Some time this week, autumn truly arrived. There are many ways to determine that date, from the cosmological (the fall equinox!) and the meteorological (the first morning you wake up shivering) to the cultural (Labor Day! the start of school!) and, yes, the ecclesiastical: Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, which falls every year on September 29 and marks, in its own way, the arrival of fall.

People have wildly different feelings about angels. For some, the notion of a “guardian angel” who guides and protects each person has been a comfort throughout life. For others, angels seem like an old-fashioned superstition; as the Episcopal Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts puts it, the depiction of winged angels with swords and white robes “has led many to dismiss the angels as ‘just another mythical beast, like the unicorn, the griffin, or the sphinx.’”

The Biblical word “angel” (Hebrew malakh or Greek angelos, hence “angel”) means, simply, “messenger.” They sometimes show up to take care of a nation, they occasionally appear when God needs an invisible army riding chariots of fire, but they mostly simply show up when God has something to say.

One of the readings for Michaelmas tells the story of “Jacob’s ladder.” The great trickster Jacob lays down for the night in a holy place, and rests his head on one of the sacred stones. As he dreams, he envisions a great ladder, stretching from the earth up into the heavens: “and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:12)

Did you catch that? Angels were “ascending and descending” on it. Not “descending and ascending.” (This is the sort of thing preachers and pedants love.) The angels are not, as a matter of course, residents of heaven who only occasionally come to earth. They are on the earth, even now, bringing holy messages to us every day, climbing up to the heavens, and coming back again with even more to say. The journey begins and ends among us, with a constant stream of conversation with God—not just messages from God to us, but prayers from us to God.

Think what you will of angels in the literal sense. We do not live in a meaningless world from which God has absconded. Nor is our only access to God through occasional, direct encounters with God. Our “messengers” from God, our angels, are creatures too. They bear witness to God’s loving words throughout all creation. They are constantly among us, zooming to and fro before our very faces; if only we had the eyes to see them and the ears to hear.

This Sunday marks the beginning of what we sometimes call the “program year”: that part of the church year, more or less overlapping with the school year, when our community’s life is in full swing. The choir returns, Sunday School is in session, Harvest Fair planning has begun, everyone’s enjoying the cookout, and the pews are bursting with excited crowds. (Right?)

In one sense, the social life of the church community is only ever the second-most-important thing. Our focus, naturally, is on the spiritual life and worship of the church, on hearing the Word of God proclaimed and receiving the Body and Blood of Christ that transport us into a realm of heavenly worship. We can do these things in all the splendor of a giant cathedral congregation, or we can do them in secret as a surreptitious pair somewhere in a Soviet gulag; we can do them with a full roster of acolytes and musicians, or we can limp along with what we have. If we walked into Mass and back out without ever speaking with one another, if the music were lackluster and the fellowship nonexistent, in any case, God would be worshiped.

But in another sense, this “program life” of the parish is really a training ground for the whole Christian spiritual life. The Church has sometimes been called “the school of love,” the place in which we learn what love really is and we practice what love does. The Church is, more than anything else, the community in which we learn to love God and one another as best we can, despite all our imperfections.

So as we return to the busy schedule of church life, to weekly choir practices and sumptuous coffee hours, to Sunday School and committee meetings and all the machinery that makes us go, may we be reassured by the notion that whatever we do when we worship God is good enough for God, and may we delight in the opportunity to grow in patience, wisdom, and love.

Especially when we just can’t wait for that Zoom meeting to end.

“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.”
– James 3:1-2

And a very happy first day of school to you, too, James!

Many of us start a new school year today with a mix of emotions: elation to finally have somewhere for the kids to go after a long summer at home; exhaustion at the prospect of a third school year shaped by circumstances beyond our control; anxiety about saying goodbye to our parents and excitement about saying hello to new friends. We start with new backpacks in bigger sizes, new cups of coffee (perhaps in bigger sizes, too), and the hope and prayer that the school bus will eventually arrive.

Not all of us, of course, are kids or have kids in school. But all of us are students, and all of us are teachers, whether we know it or not. All of us are still learning what it is to be Christian, what it is to be human, what it is to be a creature of God in this world; and all of us, every day, teach these things to the people around us through our words and our deeds.

James’s warning to teachers in our epistle for this coming Sunday makes me laugh. It is, you might say, a classic no-win situation. Each one of us, every day, is an example to the people around us, for better or for worse. Hopefully, this is mostly a positive example, an example of what we should do, how we should talk to one another and care for one another and love one another. And yet we all know it’s sometimes a negative example. “For,” after all, “all of us make many mistakes.”

But this can be a gift. We try to model goodness. We strive for perfection. And yet we are imperfect, and we constantly need to learn how to respond to our own imperfections, not to mention those of others. And in a way, learning to fail well is the most important lesson of all.