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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Pastor Galler is on vacation, but, for our reflection this morning on today’s First Reading, Pastor Galler edited a sermon written by The Rev. Richard A. Lammert, a former classmate of Pastor Galler’s and the current Technical Services Librarian at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Rev. Lammert’s sermon was published in the current volume of Concordia Pulpit Resources (29:4, pp.4, 16-19), to which publication Pilgrim subscribes primarily in order to supply sermons on occasions such as this, when our pastor is away and the congregation has not otherwise supplied the pulpit. The edited sermon reads as follows:
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Today is the Feast (or “Festival”) of St. Michael and All Angels. Since the earliest centuries of the Church and especially since the time of the Reformation (Pfatteicher, Festivals, 368), the day has been an occasion to recognize and celebrate God’s wonderfully providing for his people by creating all of the angels who serve God and us, and the appointed Scriptures and Hymns today do just that: recognize and celebrate God’s provision of the angels. In the Additional Psalm (Psalm 91; antiphon: v.11), we repeated the promise that no evil will befall us because the Lord commands His angels concerning us. In the Office Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 522), we gave all praise to God for creating angel hosts. In the First and Second Readings (Revelation 12:7-12), we heard how powerful these angels are; in the Third Reading (Matthew 18:1-11), we heard one of the passages behind the belief that people have their own guardian angels. And, in the Collect of the Day, we will remember that God has ordained the service of angels and ask Him that His holy angels may help and defend us here on earth. Our need for St. Michael and all angels is apparent: despite our Lord Jesus Christ’s ultimate victory, our old evil foe, the devil, continues to fight against believers, giving us no relief. The servants of God, the angels—of whom the foremost is St. Michael, the archangel—are dedicated to defending Christians against all the assaults of the devil and the fallen angels who followed the devil into perdition.
American culture has a certain fascination with angels. From the roly-poly cherubs of valentines, to television series such as Touched by an Angel, to the guardian angel in the movies It’s a Wonderful Life and its retelling It Happened One Christmas, angels make various appearances. But, how accurate are those popular portrayals of angels? If popular perception sees angels as somewhat wimpy, that perception is completely opposite the Bible’s portrayal of at least one real angel as a powerful being. Compare today’s First Reading, for example, where the archangel Michael is a warrior who both fights against fallen angels and fights for God’s people. We are probably well aware that assaults of the devil can come through the temptations of our own flesh, but how about assaults of the devil coming through existing authorities and the power of government, as we hear about in that Reading? God’s angels defend us against the enemies of God, no matter who or where they are.
At the general time of that First Reading, during the Babylonian exile, the Israelites probably would have had a greater appreciation of God’s enemies and maybe even wondered if God was in control of His creation. You may recall that, about six hundred years before the time of Christ, the Babylonians under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried off the Jewish people into Babylonia. Things could not have looked any worse. But, about 540 years before Christ, the Persian king Cyrus had conquered Babylonia, and God had used Cyrus to send some of the exiled people back to their own land. The prophet Daniel originally had been one of the captives carried off into the exile. He had been selected by court officials to serve in the royal court of Babylon, faithfully serving Nebuchadnezzar and his successors until the Babylonian Kingdom was conquered by Cyrus. And, he then served as a top official in the court of Cyrus, king of Persia.
The immediate time of the First Reading is about two and a half years after Cyrus conquered Babylon and sent some of the Israelites back to Judah. Daniel was in mourning, although we are not told exactly why. Perhaps Daniel had heard that the construction of the temple was not going well because of opposition from the Samaritans. Daniel was clearly concerned about his own people and fasted and prayed for three weeks. After the three weeks, God spoke to Daniel through a vision, telling him about the present, the near future, and the far future. In the vision, God told Daniel—and us—much about how “God Cares for and Protects His People through His Angels”. The chief angel whom God mentions is Michael, whom the New Testament (Jude 9) calls an archangel. Through the service of St. Michael and all angels is one of the ways God cares for and protects His people.
The hand that touched Daniel at the beginning of our First Reading may have belonged to the Second Person of the Trinity, the Christ before He became flesh as Jesus (Steinmann, Daniel, pp.497-501), in which case Christ wanted to assure Daniel that he had heard his prayers and wanted to tell Daniel how he would take care of his people in the future. This revelation to Daniel pulls back the curtains, as it were, on a supernatural reality that we do not usually see. Seemingly God was not able to come to Daniel immediately because he was fighting against the “prince of the kingdom of Persia”, a fallen angel—or we could call him a demon—who was working with the kingdom of Persia against God. The archangel Michael came to God’s side with help in defeating the fallen angel, the demonic power behind the throne of Persia.
In arguing for the superiority of Christ, the author of Hebrews rhetorically asks about angels, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14). God created the angels to serve—they serve God, but also and especially people. In the case of the First Reading, the powerful warrior archangel works with God to defeat the fallen angel who is pushing the kingdom of Persia to work against God. God told Daniel that St. Michael came to assist him. So far, we haven’t seen a direct connection between St. Michael and God’s people. That connection will be made explicit in a moment. But even here, we can sense that God’s angels work for God’s people. When any of God’s holy creation, the angels, fight against the devil and his ways, they are protecting and defending God’s people from the wrath of the devil. They are defending the people whom God has made His own, those whom the devil hates mightily.
Jesus said the devil was a murderer from the beginning and a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). With his lies, the devil in the Garden tempted the woman and the man and led them and all of us, their descendants, into sin and its consequences, including temporal and eternal death (Genesis 3:1-7). But, the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work (1 John 3:8). On the cross, the Offspring of the woman bruised (or “crushed” [NIV]) the devil’s head, even as the devil bruised (or “struck” [NIV]) the Offspring of the woman’s heel (Genesis 3:15). Jesus died on the cross for us, in our place, the death we otherwise deserved. And, He showed His victory over death for us with His resurrection from the grave. With Jesus’s holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, He redeemed us lost and condemned people, purchased and won us from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil (Small Catechism II:4). We are saved by grace for the sake of Jesus Christ, when we turn in sorrow from our sin and trust God to forgive our sin. Our Lord Jesus Christ gives us the ultimate victory, but the devil continues to fight against us.
Between the two parts of today’s First Reading, in the remainder of Daniel chapters 10 and 11, God reveals to Daniel what the future holds for the people of Israel. What He ultimately wants Daniel to know and trust will come about is “what is to happen to your people in the latter days”. The “latter days” is generally used in the Old Testament to refer to the time that began with the birth of Jesus Christ and extends through the entire time of the Church to the Last Day. “At that time,” Michael, the archangel, the “great prince who has charge of [Daniel’s] people”—that is, the people of God—shall arise and defend those people. Since this is in “the latter days,” this is the time of the Church. The people of God are the believers in Jesus Christ, the “Israel of God,” as St. Paul calls them (Galatians 6:16).
St. Michael will defend these people—you and me—against the assaults of the devil. We see some of the fierceness of such assaults in the way that the prince of the kingdom of Persia, a fallen angel and follower of the devil, opposed God. But, we see more of the fierceness of such assaults of the devil himself in our Second Reading. At the beginning of that Reading, we hear about Michael and his angels fighting against the devil. St. Michael and his host defeat the devil, casting him out of heaven—if not after the seven days of creation and before the Fall into sin, then perhaps as a result of Christ’s victory and at the time of His Ascension and sitting at the right hand of God (so Brighton, ad loc Revelation 12:1-18, p.334, with reference to Revelation 5:1-14). The Second Reading ends with these words: “But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!” That great wrath the Church of God must contend with until the Last Day. But, God assures Daniel that there is one who defends the people of God from the devil: St. Michael, and with him all the holy angels. God cares for and protects His people through his angels. God does not leave his people defenseless but sends them a powerful defender.
The devil, and the evil angels who followed him in his opposition to God, stand eternally against “everyone whose name shall be found written in the book”. Through Holy Baptism, your and my names are written in the Book of Life. When God put His Triune Name on us in Baptism, he rescued us from death and the devil by creating the faith in us that receives the salvation offered in Jesus Christ, and thereby he wrote our names in the Book of Life. The devil seemingly knows our names are written there and relentlessly attacks us, but God sends St. Michael and all his holy angels to defend us against the devil’s attacks. The devil can easily attack us, because we retain the sinful flesh with which we were born. We still have the sinful nature that apart from repentance and faith separates us from God—and the devil will do everything in his power to make us focus on that, on our sin, on our unworthiness to be in God’s kingdom. The devil’s goal is to bring us to despair of our salvation.
True, we remain poor, miserable sinners, but, in Holy Baptism, God clothed us with the holiness of Jesus Christ, the holiness that He won for you by his suffering and death on the cross. We stand before God acquitted of any charges of sin. We have the confidence that God gave Daniel: “at that time your people shall be delivered”. We are delivered by the blood of the Lamb and by the Word of the Gospel testimony in all of its forms, including Holy Absolution and Holy Communion. If God and His holy angels are for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31). Not demons or even death, which came into creation only because the devil brought it with him, can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39). We shall be raised from death on the Last Day and will “shine like the brightness of the sky above”, as God poetically describes heaven to Daniel.
The ending of the story is indeed glorious—that ending has already been written for us in the Book of Life. Our Lord Jesus Christ has given us the ultimate victory. While on this earth, we will contend with the devil, his fallen angels, and our own sinful flesh. As our culture, with its dismissal of angels as wimpy, and our civilization start to change and begin to look a lot more like the kingdom of Persia, we can confidently trust, as God asked Daniel to trust, that the future is in God’s hands. St. Michael and his holy angels defend us against the assaults of the devil, whether they come to us through the inclinations of our own sinful flesh or from world powers. God’s power is not limited. God cares for and protects his people through his angels. Amen.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +