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Michaelmas

The feast of St Michael and all Angels (otherwise Michaelmas) falls at the end of this month - even if we will be celebrating it on the first Sunday in October.

I rather think that the festival of the Holy Angels will not be unduly emphasised in most Anglican Churches in the West at the present time. It’s just too mediaeval, don’t you think? Angels are really not much better than than Noah’s ark or Jonah’s whale. All very charming, of course, and just the thing for the children, but hardly suitable for grownups in the twenty-first century.

Well, you know I’m going to disagree with that tout court! Fashionable modern prejudices about theology don’t appeal to me in the slightest when they water down ’the faith once delivered to the saints.’ Doctrinal minimalism is for atheists, not believers, thank you very much.

But am I being consistent? After all, I am frequently very happy to water down what is often believed to be the traditional morality of the Christian religion. I entirely accept the remarriage of the divorced, the use of birth control, the rights of women (most of them, anyway!), monogamous same-sex partnerships, and a few other matters which would probably have had me burning merrily at the stake three or four centuries ago. Furthermore, I think slavery is quite wrong and unchristian - even though the New Testament apparently has no difficulty with it at all.

So am I just being a typical wishy-washy Anglican, picking out the bits I like, and discarding the rest? Well, no I’m not. I believe in the creed - the Nicene Creed -which we recite at the Eucharist each Sunday. Not only do I believe in it, for many years I actually assented to it whole-heartedly when I did not actually believe all of it - the so-called virgin birth in particular. I believe it now, as it happens, but during the time that I didn’t, I still assented to it as a matter of principle, not regarding my individual judgement as a higher authority than the authentic teaching of the Church. And you will have noticed that the creed is not about morality at all, but about doctrine.

Christianity differs from its Semitic stablemates Judaism and Islam in being a revelation not about human behaviour, but about the very nature of God himself and his activity in the world. We don’t have lots of rules and regulations about eating, drinking, clothing, marriage, family life, financial matters and all the rest as the other two do. We know generally that we are to be kind, loving, and so on. But we have not been provided with a detailed blueprint. Thus Christian morality has been somewhat flexible, at least in its details. Nobody (apart, of course, from the Bishop of Rome and Bishop Tamaki) enjoys perfect certainty about how such matters are to be put into practice, no matter how much they might wish that they did.

We need to beware of the fact that our culture and society do not share our priorities. They want Christianity to be a source of moral certainties (their own, of course) while at the same time they regard doctrinal orthodoxy as of little importance. And we need to be aware that all too many of us are tempted to share those priorities. As the general election approaches this month we should beware of those who see religion as a means of regulating the lives of others to their own satisfaction. St Bernard said, ’Life is only for love, and time is only that we might find God.’ In its right context, morality is an integral and essential part of our faith. But it is no substitute for the living God, and becomes just another idol if we try to make it so.

The feast of the Holy Angels is a reminder that reality is much greater than we can either see or conceive, and that the love of God is always at work in ways which we can hardly comprehend. We would be foolish to limit workings of providence to our own understanding of it.