are you availing yourself of Christ’s wondrous healing power?

John Keble: Restoring the Church

Today we continue with our featured Anglican theologian for the week, John Keble. You will recall from yesterday that Keble was instrument in the rebirth of the Anglo-Catholic movement within Anglicanism and keenly interested in restoring the Church of England. Today’s writing reflects this.

The surest way to uphold or restore our endangered church will be for each of her anxious children, in his own place and station, to resign himself more thoroughly to his God and Savior in those duties, public and private, which are not immediately affected by the emergencies of the moment: the daily and hourly duties, I mean, of piety, purity, charity, justice.

National Apostasy

An Awesome Example of Faith

Norman Harrison in His in a Life of Prayer tells how Charles Inglis, while making the voyage to America a number of years ago, learned from the devout and godly captain of an experience which he had had but recently with George Müller of Bristol. It seems that they had encountered a very dense fog. Because of it the captain had remained on the bridge continuously for twenty-four hours, when Mr. Müller came to him and said, “Captain, I have come to tell you that I must be in Quebec on Saturday afternoon.” When informed that it was impossible, he replied: “Very well. If the ship cannot take me, God will find some other way. I have never broken an engagement for fifty-seven years. Let us go down into the chartroom and pray.”

The captain continues the story thus: “I looked at that man of God and thought to myself, What lunatic asylum could that man have come from. I never heard such a thing as this. ‘Mr. Müller,’ I said, ‘do you know how dense this fog is?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘my eye is not on the density of the fog, but on the living God, who controls every circumstance of my life.’ He knelt down and prayed one of those simple prayers, and when he had finished I was going to pray; but he put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to pray. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘because you do not believe God will, and secondly, I believe God has, and there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.’ I looked at him, and George Müller said, ‘Captain, I have known my Lord for fifty-seven years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to get an audience with the King. Get up and open the door, and you will find that the fog has gone.’ I got up and the fog was indeed gone. George Müller was in Quebec Saturday afternoon for his engagement.”

–Glenn Clark, I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes

Chyrsostom: Five Paths of Repentance

Would you like me to list also the paths of repentance? They are numerous and quite varied, and all lead to heaven. A first path of repentance is condemnation of your own sins: “Be first to admit your sins and you will be justified” [declared not guilty in God’s eyes]. That will be enough reason for the Lord to forgive you, for if you condemn your own sins you are slower to commit them again.

Another and no less valuable one is to put our of our minds the harm done us by our enemies, in order to master our anger, and to forgive our fellow servants’ sins against us. Then our own sins against the Lord will be forgiven us.

Do you want to know a third path? It consists of prayer that is fervent, careful and comes from the heart.

If you want to hear of a fourth, I will mention almsgiving, whose power is great and far-reaching. If, moreover, one lives a modest, humble life, that no less than the other things I have mentioned takes away sin. Proof of this is the tax collector who had no good deeds to mention, but offered humility instead and was relieved of a heavy burden of sins.

Thus I have shown you five paths of repentance: condemnation of your own sins, forgiveness of our neighbor’s sins against us, prayer, almsgiving and humility.

Do not be idle, then, but walk daily in all these paths; they are easy, and you cannot plead your poverty [for not being able to walk in them].

Homily on the Devil the Tempter 2, 6.49

If you are reading these as a bean counter, you are missing the point. Look instead to the heart and inner orientation required.