Saint Michael’s Protection

“War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” —Revelation 12:7-9

I grew up at a time when American popular culture was obsessed with angels. As a very small child I remember watching Highway to Heaven with my parents. The show starred Michael Landon as an angel sent to earth to help humans overcome problems, and often accompanying him was a retired police officer played by Victor French, a cynical foil to Landon’s angelic naiveté.

A few years later came the series Touched by an Angel, in which a group of angels helped people who found themselves at a crossroads. This show with angels directing folks toward God, while learning valuable lessons themselves, ran in prime time for almost a decade. During its run, Nora Ephron wrote and directed a comedy in 1996 starring John Travolta as Michael, the archangel himself. A couple of years later came the angelic romance movie City of Angels, with Nicolas Cage playing the angel and Meg Ryan, the queen of 90s rom-coms, as the human he falls in love with. In 2024, it’s hard to explain the earnestness of these shows, plays, and movies.

The popular depictions gave rise to a craze for all things angelic in other aspects of life— jewelry, home decor, study Bibles, and really anything on which someone might put a picture of an angel. It seemed like every magazine cover in the grocery store checkout line featured Della Reese and Roma Downey, truly the stars of the genre.

This is the context in which I understood angels when I became an Episcopalian—they were a folksy, sometimes cutesy, cultural phenomenon. Angels were more a Chicken Soup for the Soul consumer product than celestial beings involved in a divine drama of their own. I found it difficult to make the connection between the trinkets populating the Cracker Barrel gift shop and the foot soldiers of God described in the passage from Genesis that we read on this feast day.

My understanding of angels was further challenged by a visit to St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York for a seminary project. The building is massive, and the sanctuary felt like being inside of a beautiful fortress. Amid this soaring stone majesty, the thing that caught my eye was their World War I Memorial Shrine. Lee Lawrie the memorial to mark the end of that war to end all wars and in remembrance of the St. Thomas parishioners who served and gave their lives in it. It is a modest but vibrant portal in the midst of the surrounding splendor. Two large wooden doors are crowned by a polychrome relief of the Archangel Michael, wings spread and dressed a bit like a centurion, in the act of plunging a lance into the throat of the dragon representing Satan. Below that is a carved lintel showing a line of American soldiers, identifiable by their distinctive uniforms and helmets, marching off to war from the doors of St. Thomas to the cathedral in Rheims. Some are already falling along the way, caught and comforted in the moments of their deaths by angels. 

This depiction of St. Michael and his angels is still striking to me because it feels anachronistic. These angels are very clearly on the side of the Allied soldiers, assisting them in waging a holy war against the Central Powers made up of Germany, Hungary, and Turkey. We don’t talk in terms of war being holy these days, especially not regarding our own battles or countries who are now some of our major allies in Europe. In part because of the war that followed. A war in which we saw the deaths of twice as many millions of people, many of them soldiers, but many more because of hatred born of religious rhetoric that othered an entire people because of their faith.

There are a lot of local traditions for celebrating Michaelmas, from eating roast goose with carrots in the British Isles to gathering the lavender daises that bloom profusely at this time of year to decorate the altar for mass. According to a friend who collects these sorts of folk customs, for some in northern Europe, this marks the last day blackberries are picked because it is said that when Michael cast Satan out of heaven, he landed in a bramble bush and cursed it, making its fruit too bitter to eat after Saint Michael’s feast day.   

Perhaps today we can best celebrate the triumph of Michael over Satan, of good over evil, by reflecting on how we hurl those labels ourselves. As we witness the resurgence of Christian nationalism at home and war is bubbling up again around our globe with atrocities committed by individuals sure that God is on their side, it is good to remember the words of Anne Lamott, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” So today let us pray for our souls, our selves, and our country, asking for the protection of Michael and all his angels from the killing sin of mistaking our prejudices for the judgment of our loving Creator.