It’s good to be back after our month-long vacation. It was wonderful to get away and to have that rest, but it’s even more wonderful to return home and to be with you all again.
After mass one Sunday, years ago, someone said to me, “Fr. Robinson, you spoke of Satan today as if he really exists. Do you really believe there is such a thing as the devil? I’ve always assumed that the devil is more of a metaphor than a reality; you know, kind of like angels.”
It’s not uncommon for someone to say something like this to me: “I’m not a member of the Church because I’m too much of a person of science to be able to believe the major doctrines of the Church.” Many of you have probably heard the same thing from friends and relatives. Such things have been said about the supposed conflict between science and religion for at least a couple of hundred years, and before that it was between the supposed conflict between reason and faith. The major doctrines of the Christian faith have been basically the same since its beginning, but as we know, science changes and what was considered to be scientific truth a century ago, or even 10 years ago, can be overturned and completely the opposite of what science considers to be the truth today.
For instance, in July 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot twice, in the arm and in the back, but neither wound was fatal. His doctors, acting on the medical science of the time, didn’t believe in the germ theory. His primary doctor, without washing his hands and certainly without having on any plastic gloves, simply reached into Garfield’s backwound and fished around until he found the bullet. Of course, the president eventually died from infection, 11 weeks later. It wasn’t long after that that medical science came to believe in the truth of the germ theory, and medical science took a great leap forward.
Furthermore, while science seeks to answer the questions what and how, it cannot answer why. That’s the realm of religion. Why is this world here? Why do I seek for ultimate meaning in my life?
There have been scientists who have claimed that God doesn’t exist. They had no more proof for God’s nonexistence than we have proof for God’s existence, but that didn’t stop them from proclaiming their belief from the house tops, or better put, from the university lecture halls. One such atheist was Britain’s Antony Flew. Known by some as the world’s most renowned atheist, his writings in the latter half of the 20th century were used widely to support a scientific view of a godless universe, supposedly based on the science of the time. Toward the beginning of this century, Flew reversed himself, and said that he looked back on that atheistic argument as a “historical relic” due to scientific research since 1966. Philosophers must contemplate the “argument from the order of nature to God as its Intelligent Orderer. He said this approach “becomes progressively more powerful with every advance in humankind’s knowledge of the integrated complexity” of nature. Furthermore, science has undergirded “the fine-tuning argument” for such an omnipotent intelligence: If the constants of physics were “to the very slightest degree different, then no planet capable of permitting the evolution of human life could have evolved.”
Flew therefore considered it “reasonable” for followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “to see the fine-tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of” their belief in God – though he didn’t embrace those religions himself. Because of his change of mind, he became a strong, vocal advocate of public schools teaching the Intelligent Design theory of creation! So, persons who say they can’t believe in the teachings of Christianity because of science had better look at the science, because the science has changed, as science is wont to do!
But throughout all of the changes of science, throughout all of the various periods of history, in good times and bad, in times of persecution of the faith and in times of wide acceptance, the truths of the Christian faith have remained constant, not the product of human reason or of science, but the product of that divine, omnipotent intelligence revealing himself to his people, and most fully in and through the person of Jesus Christ. Reason and science need not be in conflict with that revelation, yet that revelation transcends reason and science.
Today we are celebrating the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. It normally falls on 29 September, but we have transferred it to this first Sunday in October so that I would be back when we celebrated it! We did get the bishop’s permission, by the way. Angels have a prominent place in scripture and appear throughout Scripture in very important moments. An angel announced to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would conceive and bear the Son of God, angels announced his birth in Bethlehem to the shepherds, they ministered to our Lord after his temptation in the wilderness and during his agony in the garden of Gethsemane. They were present at his resurrection, and in today’s Gospel Jesus foretells them ascending and descending on the Son of Man.
Angels are probably one of those difficult things for some folks who feel that science contradicts religion, but once again, they may not be provable except through the eyes of faith, but they certainly are not disprovable either.
It’s important for us at Redeemer to celebrate St. Michael and All Angels first of all because St. Michael is the patron of a conference that’s so crucial in our youth and young adult ministry, and second because it calls attention to the wonderful spiritual reality of angels in helping us and defending us on earth. It gives us a chance to give thanks for their ministry. Blessed Michael and All Angels watch us this day and all the days to come.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (tr.)
7 October 2018