CCN Sunday and the Feast of St Michael and All Angels 2026 

On Sunday 27th September, we celebrated CCN Sunday and the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, Acting Dean Kate Massey's sermon can be read below:

So today we bring together two different celebrations. It is our Patronal Sunday when as a Cathedral dedicated to St Michael, we celebrate the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. It is also CCN Sunday – the day when we celebrate the Community of the Cross of Nails around the world – and today we have the added joy of welcoming ABESA to our CCN family. The Anglican Board of Education for Southern Africa represents 376 church schools across the region, many of whom we hope will become International Church of Nails Schools.  

At first sight, the two celebrations might not seem to have much in common. The Feast of St Michael – or Michelmas as it is often known – is associated with heavenly battles and the supernatural defeat of evil. CCN Sunday is when we give thanks for the many communities and organisations around the world, who share our ministry of reconciliation and peace. However, I think that the two are remarkably closely connected and both are desperately needed in our world today. 

As the preacher for this unique mish-mash of occasions, I was given the opportunity to select the readings. I have picked myself a couple of corkers, haven’t I? But a phrase which has been resonating with me in recent years are Jesus’ words that there will be wars and rumours of wars. Because that is what we are experiencing, isn’t it. After one of the longest periods of relative peace Western Europe has ever known, things are fragmenting, our security seems less secure and our future seems less certain. Furthermore, with the effects of global warming beginning to bite even in our moderate climate, Jesus’ words about natural disasters seem more pertinent. Flooding, food shortages, storms, droughts and wildfires – the environment that we rely upon for our survival is feeling more and more fragile. Apparently, the Government are launching a preparedness strategy this autumn to encourage us to be ready for all sorts of crises, natural and human-made. It’s beginning to feel like we might need this. 

It’s a bit depressing isn’t it? But in some ways, the peace and prosperity that has been the experience of so many of us over the past 80 years is the anomaly. Strife and struggle have been a much more common human experience. Jesus’ words have echoed down through the millennia with constant relevance. There have always been wars and rumours of wars, earthquakes, famines and more.  

There is a degree of comfort in knowing that Jesus knows. See that you are not alarmed, Jesus says. It’s not the end of the world - yet. But the reassurance is short lived. Those who follow Christ will experience persecution, he continues. The Church will diminish and divide. There will be false teachers who water down and distort the Gospel of love.  (Matthew 24:1-13) Again, this is all sounding a little too possible. 

What are we called to do in these circumstances? Endure. Simply endure to the end. But what does enduring look like? In short, it looks like leaning into love. Lean into love. 

This sounds desperately simple and is actually exceptionally hard. When the world around us is becoming more violent, it is difficult to remain gentle. When the world around us is experiencing scarcity and competition, it is hard to stay generous and grateful. When the world is consumed by fear, we have to dig deep to remain hopeful. When the world seems increasingly divided and hateful, it is precarious, prophetic and provocative to choose to love. 

It will not be easy and it will not make us popular. But it is what it looks like to follow Jesus. It is what it means to endure. 

How on earth do we sustain ourselves as we lean into love. This is where we return to the first of today’s celebrations: the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. Outside this Cathedral we have Epstein’s incredible sculpture of St Michael’s defeat of the devil. I love it because St Michael just looks so serene. There is no sense of a close-run fight. The Devil is completely powerless and beleaguered, bound at the Angel’s feet. In this sculpture, Epstein captures something fundamental. In the spiritual realms, evil is defeated. It was utterly defeated the moment Jesus died on that cross. The rest is simply the birth pangs of the coming Kingdom of God, which began in that moment and will one day come in all its fullness. Evil may fight and tantrum and plot and spoil, but those are its death-throes. The end of the story has already been written. Jesus wins. Love wins. This is what is truly real and this is worth betting your life on. 

I was having a conversation with someone the other day about how we both really love reading fiction but we both had a guilty secret. Sometimes if we find ourselves really caring about the story’s characters, we flick to the end of the novel to make sure that our characters make it. We don’t know how they get there, but we know that they do. It doesn’t spoil the story for us - it enables us to enter into it. God has told us the end of the story. God has promised us that if we endure, we will make it. We don’t know how. We don’t know what obstacles and struggles we will meet along the way. But if we endure, if we follow Jesus, if we lean into love, we will be there for the final chapter. 

This is what our psalmist is saying too in our first reading. My parents are down visiting from Scotland this weekend – do chat to them after the service! In their honour, I am going to introduce you to a great Scottish phrase: dinnae fash yersel. Dinnae fash yersel. Translated, it means don’t fret – something that our psalmist tells us three times in half a song. Don’t fret about evildoers. Don’t fret about those who prosper by doing wrong. Again, is any of this sounding familiar? Three-thousand-year-old words that seem uncannily contemporary.  

Don’t fret – it only leads to evil. Instead we are to trust in the Lord, take delight in the Lord, commit to the Lord and be still before the Lord. Because the Lord has decreed that evil shall not overcome in the end. We can root all our hope in God and live accordingly. The psalmist is not advocating a passive indifference to the works of evil, but rather by living as God’s people to fearlessly and peacefully challenge them. (Psalm 37:1-11)

Renowned theologian Walter Wink wrote extensively about the powers and principalities of the spiritual world. For him, evil was all part of what he called the Domination System – a system of violence, or abuse of power, which perpetuates injustice and dehumanises people. Wink says that people usually respond to the Domination System in one of two ways. They either respond with violence too or they stay passive and try to fly under the radar, hoping that so long as those committing violence and injustice are bothering someone else, they won’t come for them. Wink advocates something he calls Jesus’ Third Way – the way of non-violent resistance. That looks like finding ways to creatively resist and subvert evil without losing sight of the fact that those perpetrating it are also human beings too.  

At the Ammerdown Centre, another CCN partner, they speak of the two hands of non-violence. One hand lifted in refusal to engage in the works of domination and evil. The other hand extended in relationship and a willingness to reconcile. We do not join in with evil. We do not pretend it isn’t happening and doesn’t matter. We resist and remember our interrelationship.  

Once again, none of this is easy to do and that is why we need our second celebration this morning. This has been a bumper year for organisations joining the Community of the Cross of Nails. By the end of 2026, 18 churches and organisations and a further 5 schools will have become part of our network. My overwhelming sense is that as the world becomes less peaceful, those who want to tell a better story, who value peace and dream of reconciliation, want to join up with other people doing the same thing. In the Community of the Cross of Nails we can pray for one another, we can share stories of peace and hope, we can learn from one another what the costly work of reconciliation looks like, we can creatively resist injustice and we can encourage one another to lean into love, whatever that might look like in their context. 

As our world becomes more conflicted and complex, I cannot but help think of Palestinian Christians who have been living with conflict and complexity for generations. Daniel Munayer, whom some of us heard speak a few weeks ago, is the Director of Musalaha, an organisation which works for reconciliation between Arabs and Jews in Israel-Palestine. He has a simple question which guides him in that conflict and complexity – what does love look like in this situation? What does love look like in our situations? 

The incredible richness of the Community of the Cross of Nails is that we have over 300 organisations on six of our seven continents asking that question. What does love look like here? What does love look like between Germany and Britain, countries who spent too much of the last century at war? What does love look like between people who have lost their land to colonisers and the descendants of those colonisers? What does love look like in places where there has been ethnic cleansing and genocide? What does love look like in places scarred by civil wars? What does love look like in situations where part of the population has been treated as second class on grounds of their skin colour, ethnicity, religion or sexuality? What does love look like? A simple question with so many different answers. We have so much to learn from one another as we each try to lean into love where God has placed us. 

So the next time you open a newspaper, turn on your radio or TV, or pick up your phone and see that there are wars and rumours of war, don’t fret. Dinnae fash yersel. Lean into love and remember the two things we are celebrating today. The Feast of St Michael reminds us that evil has been defeated. CCN Sunday reminds us that we are not alone in dreaming of peace and reconciliation. May these two things give you courage to endure to the end, and to do what love asks of you in whatever lies ahead.  

---

Sign up to our Reconciliation newsletter for updates on the latest Pondering Peace blog posts.