The Presentation February
2, 2014
Malachi 3:1-4
Ps.84:1-6
Heb. 2:14-18 Luke
2:22-40
Today is a day which has many calendar
designations. In the regular church
year, this would be the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany, but it is
also the 40th day after Christmas on which falls a major feast of
our Lord and when a major feast of our Lord falls on a Sunday, it takes
precedence over the regular propers for the Sunday.
On the folk ethnic calendars February 2nd
is known as Groundhog Day. On this day
we believe that an over-grown rodent can become an accidental weather
prognosticator for predicting the duration of the cold of winter. I guess the liturgical counter part of
Paxsutawney Phil would be that if Preacher Phil comes into the pulpit and sees
his shadow then Lent is going to last 14 weeks instead of 7 weeks this
year. And I do see my shadow since the
house lights are on. Sorry.
But on the perhaps the most revered calendar
of the American culture, the Super Bowl falls on this day this year. And unfortunately for many, the Super Bowl is
the feast of feasts and takes precedents over everything else on this day,
which is why a priest once told me that he always prayed that his home team did
not make it to the Super Bowl because he desired to have at least some church
attendance on Sunday.
With all of the calendar conflicts of this
day, we can return to some reflection upon the feast of the Presentation. The events of this day have brought about
some interesting practices as well as historical adjustments. But beyond the liturgical minutiae there is
perhaps a profound message embedded in the song of Simeon which proves to be a
rhetoric of origin for the greatest early paradigm shift in the practice of the
Christian church.
On the fortieth day after Christmas, the
birth of Jesus, Mary, the mother of Jesus reached her days of required
segregation from the Temple due to the ritual impurity that was believed to be
incurred by women during child birth.
This notion of Mary’s ritual impurity was unthinkable for those who
later came to hold that Mary was perfect and without sin, that she was
immaculately conceived and that she was perpetually a virgin, in that there is
a branch of the church who do not believe that Jesus had biological brothers
and sisters. So why would perfect Mary
have to re-enter the community in fulfilling a purification rite? Well, she didn’t have to, but just like Jesus
was circumcised and was baptized by John and didn’t need to repent of any sins,
so Mary fulfilled the liturgical rites as an expression of her full solidarity
with humanity.
For a long time, churches had their parallel
rite for the re-entry of the mothers into the church after child birth. For those of you old enough to remember the
former Books of Common Prayer, you perhaps remember the pastoral rite entitled,
The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth commonly called The Churching of
Women. The rubrics actually specified
that women were to present offerings for the occasion for the priests and
wardens to be used for distressed women.
While the Jewish rite implying the impurity of women during child birth
is rather repugnant to us today as well as even the hint that women had to be
“churched” again after child birth, we perhaps need to exercise some
interpretation charity in appreciating the high infant mortality in the not so
distant past as well as the high rate of mortality of women in child
birth. Such a birth event with high
negative probability could account for corporate liturgies with non-scientific
and liturgical superstitious connections being honored as a way for communities to deal with this major rite
of passage for child and mother. Modern
non-religious folk do far crazier things to guarantee that their favorite team
will win. We could also regard this as a societal recognition of a 40 day maternal leave for mothers to bond with their babies.
This feast is called the feast of
Presentation because of another ancient rite with a history. The Passover Lamb was the ritual decree that
God gave through Moses when there was an indiscriminate killing of all first
born sons who lived in Egypt during the time of Moses. Moses gave the people of Israel inside
information; “If you will sacrifice a spotless male lamb in place of your son
and sprinkle the blood on the door, then your son will be spared death but you
will also know that your first born son will belong to the Lord and so you must
ritually present him to the Lord.” And
this of course was the basis for the church at various times in history
requiring that first born sons be given to the church for the priesthood. It also meant that if first born sons
belonged to the church, so did their inheritance because all of the “worldly”
possession of the priest belonged to the church under the rubric of the vows of
poverty, chastity and obedience.
This day is also called Candlemas and has been
a liturgical event for churches to bless candles. The Song of Simeon, states that the infant
Jesus would be a “light to lighten the nations.” So Christ as the Light of the world makes the
feast of the Presentation consistent with the basic theme of the season of the
Epiphany.
I apologize for all of the secular and
ecclesiastical liturgical minutiae; presented for context if not just a
chuckle. However, I think that this
feast is significant in reinforcing the main theme of the Epiphany, which is
the Manifestation of the light of Christ to the world.
And so I would like for us to turn to the
significance of Simeon and the famous Song of Simeon, which is included in
Daily Office of Evening prayer known under it famous Latin designation the Nunc
dimittis.
The Gospel of Luke is the first half of a
larger work sometimes referred to as Luke-Acts.
And while it would seem that the events of the life of Jesus occurred
chronologically before the birth of the church, the writing of Luke’s Gospel
actually occurs after the church was already an established reality. Why?
Because history is always written in hindsight. We only are interested in what came before
after something significant has happened.
Why do we have countless millions of people
who have made the pilgrimage to Bethlehem and nobody making a pilgrimage to
Swedish Covenant Hospital, in Chicago.
Why, because I was born at Swedish Covenant Hospital, and nobody rightly
gives a rip about my birth place.
The Acts of the Apostles was penned by
Luke. It is a chronicle about the
success of the church through mission of the apostles, Peter and mostly St.
Paul.
St. Paul is responsible for presiding over
the most significant paradigm shift in the history of the church. Although, Paul visited the synagogues in the
Jewish Diaspora in various cities of the Roman Empire, he found that the
success of the message of the Gospel was embraced by more non-Jewish
persons. So there was an incredible
dilemma; here these non-Jewish persons wanted the message of the Gospel. They received it and they changed their
lives. They devoted themselves to these
new Christ communities. Paul had a
dilemma; how do you tell someone who has embraced the message of Jesus Christ
that he had to become circumcised, he had to quit eating pork, and he had to
observe all of the feast days on the Jewish liturgical calendar? The Jewish ritual practices were impractical
and inaccessible to so many who were having their lives transformed by the
Gospel and who were forming these early churches.
St. Paul saw the evidence of the message of
Jesus Christ; he also recognized that the Jewish rituals were inaccessible to
the people who were receiving the message.
He made a theological decision; he became the theological architect and
ecclesiastical Pope for the “seamless” inclusion of the Gentiles into the
greater River of Salvation history which had Judaism as a major tributary after
the age of Abraham.
Jesus himself was not the conscious architect
of the church or its separation from Judaism.
So Luke had a writing goal which needed to be achieved. How could the true Jewish roots of Jesus of
Nazareth be upheld but be presented with subtle hints toward the reality of
what eventually happened within the Pauline churches and in Christianity?
And so we have the infancy narratives, the
Christmas Stories, in Matthew and Luke.
Some scholars believe these narratives were the last to come to textual
form in how the Gospels were comprised.
How was the Gentile mission of the Gospel
foretold in the life of Jesus? Well,
magi, foreigners or Gentiles visited the Christ Child and paid him homage. And Simeon, this very old man, symbolizing
the antiquity of the Jewish tradition sees the baby Jesus at his presentation
and what does he say, “ I have waited my whole life to see this. I have waited to see how our tradition is
connected with the lives of the rest of the people in our world. Because I now see with my own eyes the
Savior. And the whole world is now
prepared to see the Savior. His time is
ripe. This baby will be the light to
enlighten the Gentiles or the nations.
But it will not be a diminishing of Israel; it will in fact be Israel’s
glory because this baby will universalize Israel to the entire world.”
And so you see how Luke uses the Song of
Simeon as a rhetoric of origin for why the Pauline churches happened; it
happened because it grew out of and was predicted by the salvation history
which began in creation, flowed in a definitive way through the people of
Israel, but now has come to the entire world.
This is why Paul wrote that in Christ there
is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free but a new creation.
The Song of Simeon was Luke’s literary
pilgrimage to the origin of the success of the message of Christ to the entire
world.
You and I can embrace the light of Christ as
a light to the world. Christ can still
be light to this world of non-Christian people because his message of love and
hope is universal to all. We do not have
to think that the Christian churches of the world exhaust the relevance and the
message of Christ as light to this world. We can be completely committed to this light even
as we don’t need to be chauvinistic about our church or Christianity. We can be humble about the relevance of the Light
of Christ to all and know that where people practice love, justice and forgiveness
they are in fact, joined with the light of Christ. Amen.
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