"And You Will See Heaven Opened"

Today, as we celebrate the Synaxis of St. Michael and All Angels, known as Michaelmas in the Western Church, we approach one of our most consequential feasts. For our life in God's sight is filled with the salutary influences of angels. Each one of us born into the world is entrusted to these wholesome, pure, and wonderful guardians. The Lord Jesus warns, these pairs, these angel-humans pairs, are the guarantor of a high dignity accorded every human creature:

Yes, we give thanks for our great exemplars, the saints, who have preceded us. Their lives guide us in the sure and dependable way ahead through a gritty and dangerous world. We give thanks for their intercessions. They are near to us: as near as our heartfelt prayers and fully present to us through their luminous icons. In exceeding measure, then, we open our hearts and souls and minds today, pouring out our praise and thanksgivings, as we venerate the Holy Ones, the Ones Who guided the saints, the Ones Who saw the Creation of Man, Who raised up Alleluias on the night of our Savior's Birth, and Who fill with the world with a superabundance of goodness and and guiding.

An icon near to our Altar (after Rublev) honors Mysterious Visitors, depicted as angels, to Abraham and Sarah. And in this we draw near to the transformation point of life. Angels are bodiless we are told, yet they are visible and present. They are silent, yet we hear them speak and sing. They are spirits, yet they surely take hold of us if they must (and their embrace or grasp is a firm one, I assure you).

The Holy Trinity, as we have said, are depicted as angels. So is St. John the Forerunner. For he is not only the royal herald of King Jesus, but is a Forerunner to our ourselves as he ascends into the Paradise, the Paradise he modeled on earth.

We in our earth-bound ways might be tempted to call this the vanishing point, the point where the bodily meets the bodiless, where the corporeal meets the incorporeal, where earth meets with Heaven. Many of us cherish a departure from earth, leaving all our cares behind, as we enter a place where there are no tears.

I do not say that every tear will be not wiped away (Rev 21:4), but if that same Book of Revelation is about anything, it is about the towering doctrine that God does not forget:

And

No. While there is a Heaven and earth, there is no vanishing point. For our life in Christ is the life of love — in which no one is forgotten, nor can love ever die. The great reminder of this law of spiritual physics, we might say, are the never-failing prayers of the saints and the wholesome and availing presence of St. Michael and All Angels. Never failing.

May I go further this morning and offer additional names for our religious tradition? Let us call it the Kingdom of Heaven Tradition and the Holy Angels Tradition. For our doctrine is this: there is no two-part division, not in the real world, the ultimate world, the abiding world. The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near. These are the opening words of the Forerunner's ministry on earth. These are royal words announced by fiat:

"Metanoiete!", the Baptist cried: "Turn around! You are going the wrong way .... into the world's brokenness! Turn around and see the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst!"

These same words will be uttered in sovereign tones by the King's own voice: "Metanoiete!", the very word that begins His three-year ministry on earth. This Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near.

The suggestion that Heaven hangs suspended in a kind of hazy, future mist .... there's an exam we must prepare for. This is a dangerous idea. It is the work of demons. They cry out (as we heard last week),

No, this idea of a future time is a trap. Heaven can never abide the vile nature or filthy influences of demons. The Master ignores this lying bid for a "truth-claim." and He sweeps them aside with in one stroke.

The Kingdom of Heaven is now. The Kingdom of Heaven is very present. Nor are we ever absent from it, not while angels are our companions, nor our eyes fixed upon its Lord and King.

This is what the Disciples saw at the time they were called and what they beheld as they followed the King of Heaven throughout the Levant. Indeed, these were the words He told them to proclaim to all Israel (and thence to the corners of the earth):

I say, this is what the Disciples heard and saw, for theirs was a world that had been stripped of angels. The world of Judah-ism, where the Moses tradition was ascendant, was in tension with a "Kingdom of Heaven" tradition. The rulers of the Second Temple forbade talk of angels. Their vision was a kingdom which was their kingdom, and their work was to enforce its here-and-now social rules.

"But," the Disciples might have asked as boys, "Where did all the angels go? They were fellows of Abraham and Sarah, received in their tents amongst the Oaks of Mamre (Gen 18:1-15). They were holy helpers and watchers, threatened with homosexual rape, in vile Sodom for Abraham's sake and for Lot's (Gen 19:1). They gave succor to Hagar who was cast into a heartless desert (Gen 16:7). At Abraham's behest, an angel guided and protected Jacob (Gen 24:40ff) .... and then patiently strove through the night with him, crowning this child with a new name at dawn: 'Israel.' Where did all the angels go?"

From the cool groves of Eden and up until the end of that mysterious lifeworld we call Genesis, angels are the very stuff of life. They are the atmosphere of our ancient faith, the faith of Abraham, of the Patriarchs, and of Heaven.

But as we have explored this past year, the Hebrew Scriptures present two, very different narratives. Yes, we have the narrative of the Patriarchs, scattered throughout non-Judean Israel. And we have the Judean narrative of Moses and the Giving of the Law. Both are present. And they are very different. There is no intersection between them.

Not surprisingly, they are paired to traditions in the practice of religious faith. The Abraham tradition is characterized by the transformation of mind while the Moses tradition is preoccupied with animal sacrifice. Indeed, we may summarize the conversion of St. Paul in terms of these two: he experiences a turn-about, deprecating the primary importance of Moses and the Law. (You recall this was the charge against St. Stephen: the threat to take away Moses' customs). Moses deprecated Moses and the Law while taking up the primacy of Abraham as the Father of our Faith.

In Psalm 51, to draw on one of many examples, it is not enough to attest the acceptable sacrifice of God, which is thanksgiving, a broken heart, a contrite spirit. It is not enough. For Psalm 51 also openly mocks and belittles the idea of laying bulls and goats before God.

Animal sacrifice is central to the Moses tradition. And we do well to ask where or when does Moses speak of the Kingdom of Heaven? The Book of Exodus and the Book of Numbers are practically devoid of angels except in particular places where good order is threatened. For example, in Numbers Chapter 22, an angel is repeatedly present to constrain the rebellious Balaam.

The Abraham story and the Moses story are discontinuous. The ancient, mysterious, and luminous story of Genesis does much more than introduce characters and a plot. We are initiated into a certain quality of holiness. Here is a fluid situation in which primal chaos gives way to sublime order, in which cosmic spaces become alight in eternal darkness, in which the near presence and company of God is a constant. The story of Abraham is one of inner ascent: called from carnal Babylon into deserts of purification unto union with God, which Jesus signifies with His mysterious phrase, the Bosom of Abraham .... "carried by angels," He says.

The Moses story and the Giving of the Law recall this intimacy. We have the encounter in the Midian wilderness where he discovers he is on holy ground and must remove his sandals. An angel of the Lord stands nearby the burning bush. And, of course, Moses ascends Mount Sinai. And we find that he has been illuminated, unbearable even to gaze upon, go great is his inner transformation.

The quality of these conversations, however, is very different than the mysteries of Genesis or Isaiah. Please pardon me, but may I lapse into saying that they have the quality of a policy meeting? They have the quality of a policy meeting. To borrow a modern analogy, they are more like a CEO calling His chief operating officer on to the carpet. "What are the employees up to now?" the CEO demands. And the overall project is to institute, regulations designed to improve their conduct. That is, Exodus is certainly about many things, much of it surely sublime, but the main business of the Moses narrative is the founding of a society. At least that is the way we have received it — much revised over many centuries and then sharpened into a social reform program following the Return.

Now, we do not suggest that the Abraham narrative is "true" while the Moses narrative is "false." The Hebrew Scriptures were revised. This is beyond debate. A primary fact observed among the Dead Sea Scrolls is constant revision. Variant versions are everywhere to be found. By and large, these were living documents in constant change. The scale of the thing is breath-taking: 15,000 fragments tracing back, some scholars argue, to 8,000 whole documents. We are not talking about some evidence coming to light. This is the principal textual discovery of the ancient world in the Levant.

We are learning — attested by a major archaeological breakthrough published just last week (Yonathan Adler, The Origin of Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press Haven, November 2022) — that what we have called Judaism for centuries is far from being a monolithic religion and culture. The solid evidences — historical, textual, literary, religious, and archaeological — point to a sectarian world having many beliefs.

Didn't we already know this? Wasn't this something we figured out in Sunday School? The Scriptures reveal an uneasy tension between Sadducees and Pharisees. St. Paul need only mention angels or the resurrection (Acts 23:6ff) to reduce a roomful of accusers into chaos and distracted debate. The tension between the Sadducees and the Early Christians or the Pharisees and the Early Christians is the stuff of Sunday afternoons after church.

A particular sect, though, the Essenes, have have unaccountably absent from these lessons. This tradition, which we might fairly call "the Kingdom of Heaven" or "the Angel Tradition," was well understood and documented during the first century. Both first-century writers Philo and Josephus knew the Essenes. They agreed about their high moral character in pursuit of holiness; their view of God as Creator, at least, of all of that is good; their rejection of money; their maintenance of a common fund; and their ethos of communal life, community meals, and mutual service. This sounds like the Hermitage! And we do well to use phrases like "Apostolic life in common," "agape meals," "sanctification," and "asceticism" when we speak of the Essenes.

Most important (from my view), they did not offer animal sacrifice (from John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community (Cambridge: Eerdsmans, 2010), 131). In Philo's words,

Sanctification of their minds .... we could take that sentence right out of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.

Celibacy-chastity was commonly practiced among them, as we Christians do, yet contemporaries knew of married Essenes, and their Community Rule makes no mention of a celibacy-chastity vow. Josephus records that that they lived in every city, town, and village in Palestine (pushing back on this idea that we were a fanatical group in the desert). Philo avers that their population levels were roughly equal to the Pharisees or Sadducees.

They had a lively interest in the life of angels. Documents such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Angel Scroll, well attested at Qumran, reveal a fluid situation where boundaries between Heaven and earth are unknown.

By contrast, the Moses tradition, which in the hands of the Sadducees had become a social-reform enterprise, had little part with the "Heaven world." A paucity of "Heaven life" is obvious especially in books associated with the Deuteronomistic reforms, begun on the eve of the Exile and put into exclusive practice following the return from Mesopotamia. Angels are not mentioned once in Deuteronomy. They are alien to Babylonian religion. We might expect angels at the right hand of the altar of incense (Lu 1:11, Rev 8:3-4) — an altar associated with prayer and personal transformation. We do not see how they would fit at the bloody altars of Marduk.

With the Advent of God, a celebration of angel life returns. We think of the man of Eden, St. John the Baptist, whose fragrance was redolent of the morning of the world. We think of Divine beings roaming Paradise. The Lord Jesus speaks of angels carrying us into that same Paradise, the Bosom of Abraham (not, we note, the Bosom of Moses).

Thus it is that the Disciples are roused. They are inspired during these heady days of their call. Eleven of them are not Judeans. The Judah-ism tradition is not their tradition. And the Lord Jesus voices tones that touch them most deeply. These are the tones of goodness of purity and of liberation from the tyranny of a clay-bound world:

Oh, these would have been most holy words to their young imaginations, words that would have taken them back, back to their families, back to Jacob's Peniel:

So there in that place, along the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, Andrew and Simon and Philip and Nathanael and the others understood. They understood that the long night and its darkness were being scattered. The hopes and ideals of their fathers stirred up within them. For the tradition of the Patriarchs, the tradition of the Kingdom of Heaven has returned, and a new day was dawning.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.