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The Feast of St. Michael and All AngelsWar in heaven. Archangels and angels battling it out, God’s voice, the blood of the Lamb, and Michael casting the great dragon out of heaven, down to earth.
This is powerful, mythic stuff: cosmic forces of good and evil pitted against one another.
We love this sort of thing. Look at all the action movies where the loveable but roguish good guy defeats seemingly insurmountable odds in a battle against the forces of darkness: Star Wars, the X-men, James Bond, and Superman.
But the heroic fight between good and evil is not just in the movies. We speak of the evil empire, the axis of evil, and evildoers. Others speak of the infidels and America as the Great Satan. In religion, the “orthodox” fight it out with the “heretics.” Cops and robbers, terrorists and Homeland Security, oppressors and champions of justice.
And on a personal level, don’t we love to engage in our own little holy wars? Those people who hurt or annoy us, why, they’re just completely wrong, malevolent. We know what’s good and right, don’t we? Why shouldn’t we rise up in righteous indignation and cast the villains out, so that our life can be more like the paradise we want it to be?
Even internally, we imagine that if we only had the faith, if we only had the wisdom, the will power, we could win the internal battle between good and evil in our souls. We could cast out everything we don’t like. Then we’d be pure and holy.
The Michaelmas story and others like it seem to offer us divine justification to engage in all of these kinds of battles. And certainly there are times when we must fight for what is good and right, here on earth.
But someone recently pointed out something to me about this story that I’ve been overlooking. It is a story about heaven, not about earth. Everything in it takes place in heaven: Satan and his forces rise up against God, Michael and his angels defeat them, and the insurgents are cast out of heaven. End of story.
Now I imagine that life in heaven is very different than life on earth; at least I hope it is.
I imagine that in heaven, God’s presence is more obvious than here, and that the good is so purified that it shines like the sun. I imagine that evil would stand out and be so obvious that everyone would see it and know it together. I imagine that God’s reign is so immediate, God’s authority so clear that any dark force that might arise in paradise would be dealt with quickly and decisively.
But life here on earth isn’t like that. Heaven had the luxury of casting Satan and his minions down to earth. What are we earthlings supposed to do? We have nowhere to cast the bad guys out to. We can try to kill them all in order to get them out of our world, but there are always more to destroy, and what kind of monsters do we become in the process? The demons have been cast down to the earth. We have to live with the bad and the good; we have to share this planet and our society together. We must deal with the difficult neighbor or family member or fellow parishioner.
We can’t even cast out all the stuff within us we don’t like. It doesn’t work; we’re only human, after all. We have to live with our personal imperfections. Here on earth, the good is never pure good; the evil is hardly ever pure evil. We live in a gray world, not a black and white one.
Besides, who are we to judge that we’re all good and our enemies are all bad? Isn’t that doing exactly what Satan did to provoke war in heaven – trying to put himself above the authority of God? It is a dangerous game to ride into town on our white horse, slaying dragons with the 100% certainty of a zealot. As Jesus said, Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned (Luke 6:37).
Well, where does that leave us? If we’re not going to engage in holy war, how do we deal with the bad stuff? In one of his parables, Jesus gives us guidance. He tells the story of someone who sows good seed in a field. But at night, when everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. They both grew up together. The workers asked the master of the house do you want us to pull out the weeds? Jesus replied No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time the weeds will be separated out (paraphrase of Matthew 13:24-30).
Isn’t this what happens? Creation is made good, human beings are made good. But in the night when we’re asleep, enemies of God come in, in the form of greed, power, selfishness, fear, anger, impatience, dishonesty, indifference, pollution and addiction. And yet the goodness is still here, growing, alongside the bad. The world is still beautiful. We still reflect the light of our Creator. Before you know it, our souls and the whole world are filled with both weeds and wheat.
Jesus asks us to have patience, to live with both the weeds and the wheat of life, the good and the bad, and to let God sort it out at the harvest in the end. We’re asked to live with our personal imperfections and with all the difficult people, and to leave the judging to God. This is easier said than done, of course. Accepting ourselves and others as we are seems to go against our nature. But if we don’t learn how to do this, we will always be engaged in a violent holy war of some kind or another, against ourselves and others.
And yet, we are given the capacity to judge between right and wrong by God. Isn’t it our responsibility to defend against evil, and to repent and change for the good? Yes, but never with a spirit of self-righteous condemnation, never with 100% certainty, never with the illusion that we can purify ourselves and our world by casting out the wicked. That’s not our job; that’s something more appropriate to heaven, where God knows better than we do how to conduct a holy war.
So yes, use your God-given capacity to discern between right and wrong, good and evil. Do what you can to make yourself and the world a better place. But do it gently, with humility, with the knowledge that we’ll always be a mixture of wheat and weeds, and with the confidence that at the harvest in the end, it is God who will purify us all.
On this great festival of St. Michael and All Angels, we celebrate with gusto this wonderful story of God’s victory in heaven - not as a parable of how we are to be, but how God is. For God will prevail, and all shall be well.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church