I WAS in my second year of junior school. My teacher was Mrs Laverty. It must have been soon after the start of the school year, September 1972, when she asked the class who knew about St Michael. I was excited that I knew an answer; so my hand shot up, Hermione Granger-style. “His name is in my clothes!”

For the benefit of younger readers, until 2000 “St Michael” was an in-house brand name for Marks & Spencer’s clothing. I think Mrs Laverty must have laughed at me. How else would the memory be burned into my brain?

In my childhood, angels were merely story characters, with tinsel wings made from coat-hangers. If I were looking to the secular world to teach me about angels today, my most accessible clues would probably be emojis: they show white clothes, wings (no tinsel), halo, smile. One angel emoji on my mobile comes in six skin-colour options. Now that is progress.

Popular culture is at variance with the Bible in many ways. But angels are a firmly biblical element in our faith, and yet with a presence in the popular imagination which more doctrinal aspects of Christianity cannot rival. Might they be a resource for mission? Testing scripture against popular culture could show whether angels might help us to communicate faith to people who are seeking God at work in the world.

Setting aside “St Michael” clothing, I have chosen three angelic examples from outside the faith which can give us an insight into this realm of existence. First, an example from popular music: angels, it declares, offer us “protection”, “love”, and “affection”. These characteristics do not surface in the reading from Genesis, or in the Gospel for Michaelmas. But, in Revelation, Michael — captain of the heavenly host, the warrior-angel — protects God’s children against forces of spiritual wickedness (Ephesians 6.12).

“Love” and “affection”, though, are not conspicuous angelic attributes in scripture, unless we judge by the quality of their actions, such as the care given by angels in, say, Mark 1.13, and the reassurance that they offer with such understanding in Luke 1.30, 2.9, and 2.43. Protection and communication are their characteristic activities. The two other archangels named in the Bible are Gabriel and Raphael: Gabriel is the angel of good news; Raphael is the companion-angel (from Tobit).

My second secular example comes from television, from what is easily the most memorable episode of the new era of Doctor Who, with the nastiest, scariest baddies. The episode is titled “Blink”, and the baddies are the Weeping Angels, stealers of lives. Psalm 78.49 corroborates the idea that angels can be baddies. The Weeping Angels make me think of Edington Priory Church, Wiltshire, and the marvellous Lewys tomb, with its weeping angel at one corner. But there is no fear there: in church, even weeping angels can be only good.

For my final secular example, I turn to a film from 1938, Angels With Dirty Faces. It starred James Cagney as the gangster, Rocky Sullivan, and made such an impact on me that I avoided watching it again. I will not spoil its famous ending. To begin with, I thought that the “angels” of the title were the kids that Rocky risked corrupting by his glamorous bad-boy image — a nameless host, in other words, like the hosts of angels in scripture.

Now, I think differently. The angel with a dirty face is Rocky himself. He has a personal name — like Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. He is an angel who represents complex human moral choices, and ways in which mortals can manifest and communicate the love of God. Not all those ways are apparent from every angle. We can readily describe a kind or helpful human as being “like an angel”. But we may also make room for the converse possibility: that those we interact with may be angels in the guise of human beings (Hebrews 13.2).

Angels ascend and descend on the Son of Man, Jesus says in John (1.51). This will be possible because heaven will be opened to allow access by the Son of Man — and Nathanael will see it happen. In this, he stands for us; for we, too, shall see “greater things” than the little that we now know of God’s love in Christ, which is already as much as we can bear. So, angels exist, to help us see God in us, and us in God.