At the end of today’s service we will make our way to the font carrying our candles: just a few steps for us but a re-enactment of the journey that Mary and Joseph made from Bethlehem up to the Temple in Jerusalem. At the font we will be reminded of our Christmas celebrations and turned towards the story of the Passion of Christ. I remember when the ‘new’ liturgies that we now enjoy around our church Feast days were first trialled and published in the 1980s. Some of these recognised the richness of feasts that had escaped the Reformation clear-out ( which were listed in the Book of Common Prayer) but which had not been observed. Candlemas, 40 days after Christmas was one of these and was offered as something of a ‘hinge’ (a turning point in time, a shift) from Christmas towards Holy Week and Easter. Candlemas has been presented as the church saying ‘enough of angels and shepherds, now its time to get serious!’. In previous years we have extinguished our candles at the font.
Except, by making Candlemas look both backwards to the crib and forwards to the cross there is a danger in losing the meaning of the day itself: not my original thought I confess, but the Dean of Westminster Abbey’s, David Hoyle, in a book called ‘A year of grace’.
So what actually happened on this day? Our writer Luke got everything a bit confused in his account. For all that he’d spent years alongside the apostle Paul as a travelling companion, the intricacies of Old Testament Law weren’t Luke’s strongpoint. He got two things both right and wrong at the same time. Yes, there was a rite of purification of a mother following a birth required in the Old Testament. There was also a rite for the redemption of the first born. This looked back to the Exodus story where the first born of Egypt died as the Angel of God ‘passed over’ the people of Israel but Israel’s children were spared. From that moment it was said that every first-born male child belonged to God but could be ‘redeemed’ (bought back) for 5 shekels. Luke jumbles these two rites or ceremonies up together and also forgets that the redemption of the firstborn had been superceded by the whole tribe of Levi becoming servants of the religious cult. But Luke had some interesting parallels to present to his readers. He had already drawn on the similarities between Jesus’ birth and the birth of another great prophet (Samuel), he doesn’t feel he has to sweat the details about the particular ceremonies in this story. Here he has another Hannah (or rather, Anna), two parents and a child (Mary and Joseph) going to a Holy Place with their child (just as Elkanah and Hannah had done with Samuel) to be blessed by an elderly man (Eli in the Old Testament story, Simeon in the new). He can work with this ‘God incidence’, allowing the reader to make the connections and to begin to see Jesus as a great Prophet.
But back to the feast, back to the ceremony: let’s stay with Mary for a while and this ‘rite of purification’. We struggle with the language because the word ‘purification’ implies an uncleanness that we moderns rightly reject. Let’s just acknowledge the fact that hidden in the origins of the ritual there are no doubt very male problems with blood, fears about everything to do with pregnancy and birth, and probably a fear of the great ‘unknown’ that is the female body. But where we might connect to this ancient practice of ‘purification’ is by recognising that childbirth is an earth-shattering thing. Whether you are the woman giving birth or their partner (concerned for your fingers as she crushes your hand in a vice like grip!) childbirth involves forces that overwhelm the everyday sense of ‘being in control’. A woman’s contractions can be managed but they cannot be controlled. An elemental drive takes over in the birthing suite: your partner’s body is not her own, ‘Nature’ makes a claim for it. Add into the mix the fact that childbirth, until recent decades (that’s decades not centuries) was the cause of the death of many, many young women brings us to a place where a woman and her partner (through childbirth) have been taken to the edges of life and death itself. They have felt humbled before nature, become aware (perhaps) of their mortality but also of the wonder of life. Forty days hardly seems enough to come to terms with this. This rite of purification was a means of recognising that something hugely significant had taken place with the birth of a child.
Call me old fashioned, but I think human beings need rites of passage like this one. Whether its childbirth or marriage, or the death of a loved one, a very modern tendency is to ‘ignore’ (perhaps too strong a word- ‘underestimate ‘(that’s better)). We give no time for reflection. We allow ourselves no pause to allow these huge events to settle within our minds, bodies and souls. Part of me wonders whether we do ourselves significant physical, psychological and spiritual damage by not recognising these moments and ‘moving on’ too quickly, ‘Keep calm and carry on’ is the general tenor of the age, but sometimes we just need to stop. To pause, to celebrate, to weep…to acknowledge and name what has happened. These events in our lives (a diagnosis, a divorce, moving house, retirement, graduation… you might add others) need to be recognised and marked. And the way we do this is through ceremony, through liturgy, through symbolic actions that speak louder than (but are usually accompanied by) words. That’s why, for all the temptation to simplify, to dress down, to translate what we do as church, liturgy and liturgical worship are precious gifts….don’t underestimate them. They ‘hold’ us through the journey of life. The increased congregations in our Cathedrals suggest that people respond to ‘well worn’ words and practices: not everything has to be new. BY treading thr path others have trod before us, by coming to a ‘holy place’ and participating in its patterns and rituals, we discharge some of the trauma of life and recharge with something of the grace of God as we re-enter whatever ‘normalcy’ might be.
Mary came to be purified. You could come to mark an anniversary of a wedding…or a death. You could come to hold the doctor’s words in the surgery in the presence of God and to pray for healing. People come with their children, they come to ‘tie the knot’, we place a coffin before these chancel steps not just because there is space for it there but because for the builders of this church that place marks the division between earth and heaven. Important stuff happens in these ‘liminal’ moments and places but it can’t happen without our attention, without us making time to ‘touch base’ with the wisdom of our faith. You do this, by coming here every Sunday: you offer the past week and are renewed for the new – but you feel it somewhere deep down when you miss a week!
And then moving our attention from Mary to Simeon and Simeon’s words about the Christ, notice that this elderly man manages to do what just about everybody else fails to do. He looks beyond the wonder of the temple around him to notice, to see the coming of the Lord. It is Simeon who sees that this child is not just the ‘glory of his people Israel’, but will be a light to ‘lighten the gentiles’. Isn’t this of a piece with a gospel that has so much time for the small, the insignificant, the poor and the lost? That in this huge temple complex (the porchway was as big as York Minster…let that sink in), with the priests and the Levites going about their regular business, with incense being burned and sacrifices being made, none except Simeon and Anna recognise the Presence of God.
Somewhere in this story there seems to be a pointer for God’s people to see differently. If you’ve watched ‘The Traitors’ on TV this season you’ll know that it is easy to go with the crowd, it is easy to be convinced that your attention should be here…not there. Luke, here in the temple, forces our attention away from the building and towards the baby in his mother’s arms. ‘Look here! Look here!’ he shouts. And Simeon’s words (spoken in a building that spoke of immense national pride and affirmation against the gentile unbelievers beyond Israel) remind us that this Christ can never be contained. The gospel is inclusive of all the nations, inclusive of all people…no exceptions. The Kingdom of God is bigger than our churches and our theology. We read last week (in the account of Jesus’ sermon at Nazaeth) of how this begins to be worked out: this divine ‘push’ outwards to the nations is what offended Jesus’ hearers and led them to want to push him off a cliff. But Jesus, through this gospel will push hard against all barriers, he will welcome outcasts, he will upset tradition and eventually empower his disciples to take the gospel to all the world so important is this inclusivity to him. No one should be beyond God’s kingdom embrace: all are welcome in this place, no strings attached, because Christ is the light of the whole world not just part of it.
So, at the end of today’s service we will make our way to the font again, bearing our candles. But this year we will not extinguish them, at least not as part of the liturgy. We will hold them and with them offer ourselves to God’s service. We will hold them to allow the light of Christ penetrate and renew us and we will hold them as reminders to play our part in lightening the darkness of a world that holds such trauma and pain and which needs healing, needs to be made ‘whole’ by the embrace of God’s restorative presence.
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