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The Presentation 2025

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During Epiphany we’ve been invited to keep vigil around the manger for several weeks instead of  just a few hours and for some it might have felt quite countercultural to keep that watch, to be observant of quiet glimpses of glory, when everyone else wants to hurry on. Now, as January slips into February we mark another festival. Officially the feast of the presentation of the Christ child in the temple is marked on 2nd February, because that is 40 days, since Christmas Day. It represents the 40 days that Mary waited following the birth of her son, to keep the rite of purification according to the law of Leviticus, and to present her first born son to God, in remembrance of the deliverance of her people from slavery in Egypt.

So traditionally (long before the tradition of 12th night)  Christians kept their Christmas decorations up until 2 February. And when those decorations came down candles were brought to church to be blessed for use in the home through the coming year, candles that would remind them that the light of the world went with them. Hence the name, Candlemas.

Today we remember both young and old: Mary and Joseph, a young devout Jewish couple, arriving at the Temple with their baby, and as they did so the final two principle characters of this season’s story, are called to play their part. Two octogenarians, Anna and Simeon who have waited all their lives for what they believed God would one day reveal. The great consolation, not just for Israel, but to the whole world.  Not in the sense we understand of a consolation prize, well you didn’t get the main win but here’s something to soften the blow. No, this consolation was the great loving kindness of God that would be the answer to all the world’s deepest pain. The light to the nations. And one day amid the rituals of family and religious life, they recognize that this gift has come. So quiet was its coming that they might have missed it, had they not been keeping vigil. In an ordinary couple coming to present their first born son to God, and to redeem him with the offering, as required by their law, they see God step quietly into time and history. In this child, flesh and blood, they see the one long promised. The anointed One. Their messiah and a light to the world.

Such a realisation comes with both joy and pain. For change and transformation often means the cost of letting go of the familiar, the known.  Especially when it is born of love. And this child is to bring change and transformation to the world out of the greatest love of all. And that love and therefore this child, is not only to be a consolation but also a contradiction to anything that is not of love. And his parents, who will be the first to teach him of love, will find the cost a very personal one, in letting him go out into the world he came to redeem.  

And somehow Simeon and Anna, whose vigil is ending, must share that knowledge with this young couple whose vigil is just beginning.

So our wait through Epiphany has been in some small way to mirror the waiting of these two faithful and devout elderly people. As we release them from their vigil we may feel a sense of relief perhaps, that we can now take down the tree and the star and pack away the crib. But as we do so, we turn with Mary and Joseph, to look down the road of their son’s life, towards Golgotha. We turn from the crib toward the cross.

And we realise perhaps that we needed those weeks of Epiphany in the company of the light and the revelation of love, and the tenderness of the manger scene, and the company of the wise ones from the East and the elders of the Temple court, to feed us and prepare us for quite another season. The forty days between Christmas Day and Candlemas are to balance the 40 days of Lent which lie ahead of us.

The world may miss that too of course. The Easter eggs are lining the supermarket shelves before Epiphany has even finished long before Lent has even begun.  Moving straight from Christmas Day to Easter morning with a quick nod at Valentine’s day in the middle to try and keep everyone feeling positive might be tempting, but it misses the point. It misses the important steps and pathways of the journey that will help us learn together.  For the joy of Easter morning is nothing without the journey to the cross. The whole cycle of living and dying and rising again must be experienced as a whole for it to have any meaning at all.

Mary would keep her vigil as her son grew up and she would watch a town reject its own. Is this not the carpenter’s son? Who does he think he is, showing us up, opening the scriptures, telling us of a different way of being.

We too can so often remain closed to any new thing that God might be doing, however quietly and gently it comes. We may miss it because we did not want to watch and pray for anything new or wondrous. When we are fearful and impatient, needing quick fixes, it’s easy to think that a culture of blame and hate at least moves things on, gets stuff out of the way, helps us look and feel busy and important. Perhaps we fear the unknown too much, perhaps we fear that the cost of truth or light or forgiveness or transformation and love might be too high. It is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable experiences for ordinary fallible people who do not want the secrets of our hearts to be known, or the less lovely parts of our nature and behaviour to be recognised for what they are, to come close to that sort of illuminating love.  It asks us to look at the worlds wounds as well as our own, with honesty and compassion and wisdom, rather than hide in the shadows or blame someone else.  And that takes great courage.

Yet as we light our Candlemas candles today and turn from the celebrations of our saviours birth to be disciples on the journey and accompany him through his ministry to the cross, may we also remember that we will be journeying with the light of the world, who walked the way of love with all that it cost him, so that light could shine brighter still in us.  The Lord you seek will return to his Temple.

And we, each of us, are called to be the Temple to which Christ returns. Not our buildings but us, you and me, his body, here on earth. To share that truth and love with the world and be its light. So, lift up your heads and hearts and lives,  that the king of glory may come in.

Amen.

Page last updated: Monday 20th January 2025 10:06 AM
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