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Angels come out in full glorious force in the book of Revelation. When I’ve traveled in poor areas, where people are in refugee shelters, where clean water is hard to come by, where government bureaucracies are breathtakingly corrupt, where education is only for the children of the rich, where the youth of the “wrong” color or clan are brutalized and enslaved, and when I’ve asked Christians living in these most desperate of circumstances what their favorite part of the Bible is, more often than not, it’s Revelation. There will be a time when God’s work is done on earth, all evil power is brought to an end, tears cease, and the mass choirs of heaven sing a victory song in the presence of the risen Christ, with God and all God’s angels.

Our communion liturgy invites us to receive a foretaste of this feast each time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The words spoken by the presiding minister pull us into a celestial song already keyed for our voices: “Therefore with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven, we praise your name and join their unending hymn:” and we join in: “Holy, holy, holy…”

This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Journey with angels” by Christa Von Zychlin in the April 2021 Gather magazine. Today we commemorate Mikael Agricola, Bishop of Turku, 1557.