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The Presentation of Our Lord - Feb 2, 2025
Rev Sarah Colvin
You can find this week's readings here.
So here we are with whiplash (yes, for the country, but for right now, I’m talking about the Gospel, not the country.) At least for the Gospel… year C lectionary, we have started kind of down the road chronologically in the Gospel of Luke, but for some denominations (Episcopal included) as codified in our prayer book, there are certain fixed feasts that get celebrated on the days on which they fall. If, like here in this church, you are in a community that worships only on Sundays (except for days like Christmas), then you only celebrate the Feast of the Presentation if it falls on a Sunday, look later at page 16 of the BCP. So happy Groundhog’s Day, and blessed Feast of the Presentation. [and you may want to know, if you don’t know, that this is also called Candlemas … candles mass, with a long history of blessing the new candles, which comes from Jesus being known as the light of the people of Israel.]
This Feast of the Presentation (from the Gospel reading) concerns events undertaken by Jewish parents after the birth of a male child, commemorated in Jesus’ case forty days after Christmas on this Feast of the Presentation. There are two different rituals combined in this passage. The first is that of “purification,” from which the Christian feast often took its name before modern times. Leviticus specifies forty days after childbirth for “purification.” Christians tend to roll eyes at the term purification, because we associate this with being “unclean”. But the post-partum mother was not a pariah or sinner, but someone whose return from the border between life and death was being recognized, bearing in mind pre-industrial infant and maternal health risks.
Purification meant a visit to the Temple and a prescribed pair of sacrifices—an act of thanksgiving or praise and to normalize or restore order. The two offerings that are here made in the form of doves or pigeons implies relative poverty on the family’s part.
Separately is the requirement for the “redemption” of any first-born child Here Luke has quoted from the Mosaic Law in Exodus which states that all the first-born —animals and humans—belong to the Lord, and that they be sacrificed (if animals), or in the case of children “redeemed” by the sacrifice of a lamb. Nevertheless, in Jesus’ time the redemption process was symbolic and economic in form, made by a payment of five shekels.
Although it makes little sense for Mary and Jospeh to redeem Jesus, for this child will always belong to God, the redemption of the first-born is part of the process, alluded to again when Jesus’ parents come “to do what was customary under the Law.” However, the focus of the story lies on Jesus’ arrival, or presentation by his parents, in a place he seems already to belong, and which will continue in some sense to be his. And it is the two prophetic figures Simeon and Anna, rather than the priests who were recipients of the redemption price, who welcome Jesus to his true home in the Temple.
Now with all of this background, we have to ask, what does this have to do with us today? Even though biblical, it feels like this whole little Feast of the Presentation thing is a bit of a disconnect. Jesus was Jewish and was taken to the temple to do the normal Jewish things. And what does this have to do with us in the USA now?
The answer entails that we get sequence correct. It is imperative; we must have the order correct. First we must know who God is, who we are and what we believe, and then respond to what is going on in the world, not the other way around. We cannot start with what we believe should be going on politically and then find a religion or pick a church to match this. We must know who we are in God’s eyes. So, I tell you, we, like Jesus, are already redeemed. As we prayed earlier that “we may be presented to you with pure and clean hearts by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Take a pause, close your eyes, believe this: know by Jesus’s death and resurrection that we are presented with pure and clean hearts to God. [repeat]
If you read Episcopal News Service at all, you may have noticed many stories about issues of justice and programs of service. There are not many about spiritual life or worship. The church tends to justify our existence by “outreach” and statements about justice. And contrary to what the news would have you think, the primary issue facing humanity is not whether you support or oppose a particular president or program. It is much bigger.
The truth of our life, seen every Sunday as we gather for the Holy Eucharist, is that we participate in the Divine Life in our worship. And there is an organic movement as the people of God flow from that Eucharist into our families, friendships, work life and civic involvements. And so, then the divine life we know in worship enters into every part of human existence. We are whole people who worship God and go into the world.
That’s what a theologian Thornton is getting at, “We do not embrace religion primarily to improve our morals, but rather undertake the moral struggle in order to improve our Prayer. However interdependent the two may become, the end of man is not purity of heart but the vision of God.” And the best way to attain the purity of heart is by aiming purposefully at the vision of God.
Perhaps on this day it is suitable to invite a great Anglican spiritual theologian to preach, to bring home to us this truth. Hear the words of Evelyn Underhill:
One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your...life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good.
For the real saint is neither a special creation nor a spiritual freak. He is just a human being in whom has been fulfilled the great aspiration of St. Augustine – “My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee.” And as that real life, the interior union with God grows, so too does the saints’ self identification with humanity grow. They do not stand aside wrapped in delightful prayers and feeling pure and agreeable to God. They go right down into the mess; and there, right down in the mess, they are able to radiate God because they possess Him.”
This is how we are to live through this time, all time, with our eyes set on God, already presented to God through Jesus. We are to radiate God, possessed by God, and we are then to go into the mess. And it is a mess, all around us, a mess. We are God’s, we adore God, we are in awe, and then we go into the world to be God’s in the mess of the world. And we do this over and over. We do it in faith and trust, until that day when the God we adore will redeem all things, and God will be all in all.
IMAGE ATTRIBUTION:
Latimore, Kelly. La presentación de Cristo en el templo, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54414 [retrieved February 12, 2025]. Original source: Kelly Latimore Icons, https://kellylatimoreicons.com/.
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