Sermon by the Revd Canon Victor Austin for the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, September 27, 2026

Jesus said, You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

We talk a lot about angels in the church, even having special feasts to celebrate them.

They appear in worship as joining with us in what we are doing, doing in fact this very hour.

Therefore, with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven we laud and magnify thy glorious name.

They appear in sacred story as messengers from God, appearing, for instance, to a young woman.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Angelic words.

They appear in popular devotion, from Jesus' teaching that children have guardian angels, to the sober realization that we also do.

I was once in a near accident, my fault, turning left in front of traffic that I thought was stopped.

I literally put all my weight on the brake pedal and aimed into the traffic between cars, and as you can tell, lived to tell the tale.

But as soon as I was able to pull over and catch my breath, I knew with unearthly certainty that I had been protected by God's angels, that, as it were, my guardian angel was not asleep at the wheel.

Despite all this, though, it is hard to take on board the strangeness of angels.

The short answer to the question, what is an angel, says two things.

First, angels are intelligent creatures, as we are too, creatures made by God, intelligent, that is, rational beings.

The difference between them and us is second, that they are bodily thus.

They have no bodies.

Their intelligence is pure and generally better than ours, and they are purely spiritual creatures.

And not having bodies means that they do not exist in space, though they do exist in time.

So tradition has thought, although they are able to appear in space, appear to us, bring messages to us, join us in praise of God, and have an effect in space, protect us, they do not have to go through space in order to be with us.

That, my fellow human creatures, is really weird.

Saint Thomas Aquinas thought carefully about angels, so much so that he was known as the angelic doctor, doctor because he was a teacher, angelic, not because he was sweet and cherubic, but because he had famously developed teaching about angels.

Aquinas taught that every angel is his own species.

We human beings make one species.

There are billions of us because we have bodies.

Matter, as Aristotle said, is a principle of differentiation.

Matter makes possible that there be multiple individuals within a single species.

This is also behind the rather forlorn thought that there could be a thousand cats in your living room and not just one.

But if cats and humans were pure spirits, there would be only one of each of us, one human and one cat.

But of course, we wouldn't really be human or cat, because to be human or cat is to have a body.

In popular culture, also, angels are widely misunderstood.

They are taken to be people who are sweet and good.

Saints are pictured as sprouting wings when they die.

This idea plays ironically in an old rather cynical song, I'll String Along with you.

The ramp up to the song goes, All my life I waited for an angel, but no angel ever came along till one happy afternoon I met you, and my heart began to sing a song.

Well, the singer would not have mistaken her for an angel if he had had better theology.

When I last preached on the Feast of the Angels, it was seven years ago, and something very significant has happened in the past seven years that makes it possible for us to apprehend the strangeness of angels in, frankly, a new way.

That something is the rise of AI, which does not stand for angelic intelligence.

Now, angels and AI are importantly almost opposite, especially in their origins.

Angels are God's creation.

AI is something of human manufacture, but they have a couple of parallels.

Neither have bodies.

Both are essentially immaterial.

As angels can appear and speak with us, so AI is designed to be able to seem to be something speaking to us.

When I Google a question these days, there's an AI generated response, which often ends with an offer.

If you, it says you, tell me more about such and such I, it says I can give you a better answer.

So here we are, getting used to communicating with what puts itself forward as non-bodily intelligence.

On a more popular, indeed superstitious level, I have known people who interrogate AI agents as oracles.

Second parallel, angels can be good or bad according to their fundamental free and irreversible decision to serve God or rebel.

The rebellious angels are called demons.

This is put forward as a consequence of not having a body.

A spiritual being makes a decision and that's it.

There's nothing to change that decision.

So primordially, uh some angels rebel, scripture tells us, and that's what they are.

They are rebellions against God.

And others uh affirmed their allegiance to God, and that's what they are.

So they are angels and they are demons because of this that they have.

Um it seems similarly that AI agents can lead people to bad or good, as these real spiritual beings do.

This as far as I want to go, I have no point to make about AI other than it is a form of disembodied intelligence in our everyday world.

And whether it's really intelligence or not is not the point here.

It sometimes seems helpful, sometimes seems harmful, and in general seems weird, but is becoming common.

When it comes to angelic beings, they are real, they truly have agency, they are committed to serving God and assisting us in our worship and good works and also protecting us.

The fallen angels have been decisively defeated and can pose no enduring harm to any of us.

If you forget everything else I said today, don't forget this.

Demons can have no enduring harm over us.

Thanks to the angels.

We might think, given this choice here, that there's a kind of hierarchy, that there are demons and then above them humans, and above them angels.

But that would be wrong.

Although angels are wiser than we are, they have a higher form of rationality.

We humans are a higher form of being than angels.

God made us last.

The spiritual creation seems to have been first, and then the material creation and last of all, us.

God made us last because out of the human being shines forth the developed, the deepest mysteries of God.

Which mysteries were revealed in Jesus.

When Nathanael came to Jesus, Nathanael was moved by the understanding Jesus showed of him.

But Jesus went on to say that Nathaniel and all the disciples and all of us would see far greater things.

We would see, Jesus said, angels communicating to and from heaven and earth.

Centuries before, Jacob had seen in his dream a ladder on which angels were communicating between heaven and earth.

Jesus says there is not a ladder between earth and heaven.

There is the Son of Man on whom the angels ascend and descend.

Jesus is the ultimate human being, the one true, complete human being.

And he's the ultimate human being, and the human being is the ultimate of all creatures.

And this means you, my fellow human creatures.

It means us.

It means the person who's sitting near you.

It means the people on the street.

This is the surprise at the heart of this feast of the angels.

Because it turns out that the human being, this is the surprise, the human being as revealed in Christ, on which angels move.

Which is one more reason why we are to love God with all that we humanly are, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.