Angels and Altars
Sermon by Kenneth Padley
28th September 2025
Reading: 2 Kings 6.8-17
One of the more obscure pieces of stained glass in the cathedral is fixed in the north nave aisle, just east of the porch. I say obscure because the themes and context of this window need a little unpacking. In the left-hand lancet, the prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a chariot of fire as his mantle falls on Elisha his successor. In the right-hand lancet two men stand against an urban backdrop, scrutinising the skies above. The eyes of the viewer are led instinctively upwards, up to where a band of angelic warriors swirl at the top of the scene.
This right-hand lancet is a depiction of tonight’s first reading from the second book of Kings. As we heard, the king of Aram had been plotting against the king of Israel – but he kept being foiled through the insight of Elisha. Aram responds by sending an army against Elisha in the city of Dothan. Elisha’s servant panics at the sight of the enemy but the prophet is reassured by what the servant cannot see. ‘Do not be afraid’, he says, ‘for there are more with us than there are with them’. Then, through the prophet’s prayer, God shows the servant a celestial army all around them.
In the verses which follow, good wins out as Elisha captures the Arameans and dissuades his own king from violent revenge, convincing him instead to give the soldiers a slap-up banquet before sending them back home. The story concludes with due understatement that, quote, ‘the Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel’.
Friends, Elisha in Dothan saw angels wage peace against the twin temptations of fear and retaliation. The story is a reminder of how the universal God is to be found at work in particular circumstances and individuals. As the Precentor said this morning, the God who exists outside time and space cannot be locatively confined – or even concentrated more in one place than another. Yet the God who cares for his creation, knowing and loving each of us as individuals, is present throughout the journey of our lives. There are times when some of us might be blessed with a sense of that presence. Maybe such moments of encounter were the original impetus for the notion of angels – intelligent agents of divine purpose that are like us yet so very different, hovering on the borderlands between the invisible and the imagined, encountered in moments of heightened need, stress or sadness.
Tomorrow is the feast of the lead angel, St Michael. Michael is depicted in both the Old and New Testaments at the head of God’s heavenly armies.
I was once Vicar of a church dedicated to St Michael in the city of St Albans. St Michael St Albans is a medieval but rather unassuming church that can seat 250 at a push. However, it is located over the ruins of a building that was far grander and ten times larger, the basilica of Verulamium, headquarters of the third largest settlement in Roman Britain.
Today, St Michael’s St Albans is a peaceful place. However, once it was a site of great conflict. For, if the narrative of St Alban has any basis in history, Alban would have very likely been tried in that basilica before being executed for his faith, the first Christian martyr in Britain. Bereft of earthly hope, I imagine Alban praying for angelic support which his gloating persecutors could not have seen. ‘Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them’.
The association between the basilica of Verulamium and the trial of Alban is, I suggest, why later Anglo-Saxon Christians built a church on the site and – more specifically – why they dedicated that church to Michael the heavenly warrior. If my reconstruction is cogent, St Michael St Albans is the earliest site of known Christian activity in the British Isles. Such pinpointing and memorialisation of place is another expression of the truth borne by Elisha’s angels, a reminder that the universal God is at work in particular circumstances and individuals.
Now, this cathedral is not dedicated to St Michael. However, we are today celebrating the 800th anniversary of the date when our medieval forebears completed the first phase of the cathedral’s construction. On that Eve of the Feast of the first angel (St Michael), altars were dedicated at the east end of the cathedral to the first apostle (St Peter) and first martyr (St Stephen), both flanking an altar to the Trinity, that universal God who is at work in particular circumstances and individuals.
With providential timing, last Saturday Bishop John Inge delivered a brilliant lecture on the theology of place to the Friends of the Cathedral. He spoke of the tension between the way Christians value holy places, and the biblical insistence that such places must never become objects of worship. We need buildings in which to gather and to encounter God through scripture and worship. Yet such places are never ends in themselves. This building is a church, not a museum to human ingenuity and craftsmanship.
This tension between God’s ubiquity (presence in all places) and the locative focus of worship on specific sites is inherent in the very altars which were dedicated 800 years ago. The reason that no ancient altars remain in the cathedral is because such fixtures were decried and desecrated at the Reformation. The sixteenth century reformers associated stone altars with medieval ideas of sacrifice, specifically the notion that each Eucharist adds to the bank of goodness which God can offset against human sin. Protestants could not accept such localised merit: they looked instead to God’s grace reaching out from eternity. That said, they did install a wooden communion table in lieu of the stone altars. This would not have been a place for propitiatory sacrifice, but it was a focus for recollecting Jesus’ last supper and crucifixion, and for celebrating his spiritual presence through the bread and wine of holy communion.
We revisited some of this historical theology when planning a new altar for the Trinity chapel three years ago. Designed by Bill Pye and Luke Hughes from stone, bronze, glass and wood, our new altar is shaped like an altar and is indeed called an altar. It is even faced with a poem about an altar by seventeenth century local hero George Herbert. However, as so often with Herbert’s verse, the poet avoids sectarian divisions, dwelling instead on the deeper truths that the furniture evokes:
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy name.
For Herbert, the spiritual kernel is what matters. Yet he found the presence of the altar of use in calling him back to higher values. Thus he concludes:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
Bishop John Inge reminded us that Christians need church buildings to be ‘storied places’, places which hold and hand on the life of the community, places as TS Eliot said ‘where prayer has been valid’. I failed at the beginning to say that that Elisha window in the north nave aisle holds and hands on just such a story. The window is a memorial to glider pilots who died in the Second World War. The tale of Elisha’s angelic assistants may well have resonated with aerial combatants in mortal peril – or at least with their surviving comrades afterwards: ‘Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them’.
Like the 1940s glider pilots and the saints whose prayers have validated and been validated in this place – now for eight centuries – each of us needs to identify and cherish those stories and places which sustain our journeys of faith, never so particularised as to be idolised yet never so fleeting as to fail to anchor us in the universal God who is at work in particular circumstances and individuals.
These stones that have echoed their praises are holy,
and dear is the ground where their feet have once trod;
yet here they confessed they were strangers and pilgrims,
and still they were seeking the city of God.