This Sunday is one when the Church traditionally celebrates the
Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which is the story we heard in
our Gospel reading today.
It wasn’t supposed to be
special or rather, no more special than it would be for any family
bringing their first-born to the Temple.
The first and best of
everything belonged to God, you see, so the tradition was for parents
to “redeem” their six-week-old baby by either paying a small sum
of money or sacrificing a pair of pigeons.
Prayers were said,
and Elijah was invoked.
This was the tradition.
And then Mary, Joseph
and the baby would return to Nazareth and get on with their lives,
probably in a bustling, multi-family household with aunts and uncles
and cousins, and, in due course, brothers and sisters for
Jesus.
Because the Bible takes it for granted that lives
were lived far more in community than they are nowadays, we tend to
think of the Holy Family living in a splendid bubble of isolation.
We
tend to think of them as travelling alone –
just Mary, Joseph
and the donkey –
but of course they would have gone to
Bethlehem with a group of other travellers;
it wasn’t safe,
else.
And realistically, the manger would have been on the step
separating the animal part of the house from the human part,
and
there would probably have been a great many women,
mostly
relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards.
We don’t
think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do
that with our pets,
but of course the cattle and horses or
donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was
the norm back in the day.
So, anyway, they go to the
Temple, just like any other family.
But then it all gets a bit
surreal, with the old man and the old woman coming up and making
prophecies over the child, and so on.
Actually, the whole
story is a bit surreal, really.
After all, St Matthew tells us
that the Holy Family fled Bethlehem and went to Egypt to avoid
Herod's minions,
but according to Luke, they're just going home
to Nazareth –
a little delayed, after the census, to allow
Mary and the baby time to become strong enough to travel,
but
six weeks old is six weeks old,
and it makes the perfect time
for a visit to the Temple.
The accounts are definitely
contradictory just here,
but I don't think that really matters
too much –
after all, truth isn't necessarily a matter of
historical accuracy.
Come to that, I don't suppose Simeon
really burst into song,
any more than Mary or Zechariah.
Luke
has put words into their mouths,
rather like Shakespeare does
to the kings and queens of British history.
Henry the Fifth is
unlikely to have said “This day is called the Feast of Crispian”
and so on,
or “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once
more”,
but he probably rallied the troops with a sentiment of
some kind,
and it is the same here.
Zechariah, Mary and
Simeon probably didn't say those actual words that Luke gives them,
but they probably did express that sort of sentiment.
Although
I often wonder why it is that when Jesus reappears as a young man,
nobody recognises him.
We don't hear of an elderly shepherd
hobbling up to him and saying “Ah, I remember how the angels sang
when you were born!”
But perhaps it is as well –
it
means he had a loving, private, sensible childhood.
Which, I
think, is partly why we see so very little of him as a child,
just
that glimpse of him as a rather precocious adolescent in the
Temple.
He needed to grow up in peace and security and love,
without the dreadfulness of who he was and why he had come hanging
over him.
But on this very first visit to the Temple,
he
can't do more than smile and maybe vocalise a bit.
It is Simeon
we are really more concerned with.
His song, which the Church
calls the Nunc Dimittis,
after the first two words of it in
Latin, is really the centre of today's reading.
He is saying
that now, at last, he has seen God's salvation, and is happy to
die.
The baby will be “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and
the glory of God's people Israel.”
“A light to lighten
the Gentiles”.
This is why another name for this festival is
Candlemas.
Candlemas.
In some churches, candles are blessed
for use throughout the year,
but as we are no longer dependent
on candles as a light source, it might be more to the point to bless
our stock of light bulbs!
Because what it's about is Jesus as
the Light of the World.
A light to lighten the Gentiles,
certainly,
but look how John's Gospel picks up and runs with
that.
“The Word was the source of life, and this life brought
light to people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has never put it out.”
And John's Gospel also reports
Jesus as having said:
“I am the light of the world.
Whoever
follows me will have the light of life and will never walk in
darkness.”
Jesus is the Light of the World,
and
that's part of what we are celebrating today.
We rather take
light for granted, here in the West, don't we?
We are so used to
being able to flick on a switch and it's light
that we forget
how dark it can be.
Sometimes when we are travelling in our
motor home, we park up in a town or village where they switch the
street lights off at midnight, or even in a place where there are no
streetlights, and it can get very dark indeed.
As, indeed, it
can here on the rare occasions we have a power cut.
We end up
relying on an emergency lantern, or on the torches on our phones, but
very often we light a candle.
Candles don’t provide very
much light, of course –
you can't see to read by it very well,
or sew,
or any of the things people did before television and
social media,
or, come to that, before houses were lit by
electricity.
Although back in the day, you had what were called
Tilly lamps if you didn’t have electricity –
[The Swan Whisperer] remembers them from his earliest childhood,
and remembers the poles to carry the electric cables being
erected.
It must have made a huge difference.
We always had
electricity at home, but I remember visiting a cottage which was lit
by gas.
And in our earliest camping days, before we had the
mobile home, we used to be lit by torches or a Calor-gas lantern.
And
it made it very difficult to do much after dark – there were no backlit tablets back in the
day!
But even a candle, a tea-light, can dispel the
darkness.
Even the faintest, most flickering light means it
isn't completely dark –
you can see, even if only a
little.
And sometimes for us the Light of the World is like that
–
a candle in the distance, a faint, flickering light that we
hardly dare believe isn't our eyes just wanting to see.
But
sometimes, of course, wonderfully, as I'm sure you've experienced,
it's like flicking on a light switch to illuminate the whole
room.
Sometimes God's presence is overwhelmingly bright and
light.
And other times not.
This time of year
is half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
It's
not spring yet, but the days are noticeably longer than they were at
the start of the year.
There are daffodils and early rhubarb in
the shops,
and the bulbs are beginning to pierce through the
ground.
The daffodils are even out in some parks, although in my
local park, Windmill Gardens, they are still only in bud.
The
first snowdrops are out – I’ve not seen them myself, but friends
have posted pictures on social media.
In the country, the hazel
trees are showing their catkins,
and if you look closely at the
trees,
you can see where the leaves are going to be in just a
few weeks.
We hope.
In one of my favourite books, a
character says she likes February because it is light enough to go
for a walk after tea.
The days are definitely getting lighter,
slowly but surely – last week [The Swan Whisperer] and I and one of our grandsons
went for a walk at about 4:30 and it was definitely still light-ish,
even at the end of our walk.
And tomorrow I have to go to the dentist at 5:00 pm, which I am not looking forward to,
but I hope that
I’ll be able to walk up there in, if not full daylight, at least
twilight.
Candlemas is one of those days we say
predict the weather –
like St Swithun's Day in July, when if
it rains, it's going to go on raining for the next six weeks.
Only
at Candlemas it's the opposite –
if it's a lovely day, then
winter isn't over yet,
but if it's horrible, Spring is
definitely on the way.
The Americans call it “Groundhog Day”,
same principle –
if the groundhog sees his shadow, meaning if
the sun is out, winter hasn't finished by any manner of means,
but
if he can't, if the sun isn't shining, then maybe it is.
Maybe I
hope it will be cold and wet tomorrow and I’ll have to go to the
dentist on the bus….
So it's a funny time of year, still
winter, but with a promise of spring.
And isn't that a good
picture of our Christian lives?
We still see the atrocities, the
mass deportations in America, the shootings of innocent people by ICE
agents, the wars and insurrections in too many parts of the world to
name.
We still see that we, too, can be pretty awful when we set
our minds to it, simply because we are human.
We know that there
are places inside us we'd really rather not look at.
It is
definitely winter, and yet, and yet, there is the promise of
spring.
There is still light.
It might be only the
flickering light of a candle in another room, or it might be the
full-on fluorescent light of an overwhelming experience of God's
presence, but there is still light.
The infant Jesus was
brought to the Temple, and was proclaimed the Light to Lighten the
Gentiles.
But, of course, that's not all –
we too have
that light inside us':
you remember Jesus reminded us not
to keep it under a basket, but to allow it to be seen.
And
again, the strength and quality of our light will vary, due to time
and circumstances, and possibly even whether we slept well last night
or what we had for breakfast.
Sometimes it will be dim and
flickering, and other times we will be alight with the flame of God's
presence within us.
It's largely outwith our control, although
of course, by the means of grace and so on we can help ourselves come
nearer to God.
But it isn't something we can force or struggle
with –
we just need to relax and allow God to shine through
us.
Jesus is the Light of the World, and if we follow Him, we
will have the light of life and will never walk in darkness.
We
will, not we should, or we must, or we ought to.
We will.
Be
it never so faint and flickering, we will have the light of
life.
Amen.
