Unlike other saints´ days, the feast of St Michael & All Angels commemorates not a historical person who preached the gospel and/or suffered for their faith, but rather the concept of angels, Arch or otherwise, whom the bible tells us play a role in God’s engagement with his world.

In fact there are two strands of tradition within the Bible. On one side angels are regarded as the guardians of the other nations, but unfortunately their citizens started to worship them in their own right, and the Bible then labelled them as evil. And on the other side, there are the serving angels who enter the world of men with messages from God and return to heaven to sing his praises.

But what we have in the Bible, are the creations, not of God, but of men. And not of evil men, but men and women, like us, genuinely trying to come to terms with some of the great puzzles of our human make-up: people challenged by the frailty of their being, sapped of their self-esteem by their own fickleness, and people trying to solve that great religious dilemma, of how it is that God, the creator, relates to, and does business with, us, his creation. In other words, the existence of angels allowed us to point to causes of our behaviour outside of ourselves, and, where convenient, blame them for our shortcomings.

So, do these angels exist today? Most certainly they do. One is undoubtedly called ‘wealth’, and is not a bad thing in itself, indeed it can be very much a protecting thing, a guardian angel. But there is something in us human beings, which picks on it and idolises it, which attributes to it great powers – of salvation, of joy, of enrichment, that should only be attributed to God. And then, when everything goes wrong, we turn around & blame money, wealth, for tempting us. Another might be what we call ‘society’, though it is at least as often referred to as “they” - the great generic term which is, of course, all of us: we can idolise it as a full expression of being, the sum of existence, but then again we distance ourselves from it, and blame it for riots, corruption, racism or whatever.

And on the other side there are the angels which bring to us words from God, perhaps through the words of a friend, a piece of music or an encounter, an experience, through which God´s message is spoken.

So an expression of our humanity, good, bad, mixed and indifferent! But today we remember how that humanity, in all its fallenness, seeks to engage with our loving God.