Feast of St Michael & All Angels

Good morning.

Welcome to our Redeemer.

Every year at the end of September, the Christian Church celebrates the festival of Saint Michael and all angels.

And so our service today will focus on this comforting truth that God sends his angels to guard and keep his children, his people, you and me.

Our service begins now with our opening hymn, hymn 816.

Note in the service folder, it's printed the children will be singing the first and last stanzas of that hymn.

Amen.

If you woke up tomorrow morning and drew back the curtains and were surprised because you saw rolling down your street tanks and troops marching in step with them, first of all, you would rub your eyes in disbelief, and then in fear and fright, you would grab your phone because you'd want to find what in the world was going on.

If, however, you got up and you opened the blinds and the troops in the tanks weren't walking down the street, but instead they were encircling your home with all of their guns pointing at you, well then you wouldn't need to reach for your phone at all, and you wouldn't just be fearful or frightened, you would be terrified because it would be obvious why that force was there.

They were there for you.

And so it seems to me that we should have a lot of sympathy for the servant of the man of God, the servant of Elisha, who endured this very experience.

He woke up one morning in the city of Dothan and he rubbed his eyes in disbelief because when he looked out, he saw an army complete with horses and chariots, and all of their spears and all of their swords pointing at him.

A Syrian army that had snuck in during the night had come and surrounded that city.

And the servant of Elisha didn't need to ask if he was in trouble.

He knew it.

He knew that they were there for him.

Or more specifically, that they were there for his master, that he and the rest of the inhabitants of that city were collateral in this situation.

But it was really Elisha that that army was coming for.

Because, as we heard, Elisha had been giving up the secrets of the king of Syria, telling them to the king of Israel, and so frustrating his war plans and frustrating the king of Syria, who was trying to figure out desperately who's the spy, who's the informant, who's the mole in our ranks.

But but when he was told that it was no spy, rather it was the prophet in Israel, well, then the king of Syria knew exactly what to do.

He put a giant bullseye on Elisha.

He called his army commanders to himself and he said, You go and get that man for me.

Thus the reason why the servant found himself staring at a bristling army of swords and spears, all pointed at him.

And thus the reason why he put his hands on his head and said, Alas, what shall we do?

I think we know that feeling.

I think we know what it's like to feel paralyzed by fear.

And I would suggest that it doesn't even take a Syrian army to make us put our hands on our head and say, What in the world am I supposed to do?

How am I going to make it through this situation?

I mean, just think about what it's like to live in a world where fears accumulate so quickly.

Maybe you engage in a little bit of doom scrolling, reading through the headlines, each one aimed to be more alarming, more frightening than the last one.

You read a few of those stories and you will learn about things you didn't even realize you should be worried about.

But now, of course, they are going to weigh on your mind.

Or you tell Dr.

Google the symptoms that you've been having.

And it helpfully tells you all of the terrible, horrible, dreadful diseases that you are likely to have.

Because it's obvious that's what you would have if you have symptoms like fever and a headache.

Or you get into the habit of tracking politics, global, politic, political instability, or enjoy listening to the police scanner, reading the police reports, and you can discover that there are terrible bad things happening far away in this world, close at hand, near to where you live, and and your mind says if these things are always happening all of the time, well then it's obvious that soon some of these bad things are going to happen to you.

And those are just the fears that come from our digital environment and our communication devices and patterns.

Then there are the real world issues.

There are the real world foes, the enemies, the adversaries, the ones who are set against you.

Maybe you have a manager or a teacher who seems to be intent upon making your life as miserable as possible and you have to navigate it and endure it day after day.

Or perhaps you have a coworker who's always trying to put you in a bad light.

You feel like you always have to be checking your back, never secure.

Maybe it's a family member who knows how to land digs and just what to say to get under your skin.

We know what it means to have real-world foes.

And there are real-world difficulties, like the difficulty of trying to figure out how you're going to continue to afford what you need to buy when everything seems to be getting more expensive every day.

And there are real-world realities of relationships that wind up irrevocably broken.

There are real-world hurts, wounds that stubbornly refuse ever to fully heal.

So, yeah, I think we know what it's like to live in a world where there are moments and situations where it makes us put our hands on our head and say, What am I supposed to do?

How am I going to make it through this?

But on top of it, there's this that in this universe there exists a malice, a lurking malice, an evil one who marks as his enemies anyone who bears the name of the triune God.

Anyone who is baptized into the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been marked out by the devil as his prey, his foe, his target.

And this foe of ours, well, he is intent on doing harm to the children of God.

In fact, the the difficulty here, it runs like this.

If you just aren't all that serious about faith or religion, if maybe you say, you know, yeah, I'm a Christian, but you like never hardly ever go to church or scarcely ever pray or read your Bible, you know what?

The devil's gonna pretty well let you alone.

He's not too concerned.

He knows that the world can do its work of slowly letting you drift away from Christ.

But you see, the minute that you wake up and you say, No, faith matters.

No, God's word is the foundation and center of my life.

No, I do want to pray and I do fold my hands and speak to my Father in heaven, well, then you can count on it.

The devil will take note, and he will put that bullseye on you, and he will attack.

And should you dare to tell his secrets to others, should you say, I am a husband and a father, and therefore God has entrusted me with the role of spiritual responsibility for my family, of leading my family to the Savior, to his arms.

If you should say, I have the ability to influence my friends, to draw them to Christ, well, if you go about telling the devil's secrets to others like that, what do you think he's gonna do?

He's gonna do exactly what the king of Syria did.

He's gonna send his hosts and say, Go take that person down.

How does it feel to live as someone who's marked out like that?

With a foe who knows how to tempt and how to accuse, how to badger, how to cajole, how to whisper in your ear that you are hopeless, that you are lost, that you are alone, that you might as well give up, that you should just give in to despair.

Well, I think it feels like the servant felt when he was staring at that Syrian army of spears and swords.

Feels like, what am I supposed to do?

That is indeed a reaction that we can have to the world in which we live, filled as it is with things for us to worry about, fears and dangers that beset us.

But it's not the only reaction we could have.

In fact, it's not the only response that we hear about.

For while the servant was busy throwing up his hands and saying, I don't know what in the world we're gonna do or how we're gonna get out of this, I notice that Elisha, the man of God, seems to be getting up, looking at that Syrian army, and carrying out his morning routine with remarkable calm.

In fact, he even takes it upon himself to call that servant and to say, You need not be afraid.

And why would Elisha say that?

How could he say that?

Do not be afraid when all of that force was arrayed against him and aiming at him.

Well, it's because Elisha understood that he was a marked man in more ways than one.

Yes, he had been marked out by the king of Syria as the target for the special ops to capture.

But more than that, Elisha knew that he had been marked out by his God.

And that when God holds you as the apple of his eye, well then his protecting care goes with you wherever you might be.

In fact, Elisha understood this that when God sends his angels out, they don't just run through our world at random, nor do they even take this world and divide it up into a grid and then take patrol duty going through a certain territory.

Instead, the angel hosts of God gather at specific places, and the specific place where the angel hosts of God gather is around the child of God, around the one who is marked out by God, around his people.

You see this?

When Elisha prayed, and the servant's eyes were opened, and he caught sight of this unseen realm.

He saw the angel hosts of God in their might and in their power.

Horses and chariots of fire is what he saw.

Where were they?

The army of Syria was all around the city of Dothan.

But the angel hosts of God, those horses and chariots of fire, look what it says.

They were gathered all around Elisha.

All around Elisha, all around this man of God.

There are the angel hosts with their protecting care.

And this, this is the promise that God makes to every single person who bears his name.

It doesn't matter whether you are great or small, an infant recently brought to the font, still in a mother's arms, or a saint pushing on through the ninth decade of life who can scarcely see or hear any longer, or anyone in the middle.

His promise is that he sends his angel hosts, not at random, but to go with you, to surround you.

I guess that means that none of us are so important that we would need that sort of protection in this world.

But make no mistake about it, each one of us is so important to our God that he never fails to provide us with a better security detail than anyone we could possibly muster or pay for.

And when you leave this church, you go out those doors with God's unseen guardians, his angel hosts surrounding you, guarding and keeping you.

So you see what this means.

It means that though we live in a world where there are plenty of fears and worries and anxieties, we don't face those fears all by ourselves.

So this is what you can do.

You can take the specific things that you worry about, the specific dangers that threaten you.

You can stack them all up like they are soldiers all around you, aiming at you, pointing their arrows, their fears, their dangers, their worries, their anxieties right at you.

And you can face them all and you can say, Yes, I see this.

This is what life is like in this world.

I am marked on every side by dangers.

But then you can think of Elisha praying that the servant's eyes would be opened.

And in a sense, he can open your eyes too, so that you can know without a doubt that though they are unseen, standing between you and your fears, are all the angel hosts of God.

He sends them so that they are all around you.

And so your God assures you of the love he has for you.

So he calls to you and he says, In this world, do not be afraid.

And now, well, now your eyes have been opened so that you can say, You are right, Lord.

Your angel hosts, they are all around me.

Amen.

Good morning.

Welcome once again.

Glad to see you today at God's house, and thank you to our guests who have been here with us today at Our Redeemers.

Great to have you here.

I'm gonna highlight a couple things on our way out.

There are many announcements in the blue sheet, but today, immediately following the service in our community room, there's an opportunity to get a little cake and punch and some coffee to celebrate this autumn confirmation day, our confirms, both Bob and Bennett, later in the second service.

So please, if you would uh make your way that way.

Um, it'll be a great chance to greet the confirmants and enjoy a little time together.

Uh, soon thereafter, we'll have a ministry forum, which is an opportunity to uh hear updates and the story of the many things that God is doing here at our Redeemer that'll be between our two services, also in the community room.

You're all invited to stay for that.

Finally, thank you to all the parents who brought your children here to be with us today.

It's always a joy to hear their voices singing in our service.

So thank you very much.

God be with you this day.