Transcription

Well, good morning everybody. It is good to see you this morning. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church and February 2nd marks a very special day in the church's calendar.

It usually occurs not on a Sunday, so we haven't often, we haven't been able to do it yet, but this we'll start doing this in the future on February 2nd. Today it's on a Sunday, so we get to celebrate, it's called Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation of Christ into the temple. And this passage that we read today concludes the infancy narratives in the Gospel of St. Luke.

If you remember, in the last several weeks, we're going now backwards chronologically, we've started Epiphany the first Sunday talking about the baptism of Jesus, so he was already an adult, and then after that we talked about him changing the water into wine, his first miracle in Cana of Galilee, and then last week we saw his glory going from synagogue to synagogue as he taught. And so now we're going back in time, back to the infancy narratives, and this passage today brings us to an encounter with the glory of Jesus that Mary and Joseph are going to experience at the temple with Simeon and Anna. And as we look at these passages this morning, let me pray for us.

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight. Oh Lord, my rock and redeemer. Amen.”

We're going to look at this passage through the lens of Mary and Joseph, through the lens of Simeon, and through the lens of Anna. So those are sort of my three points this morning, and through them all we're going to see about what it looks like to live a life of faith when things feel really uncertain. In today's gospel, we find people waiting for the glory of the Messiah. They're waiting, Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna, and Mary and Joseph show us this example of a devout couple, a couple who is following the law as it prescribes.

 Mary and Joseph

They come to the temple to do three important things. First, for Mary's ritual purification after childbirth, so it's about 40 days after her son is born, for the presentation of the firstborn to the Lord, and for the dedication of the firstborn to the Lord's service. All these things are sort of wrapped up summarily in St. Luke's Gospel.

They come and they offer two turtle doves, which is according to the law, but it shows us that they are among the working class and the poorer in their culture. They can't afford to offer a lamb or a bull, and it's actually quite un-extraordinary what they're doing. They are just being faithful Jews, following the law.

They have had extraordinary encounters surrounding the birth of their son Jesus, but this particular thing that they're doing is quite un-extraordinary, and I find a lot of comfort in that because they're about to experience something amazing that God is bringing together and orchestrating, but from their perspective, they're just carrying on in the un-extraordinary, being faithful with the next thing God's called them to do, and the presence of God is making its way into the temple through this child who is being carried along by faithful parents who are doing something completely ordinary. When we think of the glory of Jesus coming to meet us, day in and day out, it reminds me that the glory of God comes through very common vessels and very ordinary encounters in your walk of faith, in my walk of faith. Sometimes people can look for signs of God's blessings in really big things, like if everything is going right, then God must be blessing what I'm doing. 

You might hear someone say, well this bad thing didn't happen to me, so God must be pleased with me for what I'm doing, and that person who's experiencing failure must not be experiencing God's blessing, or they might say this good thing happened to me, so God has to be blessing me. But instead, the story of Mary and Joseph here reminds us that God's glory is often discovered among those small, seemingly insignificant acts of faithfulness that we take, and the outcomes are sort of out of our hands, as it were. Carving out time to pray, carving out time for intention and meditation to be honest about how we're feeling, doing something for a spouse without them having to ask you to do it, making time to invite other people over.

These are small rhythms of intentional faithfulness that as we encounter the image of God in other people, these reveal to us the glory of Jesus. This is the soil. The intentional rhythms are the soil for the revealing of the glory of Jesus.

And in the last two months, I've been listening to a few books, one on parenting, the other one on marriage, and then I've been reading one on friendship, because it is so easy to occupy my mind with things that I can't change, right? And maybe some of you are in that space too, where you've spent the week and your mental load has been occupied with things that are out of your control, right? But I want to see Jesus in the everyday stuff of my life. So, not that I want to stick my head in the sand, but I want to spend an equal amount of time on these things, these everyday moments that I can control, living out life with Jesus in the everyday stuff of the household, the neighborhood, the place that I live, our church. And the things that I can control are familial relationships and friendships, and I can have an effect in those places.

So, we need to discover the glory of Jesus in small places that are just very common places. We need to be surprised by Jesus in those ordinary spaces, those everyday faithfulness encounters of just walking and doing the next good thing, just like Mary and Joseph are in this story.

Simeon

So, this is Mary and Joseph, and then the camera changes, right? If you can picture like a movie, the camera is now changing to another person, to a man named Simeon. And Simeon, according to tradition, is an old man and a priest. We don't really have that in the gospel text, and that's not the point. The point is, this is a devout man who is living in the city, who is looking and longing for the Messiah to come and bring the redemption of Israel.

Jesus had already been testified about earlier in that chapter by shepherds in the wilderness, and now he's going to be testified about in the city and in the epicenter of religious power. Jesus has the witness of those in the country, and now he's going to receive the testimony of the devout Jews who are in the city of Jerusalem. So, the Holy Spirit reveals to Simeon that he will not die before he sees the hope of the Messiah.

And so, then it says the Holy Spirit guided Simeon to the temple. I'm not sure what that looked like, but Simeon has this habit of, you know, being a part of temple life. He's described as a devout and a just man.

And so, Simeon meets Mary and Joseph and Jesus, either in the temple of the women or the temple of the Gentiles, sorry, the court of the women or the court of the Gentiles, somewhere in the temple complex. He meets them. We don't know where, but as he encounters them, God is clearly orchestrating this moment from behind the scenes.

And then, when Simeon speaks, he speaks Isaiah chapter 60, with the light and the glory that are being brought together that describe the goodness of God's kingship over all the nations. And it's really important, in light coming to the nations, this is going to be one of the important themes in the ministry of Jesus, and this is where it first shows up in the Gospel of Saint Luke, that the light of Jesus going to the nations starts right here in Simeon's song. It's connected to this universal reign of the kingdom of God that is going to include the Gentiles, and that's what's new here.

You have, in the infancy narratives, you have these songs, the song of Mary, the song of the angels, the song of Simeon, and we'll get to the song of Anna. Each of those progressively reveals something about the nature of the saving work of the Messiah. And now that Simeon has seen Jesus, he can give up his post. He can rest. He's done. He's seen it. 

He's seen God's promise fulfilled in his sight. And he adds what's interesting in this song, which we say every day in evening prayer, he adds this note of suffering in the song, and it's really interesting. So I can imagine Mary and Joseph, they're smiling with delight.

Yes, yes, you know, blessed be the Lord God of Israel. Oh wait, that's the morning prayer one, sorry, the evening prayer one. You know, as he's, you know, the light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel, and their faces are beaming with joy, like, yes, we are seeing God's goodness here.

And then he says, and a sword will pierce your own soul too. Whoa, right? This is the first moment where there's this introduction of the ministry of the Messiah will involve some level of grief and suffering, but they're not sure the fullness of what that means yet. And I would imagine Mary and Joseph's facial expressions change in that moment. 

And so now, the grief of anticipated pain is going to sit side-by-side with the joy that she's feeling about her son. And maybe, just maybe, you've been in a place like that, and maybe you're in a place this morning where grief about some sort of anticipated pain and suffering is with you. And in Mary's example, take note of her example here, she is somebody who we find that grief and hope sit next to each other for decades, right? This is 40 days into her child's birth, you know, being born.

There's 30 plus more years to go. Grief and hope are going to sit side-by-side for decades throughout the life of her son. And in that daily space between grief and hope, she does the next good thing as an act of faith, that famous, be it to me Lord according to your word.

She gives us an example of faith in that space between hope and grief. The next good thing as we're longing for the glory of God's kingdom to show up. And so we're called to follow her example.

Simeon has similarly cultivated a life of everyday faithfulness in anticipating the work of the Messiah, and he's led by God to meet these ordinary parents as yet another witness with the angels and with the shepherds of what this child's ministry is going to be. And so I've been thinking about the significance of what does it mean to end our days with this prayer of the song of Simeon, Lord now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word. Whether it's comp line or daily evening prayer, this ends our prayer every day.

And so what does that mean for us? Well, this prayer offers us an opportunity to discover the glory of Jesus in the everyday, moment-by-moment conversations and encounters that you guys are going to have every single day. It does that first. It also affirms that Jesus is present in all those things, and it invites us to rest.

I mean, when you hear Simeon sing this song, there's this profound sense that the work of God is in God's hands, and he can rest in this quiet confidence and stillness that God is going to be the one to carry out his work and his plan. And so this song invites us into a quiet rest with quiet confidence. And our bodies and our souls need that rest, and so this is why I love having this as a daily prayer. 

Our bodies need this daily reminder. There are days when you and I are enraptured by joy upon joy, and there are days where we're finding the glory of God in that joy, and there are days where you and I are struck by grief, and there are days that we just live in the ordinary somewhere in between. There are days that we undergo this pain that pierced Mary's heart as well.

But Simeon invites us to frame things differently, to frame gladness and grief under the umbrella of God's glory going forth through Jesus as he shines his light on the nations. So as we live in that space between hope and grief, we live out the next good thing to the looking for the glory of God which is going forth to the nations as we take the next step of faithfulness in God's kingdom.

Anna

So we've seen God come in surprising glory in the faithful lives of Joseph and Mary and Simeon, and now the camera is going to change yet again, and we encounter a prophet, a woman named Anna.

Anna is introduced as this prophet who is from the tribe of Asher, which is one of the northern ten tribes, and there's some debate about how old she is. You know, it's common in those days for women to get married in their mid to late teens, and so if she had been married somewhere around 16-ish, then her husband would have died by the time she was 23. So she was probably a widow from her mid-20s, and so it's possible that she's somewhere now in her early to mid-90s or even in her early hundreds, but she has spent all that time in the station of widowhood.

People know who she is. She's been in the temple every day. She is a pinnacle of the example of female piety, and she represents the voices of the women in Jerusalem in the city who are longing for the hope of the Messiah, and Anna has been looking for the redemption of Israel, which comes and brings in the new age of the messianic king, and this is going to be a major theme in the gospel, this coming kingdom.

The Venerable Bede, one of our saints in the English tradition, says something really important here. He says, “What needs to be mentioned too, is that deservedly both sexes hurried to meet him, offering congratulations, since he appeared as Redeemer of both.” So Jesus would be the redeemer of man and of woman. He would be the redeemer of Jew and Gentile, of pious city dwellers, and of common herdsmen in the wilderness.

Jesus is the hope and the redeemer for all people, and when people find their rest in the lordship of Jesus and his reign as king, they do so in a way that takes full account of who they are and the uniqueness of where they've come from, and so Anna invites us to be very curious about what the redemption of Jesus looks like in groups of people who aren't always given the most prominent voices. Women have to be heard and held in honor. Children and elderly must be heard and held in honor.

Ethnic, linguistic minorities have to be able to tell their stories, and those lives must be honored, and so the poor must have a voice in honor. So Anna hears one group of people, a representative of one group who is looking for the redemption of Jesus. She invites us to reflect on whose voices I think feel under- represented in the church.

Now think with me again about the infancy narratives. Angels, shepherds, a just and devout city-dwelling man, a pious Jewish woman prophet who is a city dweller. These are all giving unique voice and testimony to the work, the hope, the consolation of Israel in the ministry of Jesus, and so the kingdom of God is going to be lived out, and it's going to look very unique and different in the different vocations and stations of life, sexes, families of origin, subcultures, stories, and all of these things creating a tapestry in the church that's depicting this narrative of the glory of God and how the light of Jesus is going into the nations, through our neighborhoods, through our households, through our individual lives, and so as the glory of Jesus goes forth, take notice of it in the everyday stuff of life and the lives of the other people that you're encountering with a disposition of curiosity to learn more about the global picture of redemption that God's portraying.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, today's passage calls us to join Mary and Joseph and Simeon and Anna to live out faithful anticipation of God's coming kingdom in the midst of the everyday encounters that you and I have in our routines, and Mary and Joseph remind us to carry on in obedience, one good next step at a time, even though we don't fully understand the significance of what we're holding in our hands. Simeon reminds us to find rest and quiet confidence in the God who's going to carry out his plan, even though there will be times of grief and gladness. Anna reminds us to value Jesus's redemption and the unique stations and stories of others in the kingdom of God, and just as we all were carrying in our candles this morning, singing about the light of Christ, let's remember this day, candle-ness, that this day calls us to carry the light of Christ in everyday faithfulness to the world around us that is longing to know the light and love of our Lord.

Let me pray for us. “O God, our Father, source of all light, today you reveal to the aged Simeon your light, which enlightens the nations. Fill our hearts with the light of faith, that we who have borne our candles may walk in the path of goodness and come to the light that shines forever.

Your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.