Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
The Feast of the Presentation
Malachi3: 1-4
Psalm 84
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40
My predominant image of this week’s Gospel is that of the old man Simeon receiving in his arms the one-month-old Jesus. The setting is the temple at the time of purification for Mary. Jesus is being presented at the same time. It was required of faithful Hebrews that their firstborn sons were presented in such a fashion and Jesus bar Joseph was no exception. In like manner we bring our young for baptism. The commitment is similar. This child will be raised in the admonition and the awe of the Lord. But it is the aged Simeon who stands with outstretched arms to receive this child. We don’t know, but it does not appear that Simeon was a priest or a temple factotum. He simply came as one who had the right to be there.
Charity, our German Shorthair, has a quality known to be important in bird dogs. That quality is one of intensity. She can stand for minutes at a time without moving focusing on a bird or a squirrel or a deer. Recently, her intensity has been squandered on a rabbit that makes itself at home in our back yard. Out of the corner of my eye I will see a movement and simultaneously Charity tenses and every muscle in her body focuses on that rabbit. The rabbit will disappear behind the shrubbery in the corner of the yard, and I think it slips under the fence and is off exploring the neighborhood, but Charity saw that creature go behind the bushes and for five, ten, twenty minutes she will stand without moving focused on that place where she last saw the hare. Her sense of expectation that the rabbit will suddenly appear is palpable.
So it was with old Simeon. He was a righteous man, that is one who lived by the Torah of Moses and whose life was focused on serving God. His prayer might have been, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done…. Oswald Chambers’ writes of this passage in Matthew 6, “When we pray we give God a chance to work in the unconscious realm of the lives of those for whom we pray…” Curiously enough, the Lord’s Prayer is introduced by Matthew with the words “…your Father knows what you need before your ask him.” And Chambers responds, “Then why ask Him?” Answering his own question, he goes on to say. “Prayer is not getting things from God…; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God; I tell Him what I know He knows in order that I may get to know it as He does. Jesus says Pray because you have a Father, not because it quietens you, and give Him time to answer. “If the life of Jesus is formed in me by regeneration and I am drawing my breath in the fear of the Lord, the Son of God will press forward in front of my common sense and change my attitude to things…. The great, dominating passion all through the New Testament is for our Lord Jesus Christ.” 355:50-51.
Like a bird dog old Simeon kept his vigil. His prayer always centered in God praying for the consolation, the comforter of Israel, until he knew what God know –that he would see the Lord’s Christ in his own lifetime. Not moving a metaphorical muscle he readied himself in prayer and expectation focusing intently on the coming Christ. Simeon knew Malachi’s prophecy that ‘the Lord would suddenly come to his temple.’ Luke says that ‘guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God.’ Luke 2:27,28.
Can you imagine this old man’s joy at that moment? “This child was not just every child as special as every child is, Incarnation does not mean,” insists Yoder, “that God took all of human nature as it was, put his seal of approval on it, and thereby ratified nature as revelation. The point is just the opposite; that God broke through the borders of our standard definition of what is human and give a new, formative definition of Jesus.” 293:243:2026. Perhaps no one ever understood this more fully than did Simeon. And he praised, and blessed God in the words of the nunc dimittis: could he have sung it? Not like our choir will sing it this morning, but maybe in a quavering, joyful vibrato.
“Master, now you are releasing
your slave in peace,
according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared
before the face of all peoples,
a light for a revelation of the Gentiles
and a glory to your people Israel.
“…joy, that strange upwelling of delight, that tingling near-extasy in which every sense was like a fiddle-string, making music under the master’s bow…” 219:39:959. His faith had been verified and, in Madeleine L’Engle’s words, “…faith is more a matter of joy than of security.” 246:23:1040.
Simeon knew that this Jesus ‘had to become like his brothers and sisters’ in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the matters pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people….’ Hebrews 2:17.
Now I’ve never seen the temple, none of us ever has, but I have been in temple-like spaces. We share one of those spaces in this cathedral. In that temple Simeon was not alone in recognizing the child. There was one Anna, of great age, who never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. Two witnesses. And down through the ages of humankind the witnesses have never failed, those whose lives have been devoted passionately to the human expression of God, i.e., Jesus. Have you known one of these witnesses? Who in this place has been a Simeon or an Anna for you? They are here, and they have been here through many years. These witnesses are for you pointers in your own life to the Christ who himself with loving arms would receive you fully unto himself.
Jesus himself the gift has also become the river. That may be true for you and me as well. What have you to give this day? Hm. Only yourself. In the Eucharistic prayers there is unfailingly found the image of the sacrificed Christ on this altar. And coupled with it is the image of you a living sacrifice with Christ. Mark the words: “We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant. Unite us to your son in his sacrifice… As he did, so we give our lives.
Susan Howatch is an English writer whose father was an Anglican priest and she writes novels of faith in the midst of the messiness of life. The High flyer is one of those novels and there is in the story a good deal about the powers of evil. I read some dialogue in closing. Kim and tucker are in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London during this conversation.
“Why doesn’t God just zap the (evil) Powers and get on with it?”
“You might as well ask why I don’t toss off the perfect novel in twenty-four hours! I mean, this is a big creative project we’re talking about here—cosmologically speaking it’s only just got going!”
“I still don’t see why the Powers are unzappable.”
“It’s because they’re essential to creation. You can’t create without making messes and generating chaos and blundering down blind alleys and crawling back up again—you can’t create without those efforts which end in disaster, because it’s the disasters which show you how to get things right. That’s why every disaster during creation is potentially redeemable—it’s because without the disasters the creator could never complete any worthwhile project.”
“But why can’t God create more efficiently?”
“Because creation’s not about efficiency, it’s about love. It’s about shedding blood, sweat and tears to make the thing you care about come right. It’s about enduring the shadow side of creation and using it so that in the end everything can be brought into the light…
…”Listen.” I was busy processing his information about creators. On the south side of the Cathedral the light was streaming through the long windows onto the floor of the dome ahead of us as we wandered on down the central aisle. “Listen—“
“I’m listening, Ms. G.”
“—since the God –project’s so big, what can one human being matter?”
“In the perfect novel every word matters. In the perfect painting every fleck of paint matters. In this amazing cathedral every grain of marble matters.” He smiled at me before saying: “In the creation which tops all creations, you matter.”
And so do you on this the Feast of the Presentation. You too may be Simeon or Anna, a witness to joy at the center. So be it.