Angels and Messengers

What is Peace? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What are the obstacles to getting everyone on the planet to believe that world peace is possible? I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of peace in the world, I still choose to believe that peace is a possibility.

What is Justice? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What would it take for society to believe that every person deserves justice and respect?

 
Again, I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of justice in the world, I still dream of a time when every person will be treated with dignity and respect.

What is love? Imagine a world where love is unconditional.

Good readers, I believe that we must always strive to imagine a better world and never back away from the big questions. But we often get impatient with the slow progress that our institutions make.

If you feel this way, please know that you are not alone.

And yet we must keep an open mind because the fruit of our imagination is not so much what we can bring about by sheer willpower as it is about what we believe and hope for in the world around us: a better, more peaceful, just, and respectful world— a world in which people reach for higher purpose.

And this gives rise to the question of angels. Do we believe in angels? Are they real? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? Are they real? Can we see them? Are they human?

We have all heard about angles: Christmas angles, guardian angels, heavenly angels, clarion angels, Angels for Allison (http://www.stmarksjacksonville.org/angelsforallison).

What I do know is that the word “angel” means messenger, a being that is supposed to help us. Unfortunately, Christian artists through the centuries misrepresented the idea of the messenger. They painted angels using human forms, sometimes with wings and swords and dazzling costumes. This led many to dismiss angels, in sort of the same way that we now dismiss unicorns or even (dare I say it) griffins.

If this is what angels are not, then what might they be? As we have already heard, the word “angel” simply means messenger. In that sense, angels very definitely do exist. When Ghandi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world,” he was saying, be an angel, be a messenger, be an agent of goodness. Angels sit by a sick child’s bed all night with a message of love and security. They come and go from a dying grandparent’s hospital bed with a message of comfort and appreciation. Just the other day a teacher was running with his dog along a cornfield when he came across two students, one of them injured and unable to run. They had come to a crossroads and did not know where to turn so they took the path to the right, and that is where they ran into the teacher. Did an angel point the way, or was that teacher, perhaps, the messenger because he ran to back to school to get help and took them back?

Tradition tells us that there are lots of angels, and that they are almost always healthful. Of the many angels spoken of in the Bible, only four are mentioned by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In Hebrew, Michael means "who is like God." Michael is mentioned three times in the Book of Daniel, once as a "great prince who stands up for the children of your people". In the New Testament Michael leads God's armies against Satan's forces in the Book of Revelation. During the summer before my final year of college, I had to read the long poem Paradise Lost by the 17th century poet John Milton, an epic concerning the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the angelic wars that ensued thereafter. It was the Star Wars of its day—before 20^th Century Fox or Disney/DreamWorks.

Finally, Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, is the day I am writing about today. It is a day in the Western Christian calendar which occurs at the end of September. Because it falls near the equinox, it is associated in the northern hemisphere with the beginning of autumn, the shortening of days, and the harvest of God’s abundant love.

This connection of Michael to the kindness of God and the end of days reminds us that angels are messengers of kindness, order, justice, healing and the light of charity that leads to a rich and rewarding destiny.

Searching in the Dark

I read a report last Thursday that NASA's Voyager 1 probe finally left our solar system, “boldly going where no machine has gone before.” I was in my early 20’s when Voyager rocketed away from Earth. It seems strange that this tiny probe, no bigger than a small car, is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space. And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, the report said that it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this very moment, Voyager 1 is drifting in a part of the universe where it is a minute speck, and that speck has thousands of years to go before reaching the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

As a mathematician, I see the infinite in the heavens, the void becomes the space between the stars, and I realize that the universe is a place where, if not for God, it would be easy to get lost.

We all have dark spaces, and the degree to which we can get lost is infinite. A young person in a boarding school like SAS might seem comfortable in his or her skin. It might seem to the casual observer as though we had everything that speaks of connection to purpose, a sense of belonging to something vital.

But you and I know that there are dark spaces in every life. In every life there is suffering.

Yesterday I attended my first wedding of a gay couple. This very in-love couple had waited until they were almost 50 years old to get married. I was reminded that 35 years ago, a gay person would have been an outcast in most schools or even churches, a laughing stock, a deviant for others to make fun of or mock or bully.

I am very proud to write this piece today and say, with conviction, that my church school is not only a school that accepts gay students, but is a school where gay students are accepted, welcomed, and appreciated.

The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for the Creator, says, “my people are foolish, they do not know me… I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.”

This passage is a reminder that God is no stranger to infinite spaces. Whether they are the outer spaces of the universe or the inner spaces we create for ourselves on earth, there is darkness and, at times, disappointments. The dark cities of my youth were Hiroshima and Hanoi, Selma, Dallas, L.A. and Memphis. You have them too: Bagdad, Tripoli, Cairo, Damascus, even Washington D.C. New York city was certainly a dark place on September 11, 2001.

  

But God is no stranger to darkness. It is written that out of the void God created stars and planets, light and life. And, from this, humankind.

Our universe is immense. It is inevitable that we will sometimes feel lost in it. If you would only look into the sky on a clear night, you will see the infinite, and, I hope, feel its immense mystery. 

St. Paul was lost in a void of some kind. He was a cruel and ruthless man, a man who chased fame and power, a man who felt it was his purpose and duty to lord his narrow views over others and to punish others for being different. This bullying attitude served him well for a while, but he began to feel himself slipping. More and more he found himself needing to bully and persecute others. Power and greed, persecution and bullying, never satisfies, and people who engage in such practices seem to need more and more opportunities to satisfy their hunger for inflicting pain.

I imagine a bully as a lost soul desperately trying to stuff an emotional black hole with anything that will soothe his own suffering. But he finds nothing to satisfy his need. Maybe that is why, after he had done his best bullying in Jerusalem, Paul asked for permission to go to Damascus. It is said that he was going to persecute followers of Jesus there as he had in Jerusalem. God was no stranger to the void that Paul was lost in. And God is no stranger to the pain and suffering that any one of us experiences. God found Paul, stopped him in his tracks, spoke to his deeper self, turned him around so that he could live a more purposeful, joyful, and significant life.

That is the message of the gospel. Gospel is a word that means good news. The good news is that God is like a shepherd who searches the void to find every lost sheep, not just most of them, but every one. In thinking about Voyager 1 I was reminded that God is no stranger to infinity, and no matter where you are, if you are lost and willing to be found, God is there. All you have to do is say, “Here I am, God. Please find me, for I am looking to change my life, to find, and to be found by,  my higher purpose.”

Jesus taught that God is like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep. God is a woman who searches for a lost coin. Insignificant as these lost ones might be, the shepherd and the woman look everywhere.

You and I are sometimes like lost coins or sheep—small, tarnished, worn, of little value—mere nothings in a vast universe of wealth and popularity. But God knows us. Knows our reality. Knows our deepest hopes and yearnings. And God searches for us, wants to know us and steer us back to our destiny. Lost sheep live in dumps and deserts, slums and refugee camps. Their dark places may be illness, scarcity of clean water, lack of education, or poor parenting. Visiting such places in person teaches us that God finds these lost ones. How else would there be radiant smiles on their faces, laughter, hope and joy. 

Lost sheep can also live in affluent neighborhoods and schools, and their dark places are no less important to God. The more we dwell on our misfortunes, the deeper the void and the darker the place where our spirit dwells.

Yes, the universe is vast, and we are but a tiny speck in it; but we are not an insignificant speck. Wherever we are, God is searching to find and steer us toward a good purpose. And it is our responsibility and destiny to grow and learn and spread this good news.

A wise person once said that, amidst a vast universe, we could each sow some small act, and thereby reap a meaningful and life-changing habit. Sow a habit and reap a character. Sow a character and reap a destiny. What will yours be?