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Fall Asleep to The Full Story of Archangel Michael _ The Prince Who Never Left His Post · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There is a kind of night that has nothing to
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: do with the clock, You know, the one. The room
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: is quiet, the people you love are somewhere behind closed doors,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: breathing the slow breath of sleep, and you are here, awake,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: carrying something you cannot quite name, not fear exactly, not
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: worry exactly, something older than both, a sense that the
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: world is larger than you can hold, and that somewhere
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: in the space between what you can see and what
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: you cannot something is happening that matters. If that is
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: where you are tonight. This was made for you, because
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: to night we are going to meet someone, not a symbol,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: not a figure painted on a cathedral ceiling, someone whose
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: name appears in the Hebrew scriptures, in the New Testament,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: in the Koran, in the prayers of Jewish families before sleep,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: in the art of eight centuries, in the mouths of
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: soldiers and exiles, and ordinary people in ordinary rooms who
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: reached in the dark for the nearest language available to them.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: His name is Michael, And before this night is over,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: you will understand why that name, in the tradition that
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: preserved it is not a statement. It is a question,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and the question has been asking itself for three thousand years.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Settle in. We are just beginning Chapter one. The name
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: and what it carries begin with three syllables, ME, CA L.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Say them slowly, the way the ancient Hebrew speakers would
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: have said them, not as a proper name rattled off quickly,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: but as three separate sounds, carrying three separate weights of meaning.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Because in Hebrew, names are not labels. Names are declarations.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Names are the first thing a being is allowed to
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: say about itself before it has done anything at all.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Me who car like as in the manner of L God.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Put them together, and you do not get a statement.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: You get a question? Who is like God? This is
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: the name of the being we are meeting tonight. Not
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: a claim of resemblance, not a title of achievement, a
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: question pressed into three syllables and carried across thirty centuries
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: of human history without being translated, because translation would have
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: cost it. The question, and the moment you understand that
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: the name is a question, everything about Michael becomes different
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: because a name that is a question is not a
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: name that describes what something is. It is a name
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: that describes what something spends its entire existence doing. Every
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: time Michael acts in the Biblical record. Every time he appears,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: every time he speaks, or stands or intervenes, he is
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: answering the same question his name has always been, asking
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: who is like God? No one. There is a man
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: named David, a professor of Semitic languages, who has spent
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: thirty years studying the names in the Hebrew Bible. He
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: told his students once that the most important thing to
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: understand about Hebrew naming is that a name was not
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: chosen the way you choose a color for a wall.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: A name was recognized, discovered. It was the thing that
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: was already true about a being waiting to be spoken aloud.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And when he reached the name Michael in his curriculum,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: he paused longer than usual. He said to his students,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: this is the only name in the entire Hebrew angelic
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: tradition that is grammatically structured as a rhetorical question. Every
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: other angelic name in the tradition is a statement. Gavriel
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: gevurach El the strength of God a statement. Raphael refue L,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: the healing of God a statement, Uriel ur L the
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: light or fire of God, a statement. Only Michael asks
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: something and David said, when you name something with a question,
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  Speaker 1: you are not describing what it is. You are describing
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: what it will spend its entire existence, proving the being
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: who appears in Daniel as the Great Prince who protects
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the people, who appears in the Letter of Jude in
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: a dispute with the Adversary, who appears in the Book
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: of Revelation at the head of the heavenly host. That
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: being was given at the very beginning, not a title,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: a question, and every action in his long history is
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: an answer to it. Who is like God? No one
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: is like God. That is Michael. That is the answer
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: his existence gives. Now let us go a little deeper,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: because the name is only the beginning. The word L
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: in Hebrew is one of the oldest words for God
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: in the ancient Near East. It appears not only in Hebrew,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: but in Ugarittic, in Phoenician, in Aramaic, across the entire
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Semitic linguistic family. L is not a description of God.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: It is the closest the human tongue has come to
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: pointing at something that exceeds every category available to it.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: And when the ancient Hebrews built angelic names around this word.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: They were doing something deliberate. They were saying, these beings
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: are defined entirely by their relationship to the one thing
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: that exceeds all definition. Michael does not exist apart from
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: that relationship. His name will not let him. In the
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the text that shaped
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the early Christian writers and much of the Western theological tradition,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the name becomes Mikael, a transliteration rather than a translation,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: because there was no Greek equivalent. You cannot translate a
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: question into a statement without losing the question. So the
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: scholars who sat in Alexandria in the third century before
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: the Common Era kept the name exactly as it was.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: They recognized that some things cannot be moved from one
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: language to another without breaking them. The name of Michael
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: is one of those things. It arrives in English the
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: same way it arrived in Greek, untranslated, still asking. There
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: is a woman named Teresa, seventy two years old who
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: lives outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She spent her career
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: as a librarian, which is a profession that trains you
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: to understand that the most important thing about any document
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: is not what it says, but what it was designed
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: to do. She began studying the Hebrew scriptures in her
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: sixties after her husband died, and found herself, as she
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: described it, in a conversation with silence that needed better vocabulary.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: She came across the name Mika l one afternoon and
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: sat with it for a long time. Finally, she said, this,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: a question built into a name is a kind of permanence.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: States can become outdated, titles can be revoked, but a
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: question stays open. A question keeps demanding to be answered.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Every generation that encounters the name Michael is required to
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: encounter the question again, and the question does not change.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Who is like God? And the answer the name has
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: always required is the answer the name will always require
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: no one. She put the book down and looked out
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: the window for a while. She did not say anything
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: else that afternoon. She did not need to let us
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: now look at what surrounds the name, because Michael does
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: not exist in a vacuum, and the tradition preserved a
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: great deal of information about where he stands and what
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: that position means. The word that gets translated as archangel
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: comes from the Greek archangelos. The prefix arch comes from ark,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: meaning first or chief, or the one who holds the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: originating position. An archangel is not simply a powerful angel.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: An archangel is an angel who holds a position of
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: primacy within a structure. The word describes rank, not size,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: authority not force, and the word angelos itself, the Greek
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: word that gives us our English angel, translates the Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: word malak. Malak means messenger, one who is sent, one
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  Speaker 1: who carries something from a source to a destination. The
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: entire category of being we call angels is, at its
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: etymological route, a category defined by being sent. So an
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: archangel is a chief messenger, the one who holds the
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  Speaker 1: first position among those who are sent. In the Protestant
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: canon of the Bible, the word archangel appears exactly twice,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: once in the Letter of Jude, applied directly to Michael,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: once in the First Letter to the Thessalonians, without a
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: name attached. That scarcity is not a sign of unimportance.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: It is the scarcity of some thing the original readers
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: already understood. The Biblical writers were not introducing Michael to
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: their audience. They were invoking a figure their readers already
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: knew at specific moments for specific reasons. There is a
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Hebrew concept worth knowing before we go further, because it
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: will reappear as we move through Michael's story. The word
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: sar means prince or commander, or the one who holds
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: authority over a domain. In the Book of Daniel, which
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: we will spend significant time in later, Michael is called
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the Sar Hagardol, the great prince, the great commander, and
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: sar in the ancient Near Eastern context is not a
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: ceremonial title. A sar has a territory to govern, a
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: people to protect, and an authority that comes from above
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and expresses itself through the sar into the domain under care.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: In Daniel, that domain is identified explicitly as the people
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: of God think about what that means, not as abstract
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: theology as something close. There is a being ancient beyond
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: any calender, whose name is a permanent question about the
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: nature of God, who holds first position among the heavenly messengers,
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  Speaker 1: who has been given as his specific responsibility the protection
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: of the people of God across the entire span of
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: human history that the Biblical record covers. The name says
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: that domain is active me ca l three syllables spoken
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: by shepherds in the Judean hills, and by monks in
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: candlit rooms, and by soldiers and children and ordinary people
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: at the end of ordinary days, when the silence gets
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: too large and they need something to hold on to.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Who is like God? No one? That answer has not
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: changed in three thousand years, and the being whose name
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  Speaker 1: carries the question has not stopped answering it. Breathe, you
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: are in good lies company to night. The library is open.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: We have only just stepped inside Chapter two. Before the
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: sky had a name. There is a question almost no
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: one asks when they first encounter Michael, because the more
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: obvious questions crowd in front of it. What did he do?
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Where did he appear? What does he look like? These
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: are the questions that get asked first, and they are reasonable.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: But the question that changes the shape of everything that
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: comes after it is quieter and older than any of those.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Where does Michael stand? Not? Where has he been? Not?
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  Speaker 1: Where is he going? Where does he stand? What is
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: his position within a structure that, in the Biblical imagination
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: existed before the first morning of creation. Before we enter
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: that structure, one thing worth knowing the sources we will
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: draw on in this chapter. Are not all the same
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: kind of text. Some are from the Biblical canon itself,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Others are from
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  Speaker 1: the surrounding tradition texts like First Enoch and the Dead
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Sea Scrolls and the Talmud, which are ancient and illuminating
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and distinct from scripture. I will tell you which is
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: which as we go. The distinction matters, and I will
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  Speaker 1: not blur it. Now, let us walk in. The Hebrew
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: word for the heavenly gathering is sod. It is usually
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: translated as counsel or council, and it appears in the
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Psalms in the Book of Job in the Prophets. In
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Psalm eighty nine, the writer asks who among the heavenly
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: beings is like the Lord, who is greatly to be
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: feared in the council of the Holy ones. The sod
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: the gathering of beings who exist in the presence of
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: God and who participate in ways the texts describe but
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: do not fully systematize, in the governance of what has
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: been made. This is the world Michael inhabits within the
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: heavenly court. The biblic texts identify several categories of beings
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: whose nature and function differ significantly from each other. The
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Seraphim appear in Isaiah chapter six, six winged beings standing
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: above the throne, calling to one another. Holy, Holy, Holy,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: is the Lord of Hosts. The Cherubim appear in Ezekiel,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: four faced creatures of enormous complexity, the bearers of the
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: divine throne. These are not the soft, winged figures of
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Renaissance painting. They are the closest the Biblical imagination comes
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: to describing beings at the intersection of the divine and
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: the created, so far beyond ordinary human experience that the
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: writers reach for every image available and still cannot close
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: the distance. And then there are the malachem, the messengers,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: the scent ones, the beings who move outward from the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: center of the heavenly court into the created world, with
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: specific tasks, specific messages, specific responsibilities towards specific people. These
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: are the beings most people think of when they hear
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the word angel. Within this category of scent ones, the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: canonical biblical text gestures at Michael's elevated position, while the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: surrounding tradition describes it more explicitly. First Enoch chapter twenty,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: a text outside the Protestant and Catholic canon, but known
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: to the New Testament writers since the Letter of Jude quotes.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: It directly lists Michael first among the archangels and describes
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: him as the one set over the best part of
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: humankind and over chaos. The phrase best part of humankind refers,
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: in the reading most consistently supported across centuries of interpretation,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: to the orientation within human beings toward what is good,
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: the capacity for reaching towards something beyond themselves. Michael, in
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: this text's account, is set over that reaching, over the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: part of humanity that is, however imperfectly and inconsistently turning
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: in the direction of its source, and Overhaus, because wherever
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: the reaching happens, the chaos is never far away. There
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: is a woman named Naomi, fifty eight years old who
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: teaches comparative religion at a university in Toronto. She grew
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: up in a secular Jewish household, which she says gave
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: her an unusual relationship with the tradition, intimate and estranged
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: at once, like knowing someone's handwriting without knowing their face.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: She came to the angelic tradition through academic work rather
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: than through faith. She told her students once that every
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: complex system has someone whose job is not to be
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: the highest authority, but to be the one through whom
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: the highest authority is most effectively expressed. That person has
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: to be absolutely loyal to the source of authority, absolutely
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: capable in the domain they manage, and absolutely clear about
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the difference between their own will and the will of
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the one above them. She said, when I read the
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: early Jewish descriptions of Michael, across texts spanning many centuries
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: and many different communities, I find a portrait of a
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: figure who holds authority without ever appearing to confuse the
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: holding with the owning. That consistency across very different kinds
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: of texts, written by very different people in very different circumstances,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: is itself something worth noticing. She looked at the stack
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: of books on her desk. She picked up her pen.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: She went back to work. There is a Hebrew word
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: worth understanding before we move forward. The word tsava means
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: army or host. God is repeatedly called Adonite savote, the
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: lord of hosts, the lord of armies. Those armies are
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: not primarily human armies. They are the gathered ranks of
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the Malachim organized under divine authority, and in the traditions
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: telling across both the canonical and the surrounding texts, Michael
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: holds the position of commander within that host, not as
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: a soldier who fights, we ordered, as a commander who
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: holds the shape of the whole. There is a man
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: named James, fifty two years old, who spent twenty three
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: years in the United States Army and retired as a
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: senior officer. His first year of retirement was the most
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: disorienting of his life. All the structure gone, all the
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: rank gone, nothing to anchor the day he read the
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: descriptions of Michael's position in the ancient texts one evening
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: and recognized something immediately. He said, I understand what the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: tradition is describing someone who holds an assignment that did
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: not originate with him and does not belong to him,
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: and that he carries not for his own sake, but
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: for the sake of the people it is meant to serve.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: He set the book down on the table, He stood
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: up and walked to the window. He stood there for
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: a long time, looking out at a street he had
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: not yet fully learned in a city he was still
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: figuring out how to live in without rank or mission
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: or the structure that had held him for twenty three years.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: He was trying to remember how to be a person
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: without a position, and something in what he had just
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: read told him that the position was not actually the point.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: We have found our bearings. We know where Michael stands
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: in the tradition's telling before the world began, at the
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: head of the scent ones, in the position of the
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: sa Haggardol, defined entirely by the relationship that gives the
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: position its meaning and the responsibility that has not diminished
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: across the entire length of the human story. Now let
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: us find out what he was willing to do from
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: that position. Because there was a war, and the war
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: was not small. Chapter three, The War Before Morning. Close
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: your eyes for a moment long enough to try to
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: imagine the following before the earth, before the water and
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: the dry land, and the first morning of the first day,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: before or any of it, there was already something. There
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: was the presence of God. There was the heavenly court.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: There were the malachim already existing, already positioned, already holding
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: their places in the order that preceded the created world,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: and in that order something went wrong. The text that
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: describes what happened most directly is the twelfth chapter of
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: the Book of Revelation. Before we enter it, a word
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: about the kind of writing Revelation is, because it matters
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: for how honestly we read it. Revelation is written in
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: a form called apocalyptic literature, from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: unveiling or disclosure. Apocalyptic writing is not primarily a prediction
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: system or a coded map of specific political events. It
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: is a particular kind of writing designed to draw back
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: the curtain on the structure of reality that underlies the
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: surface of visible history. It uses symbolic and visionary language
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: not to be evasive, but because the realities it is
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: trying to describe exceed the categories available to ordinary language.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: A careful reader approaches Revelation asking not what specific future
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: event does this predict, but what does this reveal about
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: the nature of the conflict that underlies all of human history?
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: With that frame clearly in place, here is what the
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: twelfth chapter says. There was war in heaven. Michael and
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: his angels fought back but the dragon was not strong enough,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: was thrown down that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: who leads the whole world astray. He was thrown down
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: to the earth and his angels with him four verse.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: One of the most consequential events in the entire Biblical
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: account of the heavenly world, and at the center of it,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: named explicitly commanding the victor. Torious side is Michael. The
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Greek phrase that opens this passage is eginetto polemos ento
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: arano there was war in heaven. The verb eginato is
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: in the eriis tense, which in Greek describes an action
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: as a completed whole, a single event with a definite
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: beginning and end, not an ongoing struggle, a discreete event
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: that happened, was contested and was resolved. Who is the dragon?
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: The text itself answers that ancient serpent called the devil
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: or Satan. The word satan in Hebrew means the adversary,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: the accuser, the one who stands in opposition. The word
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: diabolos in Greek from which we get devil, means the
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: one who throws across the one who disrupts by throwing obstacles.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Both names describe a function rather than an origin, a
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: being defined by what it does in opposition to what
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: is now. The question of what this being was before
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: it became what those names describe has generated careful and
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: sometimes very different readings across the centuries. In the Hebrew Scriptures,
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: there is a passage in Isaiah chapter fourteen where a
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: taunt against the king of Babylon pivots into language that
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: has struck many readers across many centuries as reaching beyond
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: the merely political, and a similar passage appears in Ezekiel
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: chapter twenty eight. Many interpreters in the Jewish and Christian
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: traditions have understood these passages as describing a heavenly figure
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: whose rebellion preceded human history, a being of great original
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: glory who made a catastrophic choice. This became the dominant
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: reading in the Christian tradition and is the one that
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: shaped most of the texts we are exploring tonight. Other interpreters,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: including many careful scholars, have read these same passages as
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: purely political poetry directed at human kings. Both readings have
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: been held by serious people across many centuries. What follows
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: is the traditional reading held in that frame. Imagine a
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: being of extraordinary original brightness, elevated to a position of
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: great glory, who looked at that position and made the
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: decision that Michael's name refutes every time it is spoken.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: He decided to be like God. Let that land for
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: a moment, not a rebellion driven by deprivation, not a
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: creature rising against an oppressor. A being who had been
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: given extraordinary gifts, extraordinary position, extraordinary proximity to the source
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: of everything good, who decided that proximity was not enough,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Who decided that being the most glorious created thing in
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: existence was not enough, because existing within a structure still
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: meant existing below the top of the structure. And that decision,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: in this reading, is the origin of the war. Who
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: is like God? Michael's name asks this being, un I am.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: There is a man named James, the same retired army
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: officer we met in the previous chapter. He read Revelation
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Chapter twelve late one night during his first year after
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: leaving the military. He said, every significant conflict I witnessed
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: in twenty three years came down to the same thing.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Someone decided they were the point some one confused the
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: authority they were given with the authority of the one
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: who gave it, and the moment that confusion took hold,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: everything underneath it began to come apart. He said it quietly,
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: almost to himself. He said, I recognized what the text
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: was describing the moment I read it. I had lived
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: inside that story in smaller versions for twenty three years,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: and I had watched it end the same way every time.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Not well. The response to this failure in the Revelation
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: account is Michael, not God. Directly, Michael. This choice is
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: worth noticing. The one who carries the question about divine
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: uniqueness as a name is the one who goes to
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: meet the being who has answered that question incorrectly, as
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: the living demonstration that the answer given was wrong. The
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: being says, I am like God. Michael answers, no one
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: is like God, not in words, in the entire force
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: of everything he is. The text says the dragon was
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: not strong enough. In Greek uk ishison, he did not
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: have the capacity required for the victory he was seeking,
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: because the victory he was seeking was structurally impossible. You
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: cannot successfully claim to be what you are not and
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: that foundational self deception, the claim at the heart of
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: the rebellion, was the deepest source of his weakness. Michael
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: did not win because he was stronger in some simple
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: physical sense. In the logic of this account, Michael won
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: because he was right, and in a universe structured around
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: the nature of the one who made it, being right
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: is not a small strategic advantage. This is the traditional reading,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: and it is the one that has shaped the entire
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: tradition we are exploring tonight. The dragon is thrown down.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: But here is the part most readings move past too quickly,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: and it matters for everything that comes after. He is
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: thrown to the earth, not into non existence, not into
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: a sealed chamber beyond all reach, to the earth, to
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: the domain where Michael's people actually live. The adversary, expelled
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: from the heavenly order, lands in the place where the
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: people of God make their lives, and Michael, whose responsibility
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: is those people, now exercises that responsibility not in the
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: clean structure of the heavenly court, but in a contested
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: world where the adversary is actively working against everything Michael
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: is charged to protect. The war in heaven did not
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: end the conflict it relocated it. Every subsequent appearance of
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Michael in the Biblical record needs to be understood against
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: that background. He is not a visitor from an untroubled realm.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: He is a commander operating in a contested domain. After
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: the dragon is thrown down, a voice cries out in
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: Revelation chapter twelve. Now the salvation and the power and
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: the kingdom of our God have come. And then a
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: few verses later comes a sentence that has given steadiness
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: to more people in more desperate situations than most of
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: us will ever know. They triumphed over him by the
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: The victory in heaven and the participation of ordinary people
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: in the ongoing conflict on earth are connected. The blood
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: of the Lamb, which the Christian tradition understands as the
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: death and resurrection of Jesus, and the word of their testimony.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: The willingness of ordinary people to keep saying what is
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: true about the nature of reality, even when everything around
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: them insists otherwise. These together constantute the ongoing answer to
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the ongoing claim who is like God? No one the
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: adversary keeps making the claim and The answer keeps being
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: given by Michael and by ordinary people in ordinary rooms, choosing,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: in whatever small way is available to them tonight, to
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: orient toward the source rather than toward themselves. That orientation
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: is what Michael is set over. The tradition says, you
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: are not alone in it. You never have been. Chapter four,
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: The Prince who Stayed. There is a book in the
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: middle of the Hebrew Bible that most people encounter in fragments.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: The famous stories have entered the general cultural memory so
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: thoroughly that most people feel they know the Book of
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Daniel without having read it carefully. The lions den, the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: fiery furnace, the writing on the wall. These stories are real,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: and they matter, but they are not the most important
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: thing the book is trying to say, because Daniel is
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: not primarily a book of dramatic stories. It is a
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: book written by people who had lost everything, for people
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: who had lost everything about whether anything real remained when
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: everything visible had been taken away. The temple was gone,
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: the city was gone, the king was gone, the land
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: was gone. The people were in Babylon, the most powerful
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: empire the ancient world had yet produced, and Babylon was
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: not subtle about what it thought of the God of Israel.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: It had destroyed his house, it had carried his people
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: away in chains, It had renamed the young men of
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: Israel with Babylonian names, educated them in Babylonian wisdom, and
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: expected them to become Babylonian in every way that mattered.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: And into that specific darkness, into that specific question of
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: whether God was still present and still active and still
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: governing what happened to his people. The name Michael appears
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: for the first time in the entire Hebrew Bible, not
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: in the Creation account, not in the stories of Abraham
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: or Moses or David, not in the Psalms or the
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: wisdom literature or the major prophets. In Daniel, in the
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: book written for the people who had lost everything in
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the moment when the question of whether God was still
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: present was not a theological abstraction, but the most urgent
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: practical question a community could face. That is not an
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: accident of the text. Let us enter Daniel carefully. Daniel
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten is one of the most remarkable passages in
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: the Biblical record, and one of the least discussed outside
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: scholarly circles, because it requires patients and rewards that patience
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: with something that changes the texture of everything around it.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Daniel has been fasting for three weeks, twenty one days,
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: without meat or wine or any kind of anointing. He
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: is standing on the bank of the Tigris River, and
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: he looks up and sees a figure whose description is
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: almost impossible to process in ordinary terms. Clothed in linen,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches, arms and legs
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: like burnished bronze, voice like the sound of a multitude.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: The men with Daniel do not see the figure, but
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: they feel something. They flee in terror. Daniel falls on
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: his face, and the figure touches him and speaks, I
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: have come because of your words, the figure says, But
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood me for
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: twenty one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: came to help me, and I left him there with
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia, and came to
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: make you understand what is to happen to your people
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: in the latter days. Read that again slowly, This being
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: of extraordinary luminosity, whose appearance causes trained men to flee,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: was delayed, was resisted, was held back for twenty one
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: days by something called the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: and the being who broke that resistance, whose intervention allowed
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: the messenger to reach Daniel at all, was Michael. The
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Prince of the Kingdom of Persia is not the human
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: king of Persia. A human king does not withstand a
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: heavenly messenger in that way, the tradition that produced Daniel
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: understood the visible history of nations to have a dimension
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: that human eyes cannot see. The political and military struggles
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: of earthly kingdoms were understood to correspond to struggles happening
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: at a level of reality beyond the visible The Sar
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: of Persia in this text is a heavenly figure identified
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: with Persian imperial power, operating in opposition to what is
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: being worked out through Daniel and through Israel. This is
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: a window into something the Biblical text rarely discusses so directly,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: the idea that what happens in visible human history is
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: connected to an and in some sense an expression of
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: something happening in a dimension beyond what we can observe.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Scholars have argued carefully about the precise nature and meaning
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: of this passage for centuries. What it depicts without argument
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: from the text itself. Is this a channel of communication
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: between Heaven and the people of God was being blocked?
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: And Michael came and held the contested point so that
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: the channel could be cleared. There is a man named Samuel,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: forty seven years old who has worked as an air
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: traffic controller at a major American airport for nineteen years.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: He manages invisible structure, the channels that allow aircraft to
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: move through shared air space without collision, to reach their
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: destinations to land safely in conditions the passengers cannot see
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: or understand. No passenger thinks about Samuel, no passenger knows
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: his name, and yet his work is what makes the
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: journey possible. Samuel read Daniel chapter ten one evening and
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: sat very still for a long time. He said, I
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: know exactly what that is. That is what it looks
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: like when someone holds the frequency open so that the
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: communication can get through. That is what it looks like
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: when someone maintains the structure so that the connection is
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: not lost. I do that every day. He paused and
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: looked at the page for a moment. He said, nobody
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: knows I am doing it until something goes wrong. He
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: did not say anything else. He did not need to.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: Later in Daniel chapter ten, the heavenly Figure makes one
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: more reference to Michael that we need to stay with.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: He says, there is none who contends by my side
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: against these except Michael, your prince, your prince, not the
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: Prince of Persia, not the Prince of Greece, who is
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: mentioned a few verses later, Michael, your prince. The one
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: whose specific domainane of responsibility is the people standing in
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: front of the messenger, the people of Daniel, and, as
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: the Christian tradition has understood it, the people of God,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: in whatever form that community takes across history. The word
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: that matters most in this sentence is the smallest one, You're.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: It is addressed to Daniel, who is in exile, who
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: has lost everything visible, who has been fasting for three weeks,
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: in a grief so deep it is described but not explained.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: And into that grief, into that specific darkness, comes the
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: news that Michael, your prince, is contending on your behalf
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: in a dimension you cannot see. Your prince, not a
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: distant administrator, the one who came, the one who stayed,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: the one who is holding the ground right now. While
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: the message is being delivered, while the weeping has not
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: yet stopped, while nothing visible has changed. Let us move
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: forward to Daniel chapter twelve, because it is there that
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: the most direct Biblical statement about Michael appears, and it
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: is there that a single Hebrew word has been waiting
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: for us since the first chapter of this Night. Daniel
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: chapter twelve opens with these words. At that time, Michael
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: shall arise, the great Prince who has charge of your people.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: And there shall be a time of trouble such as
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: there never has been since there was a nation till
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered,
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: every one whose name shall be found written in the
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: book Michael shall arise. The Hebrew verb is ya amud.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: It comes from the root ahmad, meaning to stand. But
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: yamud in this context is not simply describing someone standing
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: up from a seated position. In the usage of the
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: ancient Hebrew text, it describes a figure stepping fully into
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: the authority of a role, moving from a posture of
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: maintenance into a posture of decisive presence. The verb used
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: when a leader steps forward to meet the crisis that
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: has reached its defining moment, and the crisis Daniel Chapter
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: twelve describes is the most severe crisis the people of
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: God will ever face, a time of trouble such as
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: there never has been since there was a nation. And
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Michael stands up yah Ahmud, not because the situation is manageable,
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: not because the outcome is already visible, but because his
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: people are in the worst trouble they have ever faced,
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and he is their prince, and a prince does not
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: disappear when the situation becomes desperate. The text then says,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: your people shall be delivered. Different readers in different theological
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: traditions have understood the relationship between Michael's arising and the
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: deliverance that follows in different ways. Some read Michael's standing
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: as directly initiating what follows. Others understand it as the
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: signal that announces what God is doing, rather than the
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: mechanism of the doing. The text itself holds that question
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: open rather than close it, and careful readers across many
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: traditions have noticed that the openness may be intentional. What
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: the text does not leave ambiguous is the connection Michael
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: arises and then the deliverance comes. In the logic of
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Daniel's vision, those two things belong together. Daniel chapter twelve
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: does not stop at the deliverance. It continues, many of
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: of the sky above, and those who turn many to
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: righteousness like the stars forever and ever. The sequence is
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: what matters. Michael stands. Deliverance comes, the dead, awake, the
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: wise shine. A woman named Priya, twenty nine years old,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: a graduate student in ancient Near Eastern studies, spent months
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: in Daniel chapter twelve working through the Hebrews. She came
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: to it as a scholar, not as a believer. The
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: word ya amud stopped her completely, she said. In every
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: other context in the Biblical text, where a leader stands up,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: it is a response to something concrete and addressable. But
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: here Michael stands up in response to the worst situation
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: that has ever existed, and the text treats the standing
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: as sufficient as the beginning of everything that follows. She
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: was quiet for a while, then she said, I spent
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: a long time thinking about what kind of universe you
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: would have to be living in for that to be true.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: She did not answer her own question. She left it open,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: the way good questions should be left. It is a
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: good question to carry into sleep. Ya amud he will
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: stand Chapter five, The Body that no one could have.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: There is a verse in the New Testament that most
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: readers pass over so quickly they barely register it. It
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: sits in one of the shortest books in the entire Bible,
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: a letter so brief it occupies less than a single
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: page in most printed editions, twenty five verses, and yet
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: within those verses, packed into a single sentence, is one
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: of the strangest and most revealing scenes in the entire
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: biblical record of Michael. Here it is but when the
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: body of Moses. He did not presume to pronounce a
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: blasphemous judgment, but said, the Lord rebuke you. Read it again, slowly, Michael,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: the Archangel, in a dispute with the devil about the
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: body of Moses. This sentence raises more questions per word
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: than almost anything else in the New Testament. Why is
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: there a dispute at all? Why the body of Moses? Specifically,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: why does Michael the figure who commanded the heavenly host
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: in revelation not simply assert his authority and end the matter.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: Why does he say the Lord rebuke you, rather than
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: saying it himself. These questions have occupied careful readers for
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: nearly two thousand years, and the answers that have been
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: offered illuminate something about Michael that no other scene in
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: the Biblical record provides quite so clearly, something about the
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: nature of genuine power and how it operates within a
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: correctly ordered structure. Let us start with Moses. The Book
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: of Deuteronomy tells us that Moses climbed to the top
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: of Mount Nebo, looked out over the promised land he
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: would not be permitted to enter, and died there. And
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: then it tells us something that was unique in the
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: entire ancient world. God himself buried Moses in a valley
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: in the land of Moab, and no one knows the
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: place of his burial to this day. No one knows.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: In the ancient world this was extraordinary. The graves of
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: significant figures known, they became sites of memory and pilgrimage
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: and veneration. The grave of Moses, the greatest prophet in
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew tradition, the man who stood face to face
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: with God, who brought the people out of Egypt, who
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: received the Law on Sinai, was hidden deliberately by God himself.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: The tradition offers a consistent reason across its various expressions.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: Moses was so central to the experience of Israel, so
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: identified with the relationship between God and his people, that
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: a known grave would have been irresistible as an object
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: of veneration that crossed into something the tradition consistently warned against,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: and so the grave was hidden. The letter of Jude,
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: drawing on a tradition its first century readers would have recognized,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: tells us that even the hidden grave was contested, that
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: the adversary came for the body of Moses, and Michael
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: was there to oppose him. Jude is drawing on a
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: text known to scholars as the Asumption of Moses or
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: the Testament of Moses. Most of this text has been
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: lost to history, enough of it was known in the
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: first century that Jude could reference it without explanation, confident
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: his readers would understand. What the surviving tradition preserves. Is this,
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: at or near the moment of Moses's death, there was
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: a confrontation between Michael and the adversary over the physical
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: remains of Moses. The adversary made a claim. In the
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: versions of the tradition that survive, the claim was that
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Moses had committed murder, specifically the killing of the Egyptian
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: recorded in Exodus chapter two, and that a murderer's body
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: was therefore his to claim. And Michael's response is the
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: most instructive part of the entire scene. He did not
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: argue the claim on its merits. He did not present
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: a counter argument or challenge the adversary's standing to make
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: the claim at all. He said, the Lord rebuke you, Epitemezai, soichirius,
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: may the Lord rebuke you? Why there is a man
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: named Richard, forty four years old, a litigator in Boston
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: who has spent twenty years in court rooms arguing cases
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: other lawyers considered unwinnable. He read Jude chapter one, verse nine,
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: one evening, and the sentence stopped him completely. He said,
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: every instinct I have trained over twenty years says, you
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: fight the claim on the merits. You challenge the evidence,
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: You question the adversary's standing, You find the weakness in
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: the argument and press it until it collapses. That is
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: what you do when some one makes a false claim,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: he said. But Michael does none of that. Michael does
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: not engage the claim at all. He does not treat
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: the adversary as a legitimate party in a legitimate proceeding.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: He steps entirely outside the adversarial frame work and appeals
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: to an authority above both of them. He said, I
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: know what that move means in a court room. It
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: means you understand something the other party does not. You
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: know where the real authority is, and you are not
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: going to be drawn into a process that grants legitimacy
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: to a claim that has none. He leaned back in
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: his chair. He said, that is not weakness. That takes
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: more discipline than fighting. The Letter of Jude draws explicit
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: attention to Michael's restraint by framing it as a contrast.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: The verses immediately before this passage criticize figures who do
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: not tremble as they speak against the heavenly beings, And
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: then it says, but even Michael, the archangel, when contending
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: with the devil, did not dare bring a condemnatory judgment himself.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Even Michael, this is the key phrase. Even the one
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: who holds first rank among the heavenly messengers, even the
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: great Prince, even the tsar Agadol, even Michael, did not
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: presume to pronounce final judgment on his own authority. He
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: referred the judgment upward to the one above him, to
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: the one whose nature his name is always asking about.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Who is like God? No one, not even Michael, when
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: it comes to the authority of final judgment. There is
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: a woman named Catherine, sixty years old, who spent thirty
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: five years as a judge in a mid level court
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: in the American Midwest, thousands of cases involving real people
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: in real difficulties, a quiet career that never made the news.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: She read this passage in Jude, the year she retired.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: She said, the hardest thing I ever had to learn
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: as a judge was that the authority I exercised was
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: not mine. It was given to me by the law,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: by the people who wrote the law, by the entire
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: structure that made my court room possible. And the moment
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: I forgot that, the moment I started to think that
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: my judgment was the point, rather than the justice the
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: judgment was meant to serve, something went wrong the authority
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: became self serving, and self serving authority is the beginning
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: of injustice. She said. Michael knew that before any human
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: being had ever sat in a court room, he knew that,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: even with every bit of authority available to him, the
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: right move was to refer the judgment to the one
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: who is the source of all judgment. She looked out
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: the window for a moment. Then she said, I wish
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: more powerful people understood that. I spent thirty five years
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: wishing that the Lord rebuke you. Three words in English,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: four in Greek, and in those words, the entire structure
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: of the universe Michael operates in is visible power that
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: knows exactly where it comes from, authority that refuses to
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: act as though it is self originating, strength that does
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: not need to be demonstrated to be real. Now there
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: is one more layer of this scene worth staying with,
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: because it illuminates something about why the body of Moses
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: matters beyond them legal dispute. Moses represents something specific in
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: the tradition. He is the covenant, the law, the relationship
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: between God and his people formalized in Stone and Fire
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: and the Long Wilderness Journey. If the adversary could claim
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: the body of Moses, he would be making a claim
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: not just on a corpse, but on everything the corpse represented.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: He would be saying, this belongs to me. The covenant failed,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: the man who was the human face of that covenant failed,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: and the failure is mine to claim. And Michael says no,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: not with a theological argument, with a referral to the
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: one above the dispute with the Lord rebuke you, which
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: is not a polite demural, but a declaration that the
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: adversary is not operating in a legitimate court, that the
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: judgment has already been made by the one whose authority
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: is not subject to negotiation, and that the body of
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: Moses and everything it represents is not available for the
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: adversary's purposes. There is a quiet ferocity in that restraint.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: The body was not taken, the claim was not honored.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: The Lord spoke, and Michael, having referred upward, having trusted
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: the one above him to be exactly what the one
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: above him is, had done precisely what he was there
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: to do, no more, no less, exactly what the situation
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: required from exactly the one who was supposed to be there.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: There is more to Michael's story than the Biblical text
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: contains on its own, and that more has been kept
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: with great care across many centuries by people who understood
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: that the tradition is larger than any single collection of texts.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: We are going there next chapter six. What the tradition
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: kept there is a way of reading the Bible that
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: treats it as a complete and self contained world. Everything
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: you need is inside, everything else side is either commentary
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: or distraction. This is a legitimate approach, and it has
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: produced centuries of careful, serious, fruitful reading. But it has
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: a cost. The cost is losing the context in which
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: the Biblical text was written, the living conversation that surrounded it,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: the things it assumed its readers already knew without being told.
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: The Biblical writers were not writing in a vacuum. They
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: were writing inside a tradition that was already ancient. When
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: they picked up their pens, and when they mentioned Michael,
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: they were not introducing a new character. They were invoking
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: a figure their readers already knew, with stories already attached
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: in a context. The texts never fully reconstruct because reconstruction
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: was unnecessary. What was in that context, the tradition that
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: surrounded the Biblical text is vast and complex and sometimes
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: internally inconsistent because it was produced by many different voices
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: over many centuries. Is arguing with each other in the
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: way living traditions argue, not by suppressing disagreement, but by
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: preserving it and letting the disagreement itself become part of
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: the record. I want to be as clear as I
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: can about what this material is before we walk through it,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: because the clarity will make the material more useful, rather
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: than less. This is not scripture in the sense that
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: the Biblical text is scripture for most Christian and Jewish traditions.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: It is the traditions accumulated thinking about what the scripture means,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: what it implies, and what it connects to. It is
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: the surrounding conversation worth knowing and worth taking seriously, and
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: worth keeping distinct from the canonical text itself, not to
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: diminish it, but to honor what each kind of source
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: actually is and what kind of authority it carries. I
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: will tell you when we are reading canon I will
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: tell you when we are reading tradition, and I will
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: try to tell you when we are reading my own
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: reas on what both of them offer. With that clarity established,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: let us walk inside. The first thing the broader tradition
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: tells us about Michael that the canonical text alone does
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: not say directly is that Michael appears in human history
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: at moments the Biblical narrative describes incompletely. The Talmud and Midrash,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: both tradition, rather than canon, preserve a set of identifications
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: that the Rabbis transmitted not as invention, but has received
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: understanding of who the unnamed heavenly figures in the Biblical
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: text actually were. The most significant of these is the
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: story of Abraham. In Genesis chapter eighteen, three figures appear
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: at Abraham's tent in the heat of the day. Abraham
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: runs to meet them bows and offers water and food
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: and rest. The text moves, in its characteristic way, between
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: calling these figures men and identifying them with the divine presence,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: creating one of the most discussed passages in the entire
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: history of Biblical interpretation. The rabbinic tradition, in the reading
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: that became most widely received across many centuries of Jewish scholarship,
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: answered this way, Michael is the one who brings to
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: Sarah the news that she will conceive and bear a
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: son within the year. Raphael is the one who heals Abraham.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: Gabriel is the one who continues to Sodom. This identification
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: is not in the Biblical text itself. It is in
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: the tradition of interpretation, and it became widely accepted across
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: both Jewish and early Christian scholarship. What makes it worth
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: holding even with that caveat, is what it says about
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: how the tradition understood Michael's relationship to the Covenant story.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: Isaac is the child through whom the entire Covenant promise
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: moves forward. Without Isaac, there is no Jacob without Jacob.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: There is no Israel without Israel. There is no biblical
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: narrative as we have it. In the tradition's reading, Michael
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: was present at the announcement of that child's coming, the
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: one set over the people of God, was there at
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: the moment when the people of God were made possible.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: In this reading, he has been there from the very
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: beginning of the Covenant story. There is another story the
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: tradition preserved about Jacob. In Genesis chapter thirty two, a
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: mysterious figure wrestles with Jacob through the night at the
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: ford of the river Jabok. The text calls this figure
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: a man, but by the end of the encounter, Jacob
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: understands he has met something more than human, and he
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: names the place Peniel, saying he has seen God face
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: to face and survived. The identity of this figure has
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: been debated for centuries. Some read it as God directly.
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: Others read it as an angel and a significant strand
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: of the tradition preserved in rabbinic commentary, and in some
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: early Christian writing identified the figure as Michael. Again. I
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: offer this as the traditions extended reading, not as a
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: claim of the canonical text. A woman named Rachel, fifty
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: four years old, a rabbi at a Conservative synagogue in Philadelphia,
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: grew up with these identifications as living things rather than
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: historical curiosities. She said to her congregation once, the rabbis
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: who preserved these readings were insisting on something specific. They
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: were insisting that the great moments of the Biblical story
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: were not managed from a distance, That the annunciation of
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: the Covenant Child, the wrestling match that gave Israel its
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: name were not moments of impersonal, divine mechanism. She paused,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: someone showed up. She let that sit for a while
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: before she continued, let us now look at the texts
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: that most directly shaped how the New Testament writers understood Michael.
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: First Enoch a collection of texts outside the Protestant and
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: Catholic Biblical canon, preserved entirely only in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition,
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: but widely known and influential in the centuries surrounding the
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: composition of the New Testament. The Letter of Jude quotes
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: it directly, which tells us the early Christian writers considered
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: this surrounding literature worth engaging. First Enoch chapter twenty gives
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: us the most explicit ancient description of Michael's function. It
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: lists Michael first among the archangels and describes him as
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: the one set over the best part of humankind and
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: over chaos. First Enoch chapter forty expands this in a
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: vision of four figures before the divine throne. One praises,
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: one blesses, one intercedes, and one drives away adversaries. In
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: this text's telling, Michael is both the intercessor and the
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: one who drives away adversaries. He holds both functions simultaneously,
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: the advocacy and the defense. The tender work in the
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: hard work. This is a more complete picture of Michael
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: than most people can. Most people carry either the warrior
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: or the intercessor, depending on which tradition shaped their imagination.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: The oldest and most careful texts tend to hold both together,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: and the holding of both is not a contradiction. It
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: is a coherent portrait of what it means to be
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: set over a people, to advocate for them and to
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: protect them, to bring their prayers upward, and to hold
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: the contested ground around them both at once. Now let
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: us come to something that most people outside the Jewish
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: community have never encountered, and it is one of the
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: most beautiful examples of how the figure of Michael was
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: woven into Jewish daily life across centuries and remains there
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: to day. Before sleep, the traditional Jewish practice includes a
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: brief prayer invoking the presence of four angels to stand
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: at the four sides of the sleeping person. The prayer
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: appears in the Talmud. It has been said by Jewish
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: men and women and children before sleep for approximately two
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: thousand years. To my right, Michael, to my left, Gabriel
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: before me, Uriel, behind me rafa Ill, and above my
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: head the presence of God. This prayer is not magic,
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: It is not superstition. It is the tradition's way of saying,
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: in language older than almost any living institution, that the
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: one who sleeps is not unattended, that the night is
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: not empty. That the ancient question who is like God
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: has an answer that is present even in the dark,
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: even in the silence, even when nothing visible confirms it.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: To my right, Michael, there is an old man named
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: Abraham eighty one years old who lives in a small
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: apartment in Brooklyn, New York. He came to America from
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: Hungary in nineteen fifty six at the age of eleven,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: which means he crossed a border in the dark with
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: his mother and two younger siblings while his father was
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: already gone, taken by a regime that did not return
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: the people it took. He grew up in Brooklyn. He
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: became a tailor, He raised a family. He has said
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: the prayer before sleep every night for seventy years. He
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: does not always feel anything when he says it. Most nights,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: it is simply the last thing he does before he
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: closes his eyes, the way a door is the last
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: thing you pass through before you are inside. He says
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: it every night, even the knights after the worst days,
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: even the knights in his first years in Brooklyn, when
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: he did not know enough English to explain to any
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: one what he had lost, even the knights after his
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: wife died twelve years ago, when the bed was too
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: large and the apartment was too quiet, and the dark
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: was the specific dark that only people who have lost
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: their person understand. He said, I do not know if
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: Michael is there. I cannot see to the right. A
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: long pause, he said, but I say the words. I
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: have always said the words, and the saying of the
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: words is itself a form of trust, and trust, on
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: some nights is the only thing left. He was quiet
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: for a moment. Then he said something else, quietly, almost
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: to himself. He said, seventy years, it has always been
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: enough to my right, Michael. The tradition kept that across
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: two thousand years of diaspora and persecution and displacement and loss,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: across every version of the darkness that human communities have
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: had to survive, the tradition kept the prayer that puts
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: Michael at the right hand of the sleeper. That is
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: not a small thing to have kept. There is one
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: more element of the Jewish tradition worth holding before we
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: move to the next room of this library. It comes
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: from a strand of Jewish mystical thought known as Merkaba mysticism,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: named for the Hebrew word for the divine chariot. In
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: Ezekiel's vision, these texts are a te nition of mystical
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: and devotional literature rather than canonical scripture. In the Mirkaba texts,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: Michael holds a role that the tradition describes as the
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: Heavenly High Priest. He stands before the divine throne and
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: offers in the heavenly Temple that corresponds to the earthly one,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: the prayers and the needs of the people below. He
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: carries what is below into the presence of what is above.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: The Earthly High Priest in the Temple tradition was the
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: one person who could enter the Holy of Holies, the
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: innermost chamber of the Divine presence, once a year, on
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. He entered with the
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: names of the twelve tribes of Israel engraved on his breastplate.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: He did not enter alone. He entered carrying every one
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: who could not enter their names on his chest their
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: needs in his prayers. The Merkaba tradition extended this image
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: into the heavenly realm. In this devotional reading, Michael does
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: that work the dimension above. He carries the names into
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: the presence. He does not leave the people at the threshold.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: I offer this as the tradition's extended, imaginative and devotional
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: reading of what the scripture implies about the heavenly court.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: It is not a claim of the canonical text. It
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: belongs to a different category from scripture. Though it belongs
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: to the tradition in a real and deep way, and
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: held at the right distance with clarity about what it is,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: it offers perhaps the most intimate portrait the entire tradition
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: produces of Michael's relationship to the people. He is set over,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: not the warrior standing over a defeated enemy, not the
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: commander holding the contested ground, the priest with the names
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: on his chest, walking into the innermost place, carrying everyone
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: who cannot go in. In this tradition's reading, your name
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: is one of those names. It has been carried, the
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: tradition says, for a very long time. We have been
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: inside the Jewish tradition for this entire chapter. And Michael
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: did not stay inside the Jewish tradition. He traveled as
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: names that our questions tend to travel across centuries and
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: borders and theological disagreements. And what happened to him in
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: the Christian tradition is a story that deserves its own
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: careful telling. The Knight has room for it. Chapter seven,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: The long Memory of the Church Christianity was born inside Judaism.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: This is not a controversial statement. It is a historical
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: description of what happened in the first century of the
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: Common Era in a small province on the eastern edge
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: They read Jewish scriptures, they prayed Jewish prayers. They understood
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: the nature of heaven and the identity of its inhabitants
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: through the framework of the tradition they had inherited, and
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: that tradition included Michael. When the early Church began to
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: develop its own distinct identity, it did not start from
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: nothing on the question of Michael. It started from the
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: full weight of what the Jewish tradition had preserved and
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: added to it the specific lens of what the death
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: and resurrection of Jesus meant for understanding the heavenly order,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: and what emerged from that combination over the following centuries
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: is a tradition around Michael that is richer and more
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: varied and more geographically widespread than almost any other figure
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: in the Christian imagination. Let us begin where the early
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: Church began underground. The catacombs of Rome are burial chambers
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: carved into the soft volcanic rock beneath the city, used
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: by the early Christian community as places of burial and
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: gathering during periods of imperial persecution. They were carved and
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: decorated across roughly three centuries, from the late second century
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: to the early fifth and in those underground rooms, in
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: the earliest surviving Christian art and j Pelic figures appear
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: on the walls. The early Christian artists were working in
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: difficult conditions with practical urgency. Most of what they produced
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: is simple figures, suggestions of wings, postures of authority. But
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: even in the simplest images, a posture holds upright, facing forward,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: not retreating. When everything above ground is hostile, when the
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: empire holds the power and you have only the catacombs,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: you put on your walls, the figure that the tradition says,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: stands between you and what is trying to destroy you.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: The walls were not decorative, they were theological. They were
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: the early community's way of saying, in whatever language was
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: available to them, that they knew who was on their side.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: As the Church moved from the underground into the open
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: air of the post Constantinian world in the fourth century
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: and beyond, the figure of Michael moved with it, and
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: in the Eastern Christian world sen at Constantinople, Michael acquired
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: a significance that went beyond the devotional into the political
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: and the institutional. The Great Church of Saint Michael at
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: Annaplace on the Bosphorus, built in the fourth century, became
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Christian world.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: The emperors of Byzantium, who ruled from Constantinople for more
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: than a thousand years, maintained a particular devotion to Michael
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: that expressed itself in architecture, in coinage, and in military practice.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: Before battles, Byzantine commanders prayed to Michael. After victories they
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: gave thanks to Michael. The imperial theology of Byzantium understood
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: the emperor not as a god, but as the earthly
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: administrator of a divinely ordered domain, and Michael was presented
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: in the Byzantine theological imagination as the model of what
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: faithful authority looks like when it is held correctly. The
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: one who holds a position given to him, the one
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: who serves the people in trust to his care, the
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: one who does not confuse the position with the source
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: of the position. An emperor who devoted himself to Michael
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: was saying something about the kind of emperor he aspired
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: to be, not the emperor who rules for his own glory,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: the one who stands for the protection of those intrusted
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: to his care. Whether the Byzantine emperors always lived up
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: to that aspiration is a very different question. But the aspiration,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: repeated across more than a thousand years of devotion, shaped
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: the theological imagination of the entire Eastern Christian world in
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: ways that are still visible to day. And in Orthodox
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: homes across Greece and Russia and Romania and Ethiopia and
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: every place where the Eastern tradition has taken root, the
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: icon of Michael has held its place on the wall
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: for centuries. There is a man named Nicolaus, sixty one
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: years old who grew up in a Greek Orthodox family
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: in Thessaloniki and now lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: works as an electrician. He has had the same icon
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: of Michael in his home for forty years. It is
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: the icon his mother gave him when he left Greece
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: in his early twenties, which is itself a copy of
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: an icon she had from her mother, which is a
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: copy of something that goes back far enough that no
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: one in the family remembers the original. Every year, on
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: the eighth of November, the feast of the Synaxis of
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: the Archangels in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Nicolaus takes the
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: icon down from the wall and cleans it carefully. He
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: does not attend church regularly. He says he has a
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: complicated relationship with the institution, which is true of many
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: people who have a completely uncomplicated relationship with the faith
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: underneath the institution. One evening, his teenage daughter asked him
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: why he cleaned the icon every year even though he
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: did not go to church. He thought about it for
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: a while, then he said, the face is the same
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: every time, whatever is happening in my life, the face
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: does not change. And some years that is the thing
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: I need most of all, something that does not change
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: because my circumstance is changed. His daughter did not say
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: anything for a moment. Then she said, I think I
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: understand that He nodded. He kept cleaning the icon. Now
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: let us move to the Western Church, where Michael's story
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: takes a different shape, while remaining recognizably the same story.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: The first explicitly documented account of Michael's appearance in the
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: Western Christian tradition, meaning an account that was preserved and
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: treated as significant by the institutional Church itself, is located
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: not in Rome, but in Italy, on a limestone promontory
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: on the southeastern heel of the Italian boot. The place
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: is called Monte Gargano, and the date traditionally given is
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: four hundred and ninety years into the common era. Before
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: I tell this story, I want to be clear about
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: what kind of account it is. The Monte Gargano story
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: is what Catholic and Orthodox traditions call a private revelation
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: or devotional tradition. It is an account preserved by the
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: Church for its spiritual value, not a claim that the
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Church requires its members to accept as historical fact in
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: the way it requires acceptance of the Biblical text. That
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: distinction matters for how we receive what this account offers.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: With that clarity in place, the story is this. A
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: wealthy landowner was searching for a bull that had wandered
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: from his herd. He found it at the entrance to
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: a cave on the mountain. He shot an arrow at it.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: The arrow turned in the air and struck him instead. Disturbed,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: he went to the local bishop, a man named Lorenzo Maiorano,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: who called a three day fast. After the fast, Michael
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: is said to have appeared to the bishop and identified
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: the cave as a place under his particular protection, a
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: place where prayers offered to God through his intercession would
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: be heard. The bishop referred the matter upward to Rome.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: Rome send representatives. Eventually, the cave was consecrated and a
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: church was built at its entrance. It is still there
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: pilgrims still go there fourteen centuries of continuous pilgrimage on
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: a limestone mountain in southeastern Italy. What the Monte Gargano
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: tradition established in the Western Church was an idea with
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: deep roots in what we have already seen in the
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: Jewish tradition Michael as in to Cessa, as the one
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: through whom prayers are carried toward the one above. The
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: language used at Monte Gargano and in the devotional tradition
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: that grew from it, is consistently the language of intercession,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: rather than direct petition. Michael is asked to carry, to bring,
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: to advocate. The movement is always upward toward the one
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: whose nature his name is always asking about. This is
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: the same movement we saw in June chapter one, verse nine,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: the Lord rebuke you, and it is the same movement
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: we saw in the Merkabar traditions. Heavenly High Priest. The
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: movement is always toward the Lord. Michael does not absorb
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: what comes to him, he transmits it. There is a
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: woman named Elena, sixty seven years old, who grew up
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: in a village in Pulia, the region of southern Italy
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: where Monte Gargano stands. Her grandmother made the pilgrimage to
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: the sanctuary every year on the eighth of May, and
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: Elena went with her from the age of six until
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: her grandmother died when Elena was twenty two. Elena now
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: lives in Chicago, where she works as a hospital administrator.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: She is not, she says, a particularly observant person. She
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: is not sure what she believes in the formal sense,
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: but she has a small image of Michael in her office.
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: She said, my grandmother believed that when she climbed that mountain,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: she was going somewhere real, not symbolic, real, a place
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: where the distance between here and there was thinner. I
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: do not know if I believe it the way she
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: believed it. She was quiet for a moment, she said,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: but I believe that she believed it, and somehow that
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: is enough to make the image on my desk something
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: I do not want to be without. In the Western Church,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: the Feast of Michael was fixed on the twenty ninth
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: of September. In England, this date became known as Michaelmas,
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: and it became one of the four quarter days that
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: organized the agricultural and commercial year. Rents were due at Michaelmas.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: Legal terms began at Michaelmas. The academic year at Oxford
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: and Cambridge still includes a term called Michaelmas term. Beginning
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: in the autumn. A feast day became a structural element
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: of English civic life embedded in the rhythms of commerce
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: and agriculture and education so deeply that it survived the Reformation,
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: survived the secularization of English society, survived every cultural shift
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: that eroded almost everything else connected to its origin. There
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: is a scholar named Thomas forty nine years old who
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: teaches medieval history at a university in Edinburgh. He is
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: not a believer in any traditional sense. He has spent
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: his career studying the structures of medieval European society, and
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: Michael appears in his research constantly, not as a figure
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: of faith, but as a structural element of the civilization
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: he studies. He said, Michaelmas is not a religious remnant
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: that somehow survived secularization. It is evidence of something more interesting.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: At some point in the formation of European culture, Michael
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: was not peripheral. He was load bearing. He was woven
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: into how people organize time and exchange and obligation. When
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: you strip away everything decorative from a culture and look
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: at what structural elements remain, Michael is in the structural elements.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: He paused, and added, I find that remarkable, and I
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: say that as someone who does not believe any of it.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: In the year eighteen eighty six, Pope Leo the thirteenth
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: added a specific prayer to the end of the Latin Mass.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: It was addressed to Michael directly. It asked him to
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: defend the Church against the wickedness and snares of the adversary,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: to rebuke Satan, to thrust into Hell all evil spirits
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: The story of why Leo wrote this prayer exists in
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: several versions and involves accounts of a vision that cannot
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: be verified in the ordinary historical sense. I offer it
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: here as a devotional tradition, not as a historical claim.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: What can be said with confidence is that the prayer
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: represents the tradition's most direct and concise statement of what
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: it has always believed Michael does. It is not asking
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: Michael to be God. It is asking Michael to be
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: Michael to do the specific thing. His specific name and
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: his specific position have always been oriented toward to stand
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: between the people and what opposes them them. The prayer
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: is still prayed in multiple languages in many parts of
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: the world by people whose circumstances have nothing to do
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: with nineteenth century Rome, because the thing it asks for
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: has nothing to do with any particular century. Across the
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: catacombs and the mountain top sanctuaries, and the Byzantine palaces,
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: and the English harvest festivals, and the papal prayers, and
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: all the ordinary rooms where ordinary people have asked, in
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: whatever language was available to them, for the presence of
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: the Great Prince to be near, one thing has remained constant.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: The movement is always upward. The Lord hear you, The
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: Lord rebuke what threatens you, The Lord whose nature his
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: name is always asking about, whose presence is the point
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: of every prayer that moves through Michael toward its destination.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: The story of Michael does not belong to the Christian
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: tradition alone. It reaches further into a third great stream
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: of the Abrahamic world, where a different nos aime carries
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: the same ancient weight, and that story is worth hearing
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: before the night moves further. Chapter eight, The Angel who
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: brings the rain. There is a word in Arabic that
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: does not translate easily into English. The word is rahma.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: It is usually rendered as mercy or compassion, but neither
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: English word carries the full weight of what rama means.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: Rama is closer to the active, ongoing, sustaining tenderness of
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: a force that wants the existence of what it has
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: made and continues wanting it moment by moment in a
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: way that does not depend on the behavior of what
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: is being sustained. The two names of God that open
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: every chapter of the Koran except one are Raman and Rahim.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: Both come from the same root as Rahma, the compassionate
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: and the merciful, not as past descriptions of things God
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: once felt, as present active continue descriptions of what God
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: is doing right now toward everything that exists. I want
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: to begin this chapter not with the scholar, but with
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: the midwife. Her name is Fatima forty one years old.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: She was born in Casablanca and has lived in Lyons,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: France for fifteen years, where she works as a midwife
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: in a busy public hospital. She is a practicing Muslim.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: She has been present at the beginning of more than
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: two thousand human lives across her career. She said, in
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: my tradition, Mikhael is the one who brings what is
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: needed for life, the rain, the food, the sustenance. When
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: I am in a room where a child is about
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: to be born. I am aware of something I cannot
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: explain in clinical language, a kind of generosity in the
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: moment itself, as though what the room needs has already
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: been arranged, as though the sustenance for this moment arrived
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: before the moment did. She did not say Mikhail arranged it.
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: She said, in my tradition, he is associated with that
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: kind of generosity, and I find that in the rooms
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: where I work, the association feels true in some way
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: I cannot prove, and do not need to prove. She
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: was quiet for a moment. Then she said, I say
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: his name sometimes in those rooms. Not as magic as
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: gratitude directed somewhere, something is generous with life. That sentence
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: stayed with me for a long time after she said it,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: because it captures something that the Islamic tradition has always
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: said about Mikhail, and it connects across all the genuine
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: differences between three traditions to something that converges with what
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: the Jewish and Christian traditions have also said. The Qur'an
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: mentions Mikhail the Arabic form of the name by name
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: in a single verse. It is the ninety eighth verse
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: of the second chapter, called Albakara. The first reads, whoever
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: is an enemy to God and his angels and his
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: messengers and to Jibriel and Mikhaiel, then indeed God is
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: an enemy to such disbelievers a single explicit mansion, and
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: yet the tradition that developed around that mention in the
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: Hadith literature and in Islamic scholarly writing across fourteen centuries,
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: gives us a picture of Mikhaiel that is specific and
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: detailed in ways that go well beyond what the Koranic
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: verse itself provides, because the Koran, like the Hebrew Bible,
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: was addressed to readers who already had a context, who
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: already understood from the tradition they had received, who Mikhaiel was.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: According to the Islamic scholarly tradition preserved in the Hadith
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: literature and in centuries of theological reflection, Mikhaiel is responsible
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: for rain, for vegetation, for the sustenance of living things.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: He is the angel who moves the clouds and directs
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: the waters and ensures that the earth receives what it
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: needs to produce what the living require to survive. He is,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: in the most literal, physical sense, the Angel of provision,
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: the one through whom god sustaining mercy toward the created
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: world is expressed in the material realm. This is a
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: genuinely different emphasis from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: I want to hold that difference honestly rather than resolving
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: it too quickly into a tidy synthesis, because the difference
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: is real and worth taking seriously. In the Jewish tradition,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: Michael is primarily the great Prince, the intercessor, the commander,
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: the one who stands between the people and what opposes them.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: In the Christian tradition, Michael is primarily the warrior and defender,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: the patron of those who bear authority in service of others.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: In the Islamic tradition, Mikhael is primarily the provider, the nurturer,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: the channel of material mercy, the one through whom God's
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: sustaining care reaches the created world in its most physicals.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: These are not simply different angles on an identical figure.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: They are different communities, shaped by different histories and different
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: theological frameworks, emphasizing what their specific situation and understanding required.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: The Jewish tradition, formed in exile and persecution needed the
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: commander who stands up at the worst moment. The Christian
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: tradition navigating the responsibilities and temptations of power across many
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: centuries needed the model of authority correctly held. The Islamic
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: tradition asking whether the material world is a domain the
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: divine cares about, needed the Angel who brings the rain.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: I want to hold those differences honestly, and then I
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: want to name the convergence, because the convergence is real too.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: A man named Tarik forty three years old, a scholar
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: of comparative religion who holds positions at universities in both
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: London and Karachi, has spent his academic career studying Michael
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: across the three Abrahamic traditions. He is Muslim by background
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: and practice. He said. MY first instinct when I encountered
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: the Jewish and Christian material on Michael was to say
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: these cannot be the same being the emphasis is too different,
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: the role is too different. He thought about it for
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: a long time, he said, I came to think that
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: the difference is not a problem to be solved, but
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: a reality to be understood. Three traditions faced different questions
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: about the nature of the divine relationship to the human world,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: and each of them reaching into the shared inheritance of
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: the name. Found in that name the answer to the
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: question it was most urgently asking. Is there someone who
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: stands for us when we are most threatened? The Jewish
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: tradition found Michael. Is there a model of authority correctly
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: held in service of others? The Christian tradition found Michael.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: Does God's mercy reach all the way down to the dirt,
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: to the rain, to the bread, to the moment before
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: a child is born? The Islamic tradition found Mikhail. He said,
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: I do not think that is a coincidence. I think
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: it is a testimony to the depth of the figure,
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: A figure deep enough that three traditions, asking three different
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: questions across fourteen centuries, all found something real when they
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: reached into the name. He paused, He said, what exactly
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: that means? I have been thinking about for twenty years.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: I have not finished thinking about it. The Islamic tradition
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: also preserves accounts of the Night Journey the Israwl mirage,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: the prophet Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and then
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: through the Seven heavens. This event is described in the
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: seventeenth chapter of the Qur'an and elaborated in the Hadith literature,
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: and it is one of the most significant events in
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: Islamic theology during this journey. According to the accounts preserved
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: in the Hadith, Gibriel and Mikhaiel are both present in
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: the higher heavens, Gibrail the Angel of revelation, Mikhail the
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: Angel of mercy and provision. Together in the Islamic telling,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: they represent what God gives to human beings in its fullness,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: the Word and the rain, the communication and the sustenance,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: Revelation and Rahma. Tarik said in the Islamic reading, you
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: cannot have a fully human life with only one of them.
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: You need the Word and you need the bread. Both
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: are given, Both have a being associated with the giving.
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: Something is generous with life. Fatima said that in a
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: hospital room in Lyon, thinking about rain and bread and
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: the moment before a child is born, Tarik arrived at
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: the same recognition from twenty years of reading across three traditions.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: The same understanding reached from two very different directions. Who
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: is like God one and the one whose name carries
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: The question has been associated across three traditions and fourteen centuries,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: with the answer to that question arriving in the most
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: specific and material ways, in the rain, in the bread,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: in the carrying of prayers upward, in the standing between
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: the people and what threatens them, in the mercy that
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: does not stop. Something is generous with life. That sentence
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: is the bridge between the texts and the next room
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: we are entering, because the next room is not made
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: of words or argument or theology. It is made of
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: stone and paint and gold leaf and light through colored glass.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: And what human beings made when they tried to see
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: Michael with their hands reaches toward the same thing Fatima
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: described in the dark of that hospital room, something generous,
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: something present, something turned toward the living. Chapter nine, The
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: Face eight centuries painted. There is a painting in the
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: louver in Paris that most visitors walk past without stopping,
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: not because it is unremarkable, because the louver is so
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: full of remarkable things that the eye, overwhelmed after the
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: first hour, begins to move faster than attention can follow.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: The painting is by rafael O Sanzio, known in English
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: as Rafael Completed in fifteen hundred and eighteen. It shows
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: Saint Michael's standing over a defeated figure lance in hand
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: armor gleaming wings extended. A student named Julia, twenty three
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: years old, stood in front of that painting for the
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: first time on a class trip from Florence, and she
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: looked at it much longer than her class mates did.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: When the group moved on, she stayed. She kept looking.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: She was looking at the face. Later, she said, the
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: face is not what you expect from a warrior who
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: has won. It is not triumphant, it is not fierce.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: It is something harder to name, she said. He looks
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: like he is still thinking about what he had to do,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: like the battle is over, but the thinking about it
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: is not. That observation is worth more than most of
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: the art history written about this painting, because Julia, without
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: any knowledge of the theological tradition behind the image, without
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: any familiarity with Daniel or Revelation or Jude or the
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: Mercabar texts or the Monte Gargano accounts, saw in Raphael's
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: face something the tradition has always said about Michael. He
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: is not a figure of violence for its own sake.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: The battles he fights are necessary, not desired. The authority
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: he exercises is always in the service of something above him,
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: never in the service of his own satisfaction. The face
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: on the wall told us something true. That is what
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: the best art does, and that is why Michael has
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: generated more significant visual art than almost any other figure
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: in the world Western tradition, with the exception of Jesus
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: and Mary. He is a figure around whom the questions
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: that matter most to artists, questions of power and restraint,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: of violence and mercy, of the individual will and the
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: larger order it serves cluster in ways that seem to
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: exhaust every medium and still leave something unsaid. The earliest
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: Christian images in the Catacombs are simple figure suggestions of
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: wings postures of authority. The artists were working in difficult
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: conditions with practical urgency, but even in the simplest marks,
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: the posture holds upright, facing forward, not retreating. By the
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: time the Byzantine tradition reached its full iconographic development, Michael
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: had acquired the specific visual language that the Eastern Christian
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: tradition still uses to day. In Byzantine icons, he appears
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: in military dress, with a spear or sword in one hand,
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: often a globe in the other the face carries the
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: quality the tradition calls hepsychia, a settled stillness, la stillness
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: of someone with nothing to worry about, the stillness of
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: someone who has decided exactly where to stand and stands
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: there without agitation. Byzantine, iconography is not trying to represent
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: what Michael looks like in a photographic sense. It is
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: trying to represent what Michael is. The gold is not decoration.
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: It is the tradition's visual vocabulary for divine light. The
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: frontal posture is not compositional convenience. It is the tradition's
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: way of saying, this figure faces you directly, without evasion,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: without the distance of being turned away. Nikolaus, the electrician
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: from Melbourne, whom we met in the previous chapter, said,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: the face is the same every time, whatever is happening
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: in my life, the face does not change. And some
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: years that is the thing I need most of all,
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: something that does not change because my circle ccumstances changed.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: The face does not change. That is what the icon
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: is designed to give, not information, stability, the assurance that
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: what is depicted is not subject to the fluctuations of
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: the viewer's circumstances. In the Gothic tradition of Northern Europe,
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: Michael appears most often holding the scales of judgment. The
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: image of Michael weighing souls became one of the most
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: widespread in Medieval Christian art, appearing above the doors of cathedrals,
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: where it was the last image a worshiper saw before
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: entering and the first when leaving. The scales of Michael
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: are not about finding people inadequate. They are about precision,
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: about the insistence that what is true is true, regardless
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: of how a person has represented themselves. The one who
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: holds the scales, whose name is a permanent question about
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: the nature of God, and whose entire existence is oriented
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: toward the distinction between what is real and what claims
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: to be real without being being so, is the appropriate
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: figure to hold them. In the Italian Renaissance, the emphasis
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: shifted toward the warrior in the paintings of Guido Rainy
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: in Rafael's Panel at the Louver, in the work of
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: the Great Workshops of Florence and Rome and Venice across
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: two centuries, Michael appears primarily as the one who has
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: defeated the adversary. There is one specific detail in the
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: Rafael painting at the Louver that most art historians note
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: and most visitors miss it is the ground beneath Michael's feet.
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: Rafael painted it as actual earth, not a symbolic surface,
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: not a golden floor, the specific physical European earth, with
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: the quality of ground that an Italian painter of the
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: sixteenth century knew because he had walked on it. Michael
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: is standing on the earth, not above it, not hovering
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: over it, in supernatural distance, on it, his feet, in
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: contact with the ground where hume beings live. Raphael made
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: a choice with that ground, and the choice is theological
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: before it is compositional. He is depicting not a Michael
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: who oversees from a safe remove, but a Michael who
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: has come down, who is present in the specific material
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: world where the specific conflict is happening, who stands on
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: the same ground as the people he protects. There is
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: a man named Marcus, forty four years old who works
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: as a fire fighter in a station in South Chicago.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: He is not religious in any formal sense. He has
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: a tattoo of Michael on his left forearm, which he
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: got when he was twenty six, the year after a
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: colleague died in a building collapse. He chose Michael not
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: because he was church going, but because, as he put it,
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: I needed something on my arm that understood what the
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: job is, something that knew about the kind of fighting
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: where you are not doing it for yourself, he said.
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: People ask me about the tattoo. Sometimes I tell them
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: Michael is the one who fights when he has to,
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: not because he wants to, because someone has to, and
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: he is the one responsible. He looked at his forearm
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: for a moment. He said, that is what the job is.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: A woman named Diana thirty eight years old, a graphic
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: novelist in Portland, Oregon, grew up entirely outside any religious tradition.
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: She encountered Michael first through art history books, not through
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: theology or church or prayer. What drew her to the
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: figure and eventually led her to spend six months reading
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: the textual tradition was the same thing Julia saw in
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: the Raphael painting the face. She said, in every serious
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: depiction of Michael, across every tradition and every period, there
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: is something in the face that is not what I
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: expected from a warrior warriors. In most of the visual tradition,
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: I know look like they are there for themselves, like
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: the power they are exercising is something they wanted to exercise.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: But Michael's face in every serious image, looks like he
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: is there for some one else, Like the authority he
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: carries is not his to keep, like he is holding
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: something that was given to him, and he is very
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: clear about the difference between holding it and owning it.
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: She paused. She said, eight centuries of artists who never
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: met each other painted that same distinction into his face.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: I find that worth thinking about. She did not say
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: she had drawn any conclusions. She said it was worth
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: thinking about, and she left it there. There is a
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: building on a granite island off the coast of Normandy
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: in northern France that has been standing in one form
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: or another since the eighth century. It rises from the sea,
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: connected to the mainland by a causeway that disappears at
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: high tide. Dedicated to Michael, called Mont Saint Michel, visited
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: by more people each year than almost any other site
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: in France. Why there, Why on a rock in the
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: sea where the tides cut you off from the mainland
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: twice a day, where the weather comes in from the
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: Atlantic with nothing to slow it the devotional tradition says
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: Michael indicated the location. The bishop of the near by
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: city of Avranches, a man named Orbeer, is said to
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: have received an indication in the year seven hundred and
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: eight that a sanctuary should be built on the island.
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: I offer this as devotional tradition, not as historical claim.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: What the choice of location expresses, whatever its origin, is
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: architecturally eloquent. A rock in the sea, something the tide
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: surrounds and isolates and then releases, something that stands in
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: the middle of what could overwhelm it, and stands because
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: it is built on rock. Something that can be approached,
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: but only with attention to the tide, only at the
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: right moment, only by those who have taken the conditions seriously.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: The tradition that placed Michael on that rock was encoding
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: something he is accessible. He can be approached, but the
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: approach asks for intentionality, for attention, for the willingness to
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: move towards something, rather than waiting for it to come
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: without effort. The tide has always come in, the rock
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: has always stood, and on the rock since the eighth century,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: human beings have climbed to the top and looked out
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: at the water and said the name. That is a question,
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: who is like God? The Atlantic has answered with the
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: only answer available to anything that is not God. Nothing
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: is nothing is like God. Not the sea, not the rock,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: not the Builder or the pilgrim, or the great figure
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: whose name is the asking breathe. The night is deep.
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: The face is the same as it has always been,
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: and it is turned toward you. Chapter ten, The Shape
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: of the Last Thing. There is a discomfort that serious
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: people feel when the conversation turns to the end of history.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: Not the end of a civilization or the end of
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: an era, the end of history itself, the final chapter
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: of the human story, the moment toward which, if the
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: biblical tradition is correct, everything that has ever happened has
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: been moving. The discomfort is understandable. The subject has been
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: badly handled. It has been seized by people who turned
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: it into a system of predictions and decoded time lines
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: that always seem to point with suspicious convenience to the
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: political anxieties of the moment in which the decoder happened
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: to be living. It has been used to frighten, to control,
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: to justify withdrawal from the world on the grounds that
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: the world does not ultimately matter. All of that is
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: a misuse, and the misuse has made many thoughtful people
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: reluctant to engage with the subject at all, which is
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: its own kind of loss. Because the Biblical tradition on
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: the end of history is not primarily a system of predictions,
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: it is in the reading that the most careful interpreters
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: across many traditions have offered a theology of hope, and
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: the difference between those two things is enormous. A system
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: of predictions asks what will happen and when and to whom.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: A theology of hope asks what is the shape of
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: the thing that is coming? And what does that shape
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: tell us about the nature of the one who is
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: bringing it. A system of predictions produces anxiety. A theology
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: of hope produces, in the fullest sense of what that
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: word means, exactly what its name says. And in the
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: Biblical account of the final chapter of human history, Michael
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: is present not as a detail at the margins, as
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: the figure whose arising in Daniel's vision initiates what follows.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: We visited Daniel chapter twelve in chapter four of This Night,
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: Now we need to stand in it more fully, because
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: we have learned a great deal since we were last here,
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: and what we have learned changes what we see. At
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: that time. Michael shall arise, the great Prince who has
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: charge of your people. And there shall be a time
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: of trouble such as there never has been since there
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: was a nation till that time. But at that time
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: your people shall be delivered. Every one whose name shall
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: be found written in the book Yamud, he shall arise,
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: He shall stand. Many of those who sleep in the
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life,
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above,
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: forever and ever. The sequence in this passage is what matters.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: Michael stands. Deliverance comes, the dead, awake, the wise shine.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: Different readers in different theological traditions have understood the relationship
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: between Michael's arising and the events that follow in different ways.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: Some read Michael's standing as directly initiating the restoration. Others
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: read it as the signal that announces what God is bringing,
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: rather than the mechanism of the bringing. Others hold the
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: question more loosely as the text perhaps invites. What the
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: text does not leave ambiguous is the connection Michael arises,
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: and these things follow in the logic of Daniel's vision,
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: those two things belong together. What is the restoration restoring?
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: This is the theological question underneath all the imagery, and
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: it is the question a theology of hope keeps returning
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: to the answer Daniel gives is expressed in that image
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: of the wise shining like the brightness of the sky,
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: and those who turn many to righteousness, shining like the
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: stars forever and ever. This is the completion of something
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: that human beings were made to be, and have been
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: across the entire length of human history, imperfectly and partially
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: and painfully aprocting. Not the creature becoming God, not the
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: human becoming divine in that sense, but the image of
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: God in which human beings were made, which sin distorted
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: and suffering tested and time wore down, being made complete,
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: fully and finally bearing what was intended from the beginning.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: And the being who stands up to initiate that completion
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: is the one whose name has been asking about that
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: image for three thousand years, who is like God the
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: restoration toward which the tradition says history is moving is
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: the fullest available answer, and Michael stands up to begin it.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: Yah Ahmud. There is a man named Immanuel fifty five
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: years old, a Nigerian born pastor who leads a congregation
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: in South London. He grew up in a village that
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: experienced some of the worst violence of the Biafran War.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: He did not experience the worst of it directly, but
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: he grew up in a community still processing what had happened,
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: still carrying grief that did not resolve cleanly into any
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: available framework. He said, I came to Daniel Chapter twelve,
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: not as theology, but as testimony. Daniel was in Babylon,
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: his people had lost everything. He had been fasting for
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: three weeks out of a grief so deep it is
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: described but not explained, And into that grief, the text says,
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: Michael stands up. Immanuel said, I know that grief, and
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: I know what it means to hear from inside that
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: grief that the one responsible for your people has not
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: sat down, has not been defeated by the scale of
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: what is happening, is still standing. He said that is
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: not primarily a prediction about the future. It is a
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: statement about the character of the one who is standing.
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: The promise is not that the circumstances will immediately improve.
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: The promise is that Michael has not left his post.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: And for people who have experienced the worst that history
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: can produce, that is not a small promise. It is
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: sometimes the only promise that can be received in the
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: place where the grief actually lives. He said it is enough.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: He said it simply, not as rhetoric, as something he
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: had tested and found to be true. Let us now
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: look at the second great Biblical text connected to Michael's
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: role in the Final Days, The First Letter to the Thessalonians,
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: written by Paul in approximately fifty one years of the
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: Common Era, making it one of the earliest pieces of
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: New Testament writing. We possess contains a passage that has
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: been read with great care across many traditions. Paul writes,
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: the Lord himself will descend from Heaven with a cry
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: in Christ will rise first the voice of an archangel.
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: Paul does not name the archangel, and it is important
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: to hold that clearly the text says the voice of
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: an archangel, not the voice of mine Michael. Many interpreters
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: across many centuries have connected this voice with Michael, and
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: the connection has a logic that the tradition has found compelling.
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: Michael is the archangel most consistently associated with the protection
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: and deliverance of the people of God, with the final
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: moments of human history in Daniel, with the great events
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: of the heavenly account in Revelation. The connection is plausible
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: and widely held. It is also a reading that goes
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: beyond what this specific text states, and careful readers notice
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: that difference. Many interpreters have connected this voice with Michael,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: the text itself leaves the name unspoken. Both of those
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: things are true simultaneously. What is not in question is
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: the event Paul is describing, the dissent, the voice, the trumpet,
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: the dead rising, the gathering of the people of God.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: This is the event toward which, in the Christian reading,
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: all human history has been moving. Daniel Chapter twelve ends
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: in a way that most readers who know the opening
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: verses have not spent time with. Daniel asks the heavenly
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: being who has been speaking to him what the outcome
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: of these things will be. The answer he receives is
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: not a detailed explanation, It is a simply unstruction. Go
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: your way, Daniel, The words are sealed until the time
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: of the end. But go your way till the end,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: At the end of the days. You shall stand yah ahmud.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: The same word used for Michael is used for Daniel.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: The great Prince stands, and the man who received the
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: vision is told that he too will stand in his
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: allotted place at the end of the days, not because
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: he has Michael's authority, because he is in the care
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: of the one who does. Emmanuel said, that is the promise,
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: not that the trouble will not come, not that the
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: suffering will be avoided, but that the standing at the
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: end is real, that the one who stands for you
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: is already standing, and that the standing, in the tradition's telling,
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: is the foundation of yours. Go your way, rest, and
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: you will stand. The night is deep. The promise is ocient.
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: It has not expired. Chapter eleven. The ordinary rooms. We
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: have spent most of this night in the elevated places,
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: the heavenly court, the primordial war, the visions of exiles,
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: the arguments of scholars, the paintings of masters, the architecture
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: of cathedrals and island sanctuaries built on rock above the sea.
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: We have been in the tradition's grandest expressions of who
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: Michael is and what he does, and all of that
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: is true, and all of that matters. But there is
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: another red in which Michael appears in the tradition, a
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: register that is quieter and less dramatic, and more immediately
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: recognizable to most of the people who have ever said
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: his name. It is the register of the ordinary room,
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: the kitchen table, the hospital waiting area, the car in
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: the parking lot when news has just arrived and there
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: is no obvious next step, the bed at three in
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: the morning, when the thing that cannot be named has
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: settled into the room and will not leave. Before I
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: enter these rooms, I want to say clearly what kind
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: of material this chapter contains. The accounts here are accounts
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: of personal experience, of what ordinary people said about ordinary
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: moments in which they reached for the language the tradition provides.
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: I am not presenting them as evidence of supernatural intervention
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: in any demonstrable or verifiable sense. I am presenting them
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: as testimony what people said, what they reached for, what
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: they found or did not find when they reached. I
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: offer them as such, without the frame of proof and
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: without the frame of dismissal, because both of those frames
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: would do violence to what these accounts actually are. There
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: is a woman named Patricia, fifty one years old who
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: works as a nurse in a hospital in Detroit, Michigan.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: She has worked night shifts for twenty two years. She
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: grew up Catholic, which means she grew up with Michael
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: as a named presence in the tradition, a figure whose
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: prayer she learned as a child, and whose feast day
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: she acknowledged with mild seasonal observance. That did not mean
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: very much to her until she had been a nurse
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: for about seven years. Seven years in she was present
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: for a death that she still thinks about every few weeks.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: A man sixty three years old had been in the
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: hospital for six days following a cardiac event. His family
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: had been there, his family had gone home to sleep.
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: He was alone in the room. Patricia came in during
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: her rounds at the moment he died. She said, I
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: have been present for many deaths. Most of them feel
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: like an ending, a closing, a subtraction. This one did
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: not feel like that. She took her time choosing the
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: next words. She said, this one felt like the room
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: was more full than it had been a moment before,
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: not less full. More. I am not a mystical person.
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: I am a nurse. My relationship to the world is
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: that things either have a physical explanation or they do
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: not yet have one. But I stood in that room afterward,
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: and I could not shake the sense that he had
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: not left alone. She went home that morning and looked
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: up the prayer to Saint Michael for the first time
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: in years, not because she had a theological system that
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: required it, because she had an experience that reached for
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: the nearest available language, and the language she had learned
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: as a child fit the shape of what she had
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: seen in a way that nothing else did. She said,
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: I do not know if I believed it. I still
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: do not know. But it was the language that fit,
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: and that was enough to say it. There is a
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: man named Kevin, thirty eight years old who lives in
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: East London and works as a secondary school teacher. He
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: grew up in a family that was culturally Church of England,
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: without being particularly observant. He had a period in his
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: early thirties that he describes as the worst two years
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: of his life. A relationship that ended badly, a sense
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: of professional failure that accumulated and then arrived all at once,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: a depression that was diagnosed and medicated, but that medication
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: did not fully resolve. During that period, he walked into
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: a church one afternoon, not because he intended to, because
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: he was walking past and the door was open, and
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: something about the quality of the silence inside made him
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: walk through. He sat for a long time. He did
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: not pray exactly. He sat. At some point his eyes
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: moved to a stained glass window on the north wall,
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: Michael with the scales in blue and gold that the
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: afternoon light was coming through at an angle that made
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: the gold look warm rather than cold. He looked at
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: that window for approximately forty minutes. When he left, something
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: had shifted, not solved, not explained, shifted like a weight
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: that had been pressing from one direction had moved slightly,
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: and the same weight at a different angle was easier
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: to carry. He went home and opened his laptop and
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: found the e mail that had been sitting in his
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: drafts folder for eleven days. It was an e mail
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: to his doctor asking for a referral to a therapist.
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: He had not been able to send it because sending
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: it felt like an admission he was not ready to make.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: He read it. Once he pressed send, he closed the laptop.
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: The therapist he was referred to became the most important
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: professional relationship of the next three years. There is a
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: chaplain named Robert, sixty two years old, who worked for
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: thirty years at a large teaching hospital in Philadelphia before
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: retiring last year. In thirty years of sitting with people
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: in the worst moments of their lives, he heard Michael
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: named more times than he can count, not always by
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: devout people, not always by people who could articulate any
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: theology at all, by people who were reaching in the
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: dark for the nearest available language. A woman who had
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: just lost her husband of forty years reached out and
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: touched a small medal on her bedside table and said
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: his name. A man about to go into surgery that
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: might not succeed. Asked Robert to pray the prayer to
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: Saint Michael before they took him away. A teenager who
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: had survived something she was not yet ready to talk
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: about directly. Asked Robert whether he thought there were beings
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: who stood between people and the worst things. Robert said, yes,
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: She said, I think one of them was there. Robert said,
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: in thirty years of sitting in those rooms, I have
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: never seen the name fail to give something to the
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: person who said it. Not always what they asked for,
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: not always as what they needed in the way they
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: expected to need it, but something. He said, I think
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: the name does something, even when it is not certain
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: what the name refers to. The reaching itself does something.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: The orientation of the reaching does something. The willingness to
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: say I need something beyond what I can provide for myself,
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: and the tradition has given me a name for that something,
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: and I am saying the name that does something. He
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: was quiet for a moment. He said, I do not
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: know how to be more precise than that. Thirty years
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: did not give me more precision than that, but they
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: gave me no doubt about that much. There is a
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: woman named Margaret, fifty nine years old who lives in
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: the coastal town of Whitstable in Kent, England, and who
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: has been managing a chronic pain condition for twenty three years.
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: The condition is real and documented and the subject of
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: ongoing medical management. It does not have a satisfying narrative arc.
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: It does not build toward a resolution. It simply organizes
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: her life differently than most lives are organized, because pain
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: is one of its permanent features. Margaret has been a
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: churchgoer her entire adult life. She has been present in
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: the tradition during the years when it was most useful,
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: and the years when it felt least useful, and the
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: years when it felt actively irrelevant to what she was experiencing.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: She said, there have been long periods when the theology
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: did nothing for me, when the words of the service
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: were just words, and the prayers were just habits, and
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: the images just images. About twelve years into the chronic pain,
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: she began reading the Psalms more carefully than she ever
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: had been for She was looking for something she had
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: not previously needed, to look for the place in the
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: tradition where people had said, without resolution, without comfort, added
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: at the end, without reassurance that everything would be fine,
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: this is what it is actually like. She found it,
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: and once she found that honesty, she found the rest
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: of the tradition differently. She found the prayers for protection.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: She found the image of Michael at the right hand
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: of the sleeper. She found the ancient prayer that has
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: been said before sleep for two thousand years. She said,
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: I could say those things, not as theology I was
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: required to believe, but as language I was reaching for
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: because the language fits something I actually needed. And reaching
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: for language that fits something you actually need is not nothing.
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: She paused. She said, it turns out it is quite
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: a lot. I have been surprised across the years by
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: how much the e mail sent, the call, the apology spoken,
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: the door walked through, the next thing becoming possible. These
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: are not miracles in the dramatic sense. They are something
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: quieter and more sustaining, the small restorations of capacity that
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: make the continuation of a human life possible. In the
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: moments when continuation feels most uncertain, and in the accounts
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: of the people in these ordinary rooms, across the decades
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: and the geographies and the very different kinds of difficulty,
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: something consistent appears, not a formula, not a mechanism, a reaching,
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: and in the reaching, something received, not always what was
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: asked for, not always visible, but something the tradition dares
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: to say that Michael is involved in that something, that
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: the one who has been set over the reaching of
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: human beings toward what is good, has been present in
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: these ordinary rooms in whatever way presence operates at the
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: level of reality the tradition describes. The tradition makes that
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: claim not as proof but as testimony as what it
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: has seen across centuries of people in difficulty reaching for
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: a name, and finding in the reaching that the name
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: was there. That is the most honest way I know
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: to say it. The night is almost over, one more
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: room to enter, one more thing to hold before sleep
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: comes Chapter twelve, the question that holds you. We have
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: traveled a long way to night, through the Heavenly Court
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: and the Primordial War, through Daniel in exile and Moses
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: in the Hidden Valley, through the strange restraint of Jude,
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: Through the Rabbinic readings and the prayer said before sleep
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: for two thousand years, through the Catacombs and the Byzantine Palaces,
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: and the English harvest festivals, and the hospital room in Lyon,
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: where something is generous with life. Through eight centuries of
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: artists who agreed on a face without comparing notes. Through
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: the theology of hope and the ordinary rooms, canon and
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: tradition and history and art and testimony, all of it.
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: And now, before sleep comes, I want to return to
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: where we started, not to summarize what has been said.
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: Summarizing would press it into a shape smaller than it deserves.
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: I want to return to the name, because the name
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: has not changed across everything we have heard, and the
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: name is still doing what it has always done. Me,
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: gau l, Who is like God? Here is what I
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: want to leave you with. That question is not only
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: Michael's question. It has always been the question underneath every
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: significant human experience of reaching. Every time a human being
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: had stood in front of something larger than themselves and
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: felt not with the reasoning mind, but with whatever is
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: underneath the reasoning mind, that the largeness was not empty,
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: the question has been there. Who is like God? What
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: is the thing that exceeds every category? What is the
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: source of what is good and the ground of what
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: is real and the destination of what is true? Human
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: beings have been asking that question with their lives since
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: before there was language to ask it in words. They
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: have asked it with their art and their architecture and
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: their music. And their prayer and their love and their grief,
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: and their inexplicable refusal, in the face of every evidence
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: that the universe is indifferent, to stop reaching toward what
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: they cannot see. Who is like God? No one? And
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: that answer, which sounds at first like a boundary, like
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: the place where the human ends and the inaccessible begins,
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: turns out when you live with it long enough to
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: be something else entirely, it turns out to be a direction.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: No one is like God, which means God is the
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: thing that everything else is unlike, the Original, of which
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: everything that exists is, in some way and at some
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: level a reflection or an echo or a very distant image.
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: And to be oriented toward that original, to have your
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: life pointed, however imperfectly, and however inconsistently, in the direction
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: of the one who exceeds every category, is not a
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: small thing to be doing with a life. It is,
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: the tradition says, the thing human lives were made to do,
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: And Michael, in the tradition's telling, is set over the
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: doing of it, not over the successful completion of it,
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: over the doing of it, the ongoing, imperfect, inconsistent, sometimes weeping,
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: sometimes singing, sometimes silent, sometimes fumbling, always reached, doing of
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: it that is his domain. The people who are reaching,
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: however badly, however slowly, however many times, they have fallen
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: back toward themselves and had to begin again. The people
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: who are oriented, in whatever way the orientation is possible
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: for them in this particular season of their lives, toward
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: the source of what is good. That includes you to night.
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: Not because you have performed adequately, not because you have
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: believed correctly or lived consistently. Because you are here because
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: you did not give up on this night, Because whatever
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: the week has been, whatever the year has produced, you
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: are still here, still willing to spend a night in
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: the company of the tradition's most sustained attempt to describe
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: what stands between you and the worst things. That willingness
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: is orientation. It is imperfect, and it does not need
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: to be more than it is to night, but it
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: is enough. There is something I want to say about
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: the ache, the ache that may have brought you into
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: this room to night, the unnamed thing, the gap between
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: the life you are living and the life you sense
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: you were made for. That ache is not a problem
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: to be solved. It is not a sign that something
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: has gone wrong. It is, the tradition, says, the most
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: accurate signal available to a human being about the nature
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: of what a human being is. It is a compass.
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: It points toward the unlike, toward the incomparable, toward the
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: thing that no human life, however beautiful, can fully contain
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: or satisfy or be. The ache is the question of
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: Michael's name felt in the body. Who is like God.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: Nothing you can touch, nothing you can hold, nothing you
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: can achieve or accumulate or arrange. No relationship however deep,
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: no success however complete, Nothing is like God. And the
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: ache that every human being carries, in one form or
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 1: another is the evidence that we were made in relation
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: to something that nothing available to us can replace. That
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: is not a cruel thing, It is a precise thing.
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: The ache is not punishment. It is design, the built
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: in incompleteness of a creature who was made for a
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: fullness that this life gestures toward but cannot deliver. And
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: the tradition, in its most durable moments, insists that the
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: fullness is real, is coming, is in some sense the
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: tradition has always struggled to express without closing it into
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: something too small, already in motion. Yahmud, He stands up.
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: The compass points now before sleep comes completely. I want
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: to say what the tradition has dared to say across
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: thirty centuries of people reaching for this name in the dark.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: Not as proof. The tradition has never offered proof. It
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: has offered something older and stranger than proof. It has
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: offered the accumulated testimony of people who reached for a
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: name and found in the reaching that the name was there.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: Teresa with her librarian's understanding of what documents are designed
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: to do. Abraham in Brooklyn, saying the words even when
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 1: he cannot see to the right. Patricia in the hospital
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: room in Detroit, standing in a room that felt more full,
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: Kevin finding the next thing possible. Margaret surprised across the
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: years by how much the language that fits turns out
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: to be worth. Marcus with Michael on his forearm, carrying
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: the understanding that the job is not done for yourself,
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: but for someone who needed someone to show up. Across
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: all of them, across all of it. The tradition dares
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: to say this, that the one whose name is the
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: question about the nature of God, whose entire existence is
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: the answer to the claim that something might rival God,
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: whose responsibility is the people who are reaching toward the
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: source of what is good, has not left his post.
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: The tradition dares to say, he is standing, faithful to
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: a responsibility that has not diminished with time, faithful to
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: a domain that has not been transferred to some one else,
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: Faithful across everything that has happened in the world and
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: in your life, and in the long complicated history of
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: the relationship between the human and the divine, still standing.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: The tradition dares to say it, The old prayer puts
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: him to your right. Three thousand years of the old prayer,
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: said in the dark before sleep by people who could
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: not see to the right, but said the words anyway,
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: Abraham in Brooklyn the tailor the seventy years. That is
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: not proof. That is something different from proof. That is
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: the tradition's most honest way of saying that the word
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: and the reaching, and the name and the presence have
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: all been tested in the most ordinary and the most
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: desperate conditions available to human beings and have not been
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: found to be nothing. There is a Hebrew word that
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: we have not yet mentioned, and it is the right
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: word to end with not the dramatic word, not ya amud,
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: though that word has earned its place in this night.
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: Are quite a word. The word is shamah. Shama means
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: to watch, to guard, to keep. It is the word
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: in the ancient priestly blessing the Lord bless you and
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: keep you. The word keep is shama, and it appears
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: in the final verse of Psalm one hundred and twenty one,
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: the Psalm of the traveler, the psalm of the one
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: who lifts their eyes to the hills and asks where
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: their help comes from. The Lord will keep your going
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Chamar, watch, guad, keep,
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: not fix, not solve, not explain. Keep. The tradition says
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: that Michael is an expression of the keeping, not the
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: source of it. The one who has been set over it,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: the great Prince, whose domain is the keeping of the
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: people who are reaching toward the source of what is good.
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: He keeps your going out, he keeps your coming in,
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: from this time forth and forevermore. Now you go out
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: into sleep, into whatever the night makes of the hours
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: that remain, into the place where the body repairs itself
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: and the mind processes what the day produced, and the
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 1: breath continues its ancient and unearned work work of keeping
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: you alive. And when the morning comes in, you will
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: come back into whatever the morning brings. The next thing,
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: the step to take, the continuation of the ordinary life,
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 1: that the ordinary grace is sustaining. He keeps the going out,
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: he keeps the coming in. Me ca l who is
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: like God. The question has been asked for three thousand years,
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: and the asking has not stopped. And the one whose
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: name carries the question has been standing in the domain
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: that was given to him, across the entire span of
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: the asking, faithful to a responsibility that has not diminished
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: with time, and has not been transferred, and has not
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: been withdrawn. That is what the tradition dares to say
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: in every language it has been able to say it
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: across every century that has tested it. The Great Prince,
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: the first among the scent, commander who holds the contested ground,
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: the high priest who carries the names, the Angel of Ramah,
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: who moves the clouds, the face that eight centuries of
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 1: painters agreed on without comparing notes, the presence at the
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: right hand of the sleeper, the one who stands up
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: at the worst moment, and holds the position until the
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: deliverance comes. The tradition dares to say he is still standing.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: The question is still open. The answer has never changed.
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 1: Yah Ahmud. Sleep now. The breath is the gift, and
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: the one who gave it has been watching over your
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: going out and your coming in from this time forth.
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: He will be watching when the morning comes