Who is like God?
Michael and All Angels
September 27, 2026
Preaching Text: Revelation 12:7-12
Bulletin: Michael and All Angels
Tracy Chapman has a song called "Unsung Psalm." In it she imagines her own arrival at the pearly gates, and she paints heaven the way most of us learned it:
There would be songs sung by a choir I would have a white robe, a halo newly acquired I'd be at peace and I'd have no desire If I'd lived right There would be cherubs with tiny harps arrows and bows I'd have a halo and a flowing white robe I'd be enfolded by a celestial light If I'd lived right
It is a beautiful picture, and yet every piece of it comes with a condition. The robe, the halo, the peace: all of it waits behind an if. If she had lived right. She sings it like someone who has heard that "if" her whole life, from people who were sure she didn't qualify. It is a song that hits me right at the heart. And I often listen to it on repeat when it pops up on my music stream. The song is not a daydream about heaven. It is a lament over the heaven she was handed: a heaven for other people, a heaven with a gatekeeper.
That conditional gatekeeping isn't just in her song; it's the postcard version of heaven most of us grew up with. White robes. Gold halos. Wings folded politely behind them. Rewards for living right. Sometimes they are porcelain figures smiling from a shelf in somebody's living room. Sometimes they are the people we love who have died, and we say they have gotten their wings.
Like Tracy, I confess I struggle with that picture of heaven. I wholeheartedly believe in eternal life. I believe Jesus has broken death open and that the grave does not get the last word. But the picture we hold of angels adorned in white robes with halos is too neat. Too sweet. Too comfortable.
The angels of the Bible are not comfortable. They shake things up. When an angel shows up, the first words are almost always do not be afraid, and there is a reason. What is about to happen is scary. Zechariah is struck silent in the temple. A teenage girl in Nazareth is told she will carry God. Shepherds on a night shift are flattened by glory. Women come to a tomb with spices for a body and find a messenger sitting on the stone, telling them to go, because he isn't here. The angels say do not be afraid, and then the world turns upside down.
The word "angel" itself helps me. In scripture an angel is first of all a messenger, someone sent. What makes an angel is not the wings but the errand. Abraham fed three strangers under the oaks of Mamre and found he had been hosting the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to keep showing hospitality, because some have welcomed angels without knowing it. The messenger might be the stranger at the door. The nurse who says the right thing at three in the morning. The person at the bus stop who tells you exactly what you needed to hear, and whom you never see again.
Then comes Michael. Michael does not fit on a shelf. Michael carries a sword. Revelation 12 does not hand us a greeting card or a precious moments figurine. It hands us a war. A war unfolding in the cosmos, in the heavens. Complete with the slaying of dragons.
Revelation was written to small congregations living in the shadow of Rome. For them, confessing Jesus as Lord rather than Caesar could cost them their standing, their livelihood, and sometimes their lives. Apocalypse means unveiling or revealing. John pulls back the curtain and shows them what is really going on beneath the surface of their days. The war in heaven is the war they already felt on earth: the pressure, the fear, the sense that the powers of this world were winning. John says the struggle is real, and bigger than they can see. And it has already been decided.
Listen to the victory song. Heaven erupts: salvation, power, kingdom, the authority of the Messiah. Then it tells us how the enemy was conquered. Not by Michael's sword. By the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.
Michael clears the heavens, but the song gives the credit elsewhere. The decisive weapons are a crucified body and a spoken word. The Lamb who was slaughtered. Ordinary believers who told the truth about him and would not let go of it, even when it cost them everything.
That is why Michael's name matters. His name is really a question: Who is like God? It is not a boast. It is a confession. Every time his name is spoken, it points away from himself. The great warrior archangel carries a name that asks a question, and the only answer is: no one. No emperor. No empire. No dragon. And not Michael either. Only God. And God looks like a Lamb. A lamb who was slain.
Notice what Revelation calls the dragon. Not only the serpent, the devil, Satan. It calls him the accuser, the one who accuses us and our comrades day and night before God.
Most of us know that voice. It has no horns or pitchfork. Sometimes it comes in the voices of others who try to convince us that we are not worthy. Other times it sounds like our own voice, usually around two in the morning. Wherever it comes from: the voice rehearses our failures. It keeps a careful ledger. It tells us we are too much, or not enough, or too late. It tells us that what we did cannot be forgiven, or that what was done to us was somehow our fault. It tries to deceive us, trick us into believing that we cannot be loved by God. It never gets tired. Day and night.
Revelation says that voice has been thrown down. It no longer has a place before God. It still talks. We know that; we still hear that voice. It has lost its standing. When it brings its case, there is no longer a court that will hear it, because the Lamb has already spoken, and the Lamb's word is final.
Luther taught us to pray every morning and every evening that God's holy angel would be with us, so that the evil foe would have no power over us. I used to hear that prayer as a request for a bodyguard, a divine protector. I hear it differently now. I hear it as a request that the true word would reach us before the accusing one does. That a messenger would come, whether with wings or without, and remind us who we are and whose we are.
Then comes the hard part of the passage. Woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short.
The thing I appreciate most about Revelation is that it does not pretend the world is fine. It names the rage we see, the violence, the cruelty, the lies that seem to multiply. And it tells us what that rage is. It is the thrashing of something already defeated. The dragon is furious because it knows it has lost. That does not make the wrath less real. It makes it temporary. The chaos is loud. It is not the last word.
So what do we do with Michael and all the angels?
We give thanks that God's care is larger than we can see, that there are powers at work for our good beyond our knowing. We stop looking for porcelain and start looking for messengers. And we remember that the victory song names two things: the blood of the Lamb, and the word of their testimony. Ours.
Here at St. Michael, we gather every week. And we ask: Who is like God? We answer it the same way each time. No one, except the One who comes to us as a Lamb, as bread and wine, as a word of forgiveness spoken out loud against every accusation.
You may not have wings. You have an errand. You have a message to share. Somewhere this week, someone is lying awake listening to the accuser. Go tell them the verdict is already in. There is nothing in all creation that can separate them (or anyone) from the love of God found in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Citations:
Tracy Chapman, "Unsung Psalm," track 6 on Telling Stories, Elektra Records, 2000, compact disc.
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