"Those long last moments" - Sermon for St. Michael's Sunday, September 28, 2025

Did an angel whisper in your ear

And hold you close and take away your fear

In those long last moments? (L. Williams 1998)

“The word ‘angel’ denotes a function rather than a nature,” Saint Gregory the Great reminded us sometime around the year 600. Angels are the heavenly spirits sent by God to deliver a message or to fulfill a purpose. Lucinda Williams, the American singer-songwriter, imagined – hoped – that God sent an angel to her friend who went back to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to die. “Did an angel whisper in your ear, and hold you close and take away your fear, in those long last moments?”

All Saints’ parish holds Michael the Archangel – the defender of the defenseless – as a singular patron saint, because during the HIV-AIDS crisis, many who were dying, and those who loved and cared for them, sought Michael’s intercession and protection. The monument in the church-garden memorializes this.

We might not imagine Michael, God’s warrior-angel, the one to whisper and to embrace. Traditional depictions of him are as a fighter, the battler of Satan, as the seer of the Book of Revelation wrote to describe the epic, cosmic battle between good and evil.

But, of course, those suffering and dying of that mysterious, dread disease, were in an epic battle of their own – a battle between the prime of life and premature death. They needed a fighter on their side, especially when so many people fearfully ran away from them.

I expect that, when the strife was o’er and the battle done for the thirty-three of our own whom we will soon remember and name, and the thousands upon thousands more, God assigned other angels, quieter and gentler than Michael, to whisper in their ears, to hold them close and take away their fears, in those long last moments. To assure them of God’s everlasting love for them in this world, and to lead them into the paradise of the next.

Pray that Saint Michael the Archangel defend us in our battles; that Saint Gabriel the Archangel reveal God’s will for us; and that Saint Raphael the Archangel accompany us on unfamiliar paths.

And pray that, in those long last moments – ours, and those of whom we love – God will send an angel to whisper in our ear, to hold us close and take away our fear, and to lead us home.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

St. Michael & All Angels Sunday – Sep. 28, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Those Long Last Moments”