Festival of St. Michael and All Angels – Revelation 12:7-12, Luke 10:17-20
It had been about a year since Mark’s wife had passed away, and life wasn’t getting any easier. Life without her required a lot of adjustments, and he’d tried to make the best of them, but it was starting to be too much. Now their three daughters had to spend a lot of time after school on their own, waiting for him to come home from work, being responsible for themselves. Their oldest was able to take some of that responsibility, but not quite old enough to drive, which meant that their extracurricular activities were limited. He felt guilty for making them choose, but what else could he do? Finding another job, closer to home, would likely mean even bigger cutbacks as finances became tighter, and work wasn’t exactly easy to come by these days. Without his wife, Mark was starting to feel lonely, too, and even his daughters seemed to be more and more distant. He needed help, he needed hope, but he was losing the battle.
For Janice, it was a struggle just getting out of bed in the morning. To be fair, it wasn’t as if she had an abnormal amount of stress weighing on her each day. Her life wasn’t particularly harder than anyone else’s, at least from the looks of it. But the amount of effort it took to face her so-called “normal” life was superhuman. She didn’t know how other people did it. By the time she got up, took a shower, dressed, and made breakfast, her energy for the day was exhausted. There was a time when she loved her job, but now, she didn’t really see the point. She may as well turn over and go back to sleep. But she’d already called off three days in a row. Irresponsible. She was a disappointment to her parents, to her friends, to herself. Overwhelmed, she pulled the covers up to her nose, and tried to fall asleep again, knowing the problems would be worse when she woke up, but at least they’d go away for those couple of hours. She was losing the battle.
After rehab, Ryan wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Every day in the rehab center was structured for him, and that made it a lot easier to find something else to focus on when the back of his mind would whisper that maybe it was time for a drink. And so he’d worked the program, he’d gotten the tools he needed to stay sober, and he’d gone home, supposedly cured. Except that at home, there wasn’t much else to occupy himself with, and all the things he used to do, he was accustomed to doing with a beer in his hand. He thought about getting together with some friends, but all his friends were drinkers. He couldn’t exactly go to the bar with them anymore. So he’d go to a meeting in the evening, and then come home and stare at the television, trying to ignore the voice in the back of his head that kept whispering to him. But the voice was getting louder, more insistent, and he didn’t know how to shut it off. He was losing the battle.
* * *
Revelation shows up in our readings today, and I think that in some ways, for all its strangeness, the book of Revelation is one of the most honest books of the Bible. Its pages are filled with crazy, difficult, and often frightening images that we struggle to make sense of, or more often, ignore because of their trouble. It’s much easier for our faith lives to sit immersed in the tales of the blessed teacher, the good shepherd whose love encompasses all things and who knows a transcendent way of life that he wants to share with us. Frankly, it can even be easier to dig into the angry prophecies of the Old Testament; God’s condemnation for our broken way of life can be more comfortable to grapple with than the ugliness of Revelation.
But one of my seminary teachers, Dr. Barbara Rossing gives us a useful metaphor for making sense of the crazy images. The Book of Revelation is like a doctor giving a diagnosis to a cancer patient. Before you can talk about treatment, she says, you need to know how far the disease has spread. So the plagues of Revelation are just ways of portraying the symptoms of what’s going on in the world. And the news is bad. The disease is spread throughout; the whole is infected. Revelation is ugly because life is ugly. Revelation may paint that ugliness in big, bright, psychedelic colors, but it doesn’t try to hide it.
And to be fair, there’s ugliness, and there’s Ug. Li. Ness. The Roman empire had some real corruption in it. No surprise there. We know about the gladiator spectacles. We know about the Emperor Nero, burning the city for fun. We know about the masses of the poor, crowded into single rooms in the cities of Rome; the terrible state of life of the slaves who made up 40% of the population; the terrible power of the Roman army. But we aren’t really surprised by the ugliness of life in the ancient world.
We aren’t too surprised, either, when life today turns out to be pretty ugly in other parts of the world. The desperation of the poor huddled together in squatters settlements in Mexico. The human trafficking that seems unstoppable overseas. The power of nations like Syria to use chemical weapons on their own citizens may be a matter of debate in the global community, but the possibility doesn’t really surprise us.
But when the ugliness is closer to home, we manage to sweep it away, to hide it, most of the time. We don’t see the incredible poverty of places like Camden, New Jersey, where things are so bad the social service organizations have just given up. We miss the fact that one of the major world hubs for human trafficking is Toldeo, Ohio. We forget quickly the hundreds of children shot and killed on the streets of Chicago. Or the desperation of inner city Worcester.
But no matter. Because it doesn’t even have to be that bad. Because as good as we can be at sweeping away the so-called big problems of our own communities, we are a hundred times better as sweeping away the ones that seem small. The ones that affect US, our personal lives. We all have them. We look around, and it looks like everyone else around us is doing so well. And we smile, and we assume, somehow, in the scheme of things, that our problems are not so important. The number of times I hear someone tell me that their challenges, their struggles aren’t so bad! I can’t even tell you! But they are. If it hurts you, if it breaks you down, if it wears you out and tests your limits, it’s legitimate. It doesn’t have to be the size of chemical warfare. The warfare that takes place in your own heart is just as important.
That’s one of the reasons I think Revelation is so useful. It’s honest about this. It gets the full extent of the warfare that takes place inside us. It writes it in big letters across the sky, and paints us a picture of a war that wages between the powers of darkness and the powers of light.
“And 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 earth, and his angels were thrown down with him…and woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows his time is short.”
Like everything else in Revelation, we’re not supposed to take this literally. It isn’t an account of what exactly happened. It is a sign, a painting that reflects reality, a representation of the war that goes on in each of us every day. And it’s honest about how the battle is going.
It’s not going well.
We’re losing the battle.
* * *
And the book isn’t over yet.
Listen to what Jesus says in today’s reading from Luke: “Do not rejoice…that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
Do not rejoice, Jesus says, in those moments when the battle seems to be going well for you. Rejoice instead that you don’t have to win the battle. Because you belong to heaven. And while on earth, the battle still seems to be raging, in heaven, we know that the war has already been won.
Jesus hung on the cross. The powers of evil threw everything they had at him. And not even their greatest weapon, death, could subdue him. God has triumphed. God always triumphs. God won the war before the first battle even broke out.
* * *
Nobody really knew what was going on in his life until one Sunday morning, sitting in Adult Forum, when Mark took the risk to share what his life had become like since his wife’s death. It looked on the outside like he was doing okay. But now his church community had some idea of the help he needed, and suddenly there were almost too many people, people willing to cook a meal so he didn’t have to start things when he got home late from work, people willing to drive the girls to school activities, people willing to provide time and space so he could reconnect with his children. And he felt hope.
One day, when Janice thought it couldn’t get any worse, she found herself sitting on the floor of her kitchen and feeling completely empty, staring at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about herself, and suddenly she spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator. And for no particular reason, something just clicks in her, and that piece of corn is the funniest thing she has ever seen, and while she cannot even explain to anyone why it’s funny. But she’s sitting on the floor and laughing and it’s stupid, which makes her laugh even harder, and joy starts flooding back in, and for whatever reason, there’s finally hope.*
Ryan knew he couldn’t battle his alcoholism alone, so he called his sponsor, who was really good at his job. He helped Ryan create some structure in his own life to replace what he had during his time in rehab, and that started to help. Built into that was some specific action to make new friends and find new things to do. And so it’s been three years since he last drank, and even though the battle continues every day, he knows he doesn’t have to fight it alone, and that there’s always hope.
* * *
The fact is, brothers and sisters, whatever your challenges are today, whether they are the size of the world, or just the size of your heart, you aren’t alone in facing them. Michael, the prince, and all his angels are fighting on your side, the powers and principalities, the forty-foot tall Cherubim and the flaming, winged Seraphim. The whole prayers of the saints of God are at your disposal. And if that isn’t enough, Christ has already triumphed; you are promised a victory. And with that promise, you can go and help bring hope to others. Amen.
*This account taken from Allie Brosh, “Depression Part Two,” posted 9 Mar 2013 at hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com This, along with part one of the blog post, is, without question, the best description of depression I have ever read.