Father Forgive, a sermon by the Rev. Margaret Waters, ETSS Class of 2000 and rector of St. Alban's Church, Austin, given on September 29, 2005, in Christ Chapel

The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels

Genesis 28:10-17

Jacob dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”

I don’t know how much my seminary professors

realized that I would take their words to heart,

but as I approached my first sermon in this pulpit

since my senior sermon,

I was haunted by their admonitions

not to shortcut researching the scriptures in their context,

to do meticulous exegesis,

and only then to sparingly consult commentaries.

The Feast Day of St. Michael and All Angels.

Wow. What a great day.

And Jacob with his ladder of angels ascending and descending.

What a great passage.

So in the interest of responsible sermon preparation,

I got in my car and drove down to the corner of Burnet Road

where I turn south whenever I drive to the seminary,

but instead of turning right

I drove into the parking lot of the Angel Store.

I figured, if there’s a whole store full of angels,

it must be a uniquely rich source of information.

But there was a “For Rent” sign in the window,

so I conjectured that responsible theology had put them out of business.

But no! There were directions to the new, expanded store

just a bit further up Burnet Road.

It is run by a very lovely couple

who appear to have retired from other careers.

What did they have to teach me about angels?

Well, I didn’t come home empty-handed.

I have here the business card

of a woman who does angel-readings

and will treat your ills with angel therapy.

I’ll put it on the bulletin board.

Here is St. Michael himself.

He set me back three bucks,

and I’ll let him hang out in the library.

This dachshund angel Christmas tree ornament

is for my son Colin who has a little dog named Zoe.

But the piece de resistance is for my sister –

a pig angel snow globe that plays the theme from Love Story.

Unpacking the theology of this rare item

would make for a longer sermon than I’m going to preach.

My father was anything but an angel.

Like many men of his generation,

a number of whom I have buried in the last year,

he went off to war to battle evil incarnate.

He flew B-25’s in southern Europe,

broke his neck in a plane crash

and when he recovered was assigned to be the private pilot

of the general

who oversaw the liberation of Buchenwald.

After my father returned home a hero at the age of twenty-four,

life was all downhill

until he died almost twenty years ago.

I have never felt as connected to him

as I did several years ago

when John Bennet and I walked into

the ruins of the Old Cathedral of Coventry.

It is the 14th century church of St. Michael.

The tears that poured down my cheeks

were tears for that young man,

a boy the age of my own son at the time,

and for all the young men

whose lives were shaped by the experience of the immediate evil

that had destroyed so very many lives

and this magnificent church.

On the night of November 14, 1940

Hermann Goering, in the diabolically named,

“Operation Moonlight Sonata”

sent four hundred fifty Luftwaffe bombers

lighted by a full moon across the channel from Brittany,

and for eleven hours

they dropped five hundred tons of high explosives

and forty thousand firebombs on the city of Coventry.

The city was consumed.

As the Provost of the Cathedral watched it burn.

he said he felt as if he were watching Christ himself being crucified.

In the morning, when the smoke cleared,

the cathedral stonemason took two scorched timbers,

wooden beams six hundred years old,

and tied them into a cross

which now hangs there in the nave open to the sky

over a red stone altar

on which are inscribed the words,

“Father Forgive.”

A priest found three medieval nails

in the smoldering ruins

and fashioned them into a cross as well.

The provost preached a sermon that angered the congregation,

indeed it infuriated the nation,

who were clamoring that the only good German was a dead German.

He held before them their identity as Christians,

and quoting C. S. Lewis he said,

“The angels of God hold their breath to see

which way we will go.”

Jacob, as he is sleeping on that holy place,

is fleeing from his justifiably murderous brother.

Inspired by his devious and devoted mother,

Jacob is taking the coward’s way out.

He is not a holy man.

He is deceitful and an opportunist,

and yet God blesses him with a vision and a promise.

He deserves neither.

But then aren’t we lucky we don’t get what we deserve?

What does this vision mean, though,

the angels going up and coming down the ladder from heaven?

It is Jacob’s foxhole conversion.

God is present. There is a stairway to heaven,

it has opened before him,

and these awesome creatures have access to both heaven and earth.

God makes a promise that God will keep,

which demands that Jacob must keep his promises as well.

Despite himself, Jacob must rise to the occasion

even if all that is asked of him is awe.

The angels then.

The angels don’t address Jacob.

The wrestling match that will redefine him

is years in the future.

These angels appear to me to be more like God’s worker-bees

than the fearsome cherubim of Ezekiel

or Gabriel with her invitation to the young Mary

to open her womb to God’s baby

and her heart to the piercing sword.

Even observing the angels, though,

Jacob is called to acknowledge that he is linked to the divine,

that his crooked little heart is called

to resonate to the source of love itself.

Grass grows in the nave of the Old Cathedral.

The choice was made to let it stand,

to be holy ground,

its vacant tracery framing the city

as it goes about its quotidian business.

The tower still pierces the sky.

The new cathedral was consecrated in 1962

marked by the premier performance

of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem,

dedicated to “Whatever shares/

The eternal reciprocity of tears.”

Whatever shares the eternal reciprocity of tears.

The new cathedral is as profoundly modern

as the medieval one is Gothic.

And the fabric that divides them,

that unites them,

the entry wall of the new church is a seventy-foot

wall of clear glass,

the Screen of the Patriarchs, Saints, and Angels.

Standing on one side or the other,

whatever you are looking at,

these enormously tall and angular figures

etched in the glass are imposed upon your vision.

You can’t see out from the inside

or in from the outside

without seeing through the divine images.

I know that the Greek word ‘angel’

means messenger,

but the Hebrew word it translates

originally meant the shadow side of God.

There is something of Godself in angels,

and whatever it is,

it seems to be of a different order of divine stuff

than the spark we contain in our human souls.

In the imagery of Coventry Cathedral,

I am trying on the idea that angels,

whatever they are or are not,

are something we see through

when we look for God.

The mission of Coventry Cathedral defined itself

in the wartime sermon of its Provost,

and it continues to be a center for world reconciliation.

This is the Community of the Cross of Nails

formed by the struggling relationship

of British and German clergy at the end of the war.

Young people from Coventry helped rebuild hospitals in Dresden,

the German town whose cathedral was similarly destroyed by the Allies.

Dresdeners helped rebuild Coventry.

South Africa, Northern Ireland,

the Middle East, Nigeria, the Sudan --

all have sought refuge and resolution

in the radical and sacred crucible of this organization.

The words on the altar say, “Father Forgive.”

There is a ringing silence at the end of that sentence.

‘Forgive’ is a transitive verb.

It takes a direct object, but there is none provided.

Father forgive whom?

Father forgive what,

which particular action,

which of the myriad sins of our heart?

Forgive our enemies.

Forgive us.

Father forgive.

Forgive and lead us into forgiveness

as vast and illogical as the sky above,

the sky from which a ladder for angels might drop at any moment.

It happened once.

It could happen again.

The promise of God demands our own promise,

our promise to remember.

Our promise to allow reconciliation

to be the screen of angels

through which we embrace the broken world.

Every Friday afternoon

in the nave of the old cathedral,

whether it is sunny or pouring rain,

whether there are two people attending

or a hundred,

the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation is recited.

Please join me:

Coventry Litany of Reconciliation

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class.

Father forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own.

Father forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth.

Father forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others.

Father forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women, and children.

Father forgive.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Amen.

The source for much of this information is “Coventry Cathedral’s Message of Forgiveness” by David Douglas -- found online