Solemnity of St. Michael and All Angels
Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 103:19-22
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. (Gen. 28.12.)
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, which was actually last Friday, September 29th. Before I was Episcopalian, I had feast-envy, and this was one of the ones I coveted most because it sounds so mysterious and otherworldly. When we started attending an Episcopal church in Hamilton, Massachusetts, our priest always got fired up about this feast because it pushes us to expand our vision of God’s Creation, of all things visible (like galaxies and children’s ears) and invisible (like St. Michael and all his angels). The Collect of the Day praises God, “who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order . . . .” Father Liias [at Christ Church of Hamilton & Wenham, MA] was fascinated that we can peer into telescopes and microscopes and see the wonderful order God spoke into being, dimension 
upon dimension, “from quarks to quasars.” And if we marvel at the visible universe, it boggles the mind to strain to grasp the invisible universe, including angels. Fr. Liias gets positively giddy, like a little boy talking about Star Wars or Spider Man, and he shouts out: “It takes seven dimensions to explain an atom – how many does it take to explain an angel?” 1
So, it is meet and right to reflect upon the wonder of God’s creation today, but there are myriad other things this feast drives home to us, and I want to think for a few minutes about the ladder – what was that all about? All that stuff about angels ascending and descending on some ladder in Jacob’s dream – Is that just an entertaining story with no real lesson for us today, or is there some truth we enlightened Americans need to hear again? To give you a map, let’s look at (1) Jacob’s ladder, (2) Jesus the ladder, and (3) for lack of a better term, “latter-day ladders.”
(1) First, Jacob’s Ladder: Genesis records Jacob’s dream of a ladder, or a staircase, between heaven and earth with angels going up and down it. (Gen. 28.12) When he awakes, Jacob says “this place is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen. 28.17) Jacob apprehended something that is often lost on moderns, particularly in the West. Surveys say a large majority of Americans believe in God and angels and a spiritual world, and periodically we’ll watch TV shows like “Touched by an Angel,” but whatever we profess to believe, we usually live like materialists. The things that really matter to us are tangible, things we can touch. We’re more concerned with our 401(k)s than we are with our souls. We believe things when we see them. We want science to prove something before we’ll really believe it. Jacob awoke to the understanding that there is more to reality than meets the physical eye, that heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material, come together.
The phrase used at the end of this passage about Jacob’s dream, sha’ar hashamayim, the “gate of heaven,” has a similar ring to another gate in the book of Genesis: Babel, which means “Gate of God.” (Gen. 11.9) Both terms suggest a nexus between heaven and earth, but they are radically different. At the vestry retreat last weekend, Fr. Sloane [of St. Paul’s K Street, Washington, DC] told us about a profound experience, almost a conversion, he had sitting before the body of Christ displayed in a monstrance, which is a small gold stand that looks like the sun and holds the host in a little window in the middle. It has been said that to look into that window is like peering through a window into heaven, but Fr. Sloane was struck by the realization that if it is a window from earth into heaven, it was a window from heaven into earth first. You see, there are different principles at work in Jacob’s dream and the building of the Tower of Babel. It has always been the sin of humankind to want to be gods, and Babel was literally an attempt to build our own ladder into heaven and storm it to take it for ourselves, to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11.4), to become like God.
(2) The problem is that grasping at heaven from our side makes us miss heaven altogether, which brings us to our second point: The door has to swing open from the other side, and that took place in Jesus. Jesus takes the imagery of Jacob’s dream and tweaks it in his encounter with Nathanael in John’s gospel. When Nathanael calls Jesus the Son of God and King of Israel, Jesus tells him “Truly, I tell you, you shall see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” (John 1.51) Leon Morris writes:
The ascent and descent of angels seem to be a reference to the vision of Jacob. But in the patriarch’s dream, there is no mention of the heavens being opened, while conversely here there is no mention of the ladder Jacob saw. In both passages, however, there is the thought of communication between heaven and earth . . . . In this passage the place of the ladder is taken by ‘the Son of Man.’ Jesus himself is the link between heaven and earth. He is the means by which the realities of heaven are brought down to earth . . . .2
God saw the infinite gulf between himself and humanity, and he crossed time and space to get to us. Jesus laid himself down to be a ladder – he took on flesh, lived, died and rose from the dead pulling all of creation up with him. My spiritual director has in his office a beautiful icon that depicts a resurrected Jesus with his hands stretched downward pulling Adam and Eve from their graves.
(3) Jacob’s dream shows us that heaven and earth intersect, and Jesus shows Nathanael that he is the ultimate bridge between heaven and earth, that despite our prideful and unsuccessful attempts to work our way to God, he fought his way down to us. Thirdly, there remain ladders today – you and I can be places where the human and the divine meet.
Reading Timothy Radcliffe’s book that Fr. Davenport has mentioned several times, I found a quote I had forgotten about from Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. On Merton’s first excursion from his monastery into the local town, he had a mystical experience when, “In Louisville [Kentucky], at the corner of fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district,” he was suddenly overwhelmed with the beauty of the people he met. Merton wrote:
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself glorified in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake . . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun . . . . If only they could see themselves as they really are . . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other . . . . [T]he gate of heaven is everywhere.3
Those of you who know me well know that there is no chance I will advocate worshiping each other – I’m still too much of a Total Depravity Presbyterian for that – but Merton was right that, in a very real sense, we are all “walking around shining like the sun” because all who share Christ’s baptism are “temples of the Holy Spirit.” (1 Cor. 6.19) Temples are dwelling places of gods, places where heaven and earth meet, just like the Temple in Jerusalem was Yahweh’s house, and Jesus was the very “tent” of God on earth. We should constantly be asking each other, “Don’t you know what you really are?” We are gates into heaven, and we should urge each other to live joyous, transformed lives before the eyes of the world to attest to the reality of God’s new creation.
How does that work? How can we attest to that reality before the world? I suggest: Just remember angels. The word “angel,” angelos, means “messenger.” All through the Bible angels show up with messages from God, and part of the glory of who we are is that we get to be couriers of God’s message of salvation for our community and our city. When we tell our stories and share our lives with our neighbors, something strange and wonderful can happen. The scrim between heaven and earth blurs, and God comes down. Renee’ and I have been hosting a community group of about ten 20- and 30-year-olds in our little apartment in the parish house on Wednesday nights, and so far all we’ve gotten around to doing is sharing our stories – what our childhoods were like, how we came to faith in Christ, how we found our way to DC and this church. But not a single Wednesday night has gone by when I didn’t close the door after everyone had gone home and think to myself, something holy happened just now.
The gate of heaven is everywhere. Just by being who we really are, by telling the stories of our lives, how Jesus found us, how he’s putting the fragments of our lives together, building something beautiful, we become ladders. We help people to see with Jacob that heaven and earth do meet, that God is not inaccessible, that he came down in Jesus and is even now pulling us up out of darkness. We are heralds, and ours is a message angels have longed to hear. Never stop telling it.
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
1. Fr. Jurgen Liias, sermon delivered 29 September 29 2002 at Christ Church of Hamilton & Wenham, MA.
2. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, NICNT (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995): 149 (citation omitted).
3. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1968): 157-58 (emphasis added) (quoted in Timothy Radcliffe, OP, What is the Point of Being a Christian? (London: Burns & Oates, 2005): 141.
© 2006 Sam Wood
