The Heart of the Matter

The Hebrew and Greek words for “heart” are used 814 times in the Bible to refer to the human heart and 26 times to refer to the heart of God. Five of those uses come up in today’s readings.

In Greek it’s cardio, a root familiar to anybody who has ever had an EKG or been in a Cardiac Care facility or gotten your heart rate up on purpose by doing cardio exercises at the gym. In the world of the Bible, the heart was seen as more than a pump. It was the center of emotions and feelings, of moods and passions. Some of that carries over to today, of course, as we remembered when we celebrated Valentine’s Day earlier this month.

The heart is capable of both joy and grief. In Acts 2:26 we read: “therefore my heart was glad.” In Psalm 13 the poet asks “must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?” The heart can be a source of courage as in II Samuel 17: “the heart of a valiant man that is like the heart of a lion.” Or it can be the source of fear, as when Joseph’s brothers discover their brother is still alive “and their hearts failed them and they turned trembling to one another…” (Genesis 42:28)

But in the Bible the heart is seen as even more than all of this. We tend to think of matters of the “head” and of the “heart” as separate realities with a clear division of labor: the head as the place for matters of intellect and the heart as more emotional. But for ancient peoples the heart was also seen as the center for decision-making, and as the place of devotion and obedience to God. It was the place where discernment happened.

As we begin our 2020 Lenten journey tonight, we hear Jesus saying in today’s gospel reading: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It’s more than a good stewardship text. If our focus and our energy are on the concerns of this world then that is where our heart is going to be as well. But moth and rust consume all of our stuff, eventually. Even we go back to the dust.

So where is your heart tonight? Jesus says in another place: seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all the rest will fall into place. Our heart is meant for God.

And so we heard the prophet Joel inviting us to “return to the Lord with all your heart.” What would it take for us to give God all of our hearts? What holds us back from that radical a faith? Joel also says: “rend your hearts and not your clothing.” In Biblical times, to show remorse and grief, people tore their clothing. Joel seems to suggest that God desires a torn or broken heart. What might that be about?

In Psalm 51 (which we will come to after the sermon today, as part of our confession) we’ll pray: “create in me a clean heart, O God.” And then there, too, we’ll pray that the heart that is acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart. Again we might ask: why does God want our hearts to be broken rather than whole?

What is the ‘heart of the matter’ when it comes to keeping a holy Lent? Remember that the forty days of Lent are patterned after the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, following his baptism in the Jordan River. And remember that those forty days were patterned after the forty years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, after escaping from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea. In both cases the time in the wilderness is about prayer and learning to trust God, about temptation and spiritual growth. It’s about the journey from slavery toward freedom.

Do you remember how in that Exodus story Pharaoh’s heart was hardened? His government was oppressing these Hebrew slaves yet he refused to change. He refused to let God’s people go. He actually didn’t believe they were God’s people at all, but his slaves. Where his “heart” was, there was his treasure also; namely with those pyramids and all the economic wealth that was being built on the backs of slave labor. And so Pharaoh could not see (or he would not see) the pain that his economic plan was causing those at the bottom rung of the social ladder. His heart was hardened to their plight, and things went downhill from there for him.

The Exodus, seen from the perspective of Pharaoh, was a financial disaster. That’s a reminder to us that perspective matters, and that we need hearts of flesh to rightly perceive God’s presence in our lives and in the world. But the problem with hearts of flesh is, well, that they are fragile. They are, as Ingrid Michaelson puts it, breakable.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess

We are so fragile
And our cracking bones make noise
And we are just
Breakable, breakable, breakable, girls and boys

Anyone who has ever loved and lost knows this. Too often once it happens we learn to put up shields and protective layers to keep our hearts safe and protected. And so we harden our hearts, thinking that is a way to protect ourselves. But hard hearts are the way of Pharaoh, not God.

The witness of this day suggests that God requires broken hearts. Does that strike any of you as odd? I think to grasp what is at stake here we need to understand first that both the prophet and the poet imagine that God’s heart is a broken heart, torn by what humans do to themselves and to one another. Sometimes people ask “why does God allow suffering in the world?” But while that is a fair enough question for someone in the midst of suffering themselves, I think there is a more important question than the “why” question. Where is God in the midst of human suffering?

We who have just finished celebrating the Incarnation from Advent into Christmas and through this long Epiphany season insist that God is right there in the midst of it all. Emmanuel—God-with-us—means just that. God with us in all of it. Not standing somewhere high above and detached, but right in the thick of it, in both the joys and in the sorrows of whatever life brings. It is hard to imagine, if you accept that reality, that God’s heart could be anything other than a broken heart. To see how people behave and treat one another and even sometimes how we treat ourselves (sometimes even in God’s name) surely breaks God’s heart.

I think that what is being suggested in these texts is that if we mean to approach God we need to allow our hearts to be broken as well. We need to become vulnerable, both to God and with one another. Community and love are not possible without vulnerability. Indeed, that is very much the message when we reach the end of this holy season, in that Upper Room where Jesus gives a maundatum novum: a new commandment to love one another, modeling a way to do that by becoming a vulnerable servant and washing his disciples’ feet. Love is the path to a broken and contrite heart. To pay attention—to be alive—to care about a world beyond our ego-centric realities is almost certainly to have our hearts broken. We are tempted to “harden our hearts” (as Pharaoh did) and call it survival of the fittest. Or we are tempted to give our hearts away to idols—the idol of money, or of security, or of nation.

And so I simply ask, as this Lenten journey begins, where is your heart? And what state is it in?

And perhaps more importantly: where would you like your heart to be in forty days? How might this season be for you as an individual and for St. Matthew’s as a community an invitation to draw closer to the heart of God?

The heart of the matter in Lent is that there are spiritual disciplines, practices of faith, that can help us with our heart’s desire:

• Fasting, or some version of fasting helps us to be disciplined with our bodies;  
• Meditating on God’s Holy Word and studying the Scriptures feeds us with food that really does sustain and nurture us, in body, mind, and spirit;
• Alms-giving insists that we see the poor and the suffering in our midst; 
• Prayer, especially in the form of confession, cleanses and heals us and opens the door to reconciliation with those whom we have hurt. (Remember that you can only confess your own sins – not anyone else’s!)

These ancient practices push us out of ourselves, in order to glimpse the world if only just a little bit from God’s perspective. The heart of the matter in Lent isn’t about shame, which in my experience paralyzes us. It is not about beating ourselves up. Rather, it’s about learning to care, learning to love, learning to hope. It’s about asking God for a heart of flesh, and knowing that unlike a heart of stone, a heart of flesh can easily be torn. A heart of flesh is so breakable.

But that is precisely the kind of heart that God can use.      

The Bright Sadness of Lent

The western liturgical calendar has us on the Mount of the Transfiguration for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. I am at St. Matthew's, Worcester. Next Sunday their new rector will be joining them, as they and we enter the holy season of Lent. 

The season that follows the Feast of the Epiphany varies in length from year to year. The reason for that has to do with when Easter falls. As you know, the wise men always arrive in Bethlehem on January 6. They are late, but predictably so! So if Easter comes early, you only need a few weeks to get to Ash Wednesday. If it comes later, as it does this spring, then you need more weeks. It’s math, but it’s pretty easy math.

Next weekend your new rector will have arrived and Fr. John will walk through this holy season of Lent, and the mystery of Holy Week, and ultimately to the empty tomb with all of you. It’s a great time for the next chapter of your life together to begin.

But before you set off with Father John, I want to remind you about how we have come to be on the Mount of the Transfiguration today. One of my favorite hymns for Epiphany is “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise,” which nicely summarizes the themes of these past seven weeks. It reflects on the ways that God is made manifest in the Incarnation: manifest at Jordan’s stream in the Baptism of Jesus – back on January 12. Manifest in the call of the disciples to come and follow Jesus, in the gospels we heard on the last two weeks in January as you thanked and said goodbye to Mother Judith. I was with you at the beginning of February when we recalled how Jesus was manifest as a forty-day old baby when his parents made the sojourn to the Temple in Jerusalem and were greeted by Anna and Simeon. And then over the past two Sundays, manifest in Jesus’ teaching ministry, especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

But God was not just made manifest a long time ago in a galaxy far away, or once upon a time: but God is being made manifest here and now if only we have eyes to see. One of the main themes of Epiphany is that Jesus is the Light of the world. But a direct corollary to that theme is that you and I are called to walk as children of that Light by allowing that light shine through our lives. We are called to illuminate the darkness around us so that the world may believe. So I wonder what epiphanies have come to you this Epiphany season, as you’ve said goodbye once again and as you wait for the arrival of a new rector?   

All of these themes culminate on the Mount of the Transfiguration. Moses and Elijah represent the two main figures of the Old Testament: the Torah and the Prophets. God seems to speak on mountaintops in the Bible, maybe for the same reason that so many of us feel closer to God when we hike up a mountain and look out over the vista. Whether that vista is a desert in the American southwest or multi-colored maple trees on an October day in New England or vineyards and olive trees somewhere in the hills of Tuscany, it is with good reason that we speak about “mountaintop experiences” as a metaphor for our religious epiphanies. The landscape itself very often helps to “open our eyes so that we might see God’s hand at work in the world around us.” In such moments we may feel the presence of God more fully and in those same moments may know the experience of being more fully known.

There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a temptation. We want to savor such moments of the faith journey by trying to hold onto them and even making them normative. I think that’s what the building booths idea is all about. Episcopalians love to build booths, to find ways to hold onto memories and to claim holy spaces. And that’s good. But it can also keep us from moving on. And Jesus is clear that he is moving on from the Mount of the Transfiguration to Golgatha. He’s also equally clear that we are invited along, to make that journey through Lent to the cross. Epiphanies are wonderful gifts for the journey and they sustain us, but faith is not one long extended mountaintop experience. We are called to listen to the Voice of God in this story which makes clear that we are called to listen to, and then follow Jesus, who insists that we are not only mountaintop people, but a people called to follow him the Way of the Cross.

I’ve traveled to the Holy Land five times and am working on another trip in May 2021. One of the times I was there, I had a chance to stand on Mt Tabor, which many believe was the mountain in today’s gospel that Jesus climbed with Peter and James and John. Our little band of pilgrims celebrated the Eucharist there and yours truly got to be the celebrant. It was an experience I will never forget. As the bread was broken and the wine was shared, it seemed very clear that Christ was in our midst. While I didn’t see Moses or Elijah that day, I could better understand that desire to try to hold onto such moments by building some kind of tabernacle. But of course our pilgrimage led us down that mountain and through the Judean desert. Like Peter and James and John we made the hard journey toward Bethphage and Gethsamene and ultimately to Golgatha, where we walked the stations of the cross in Jerusalem.

On Wednesday night I’ll be with you one more time to invite you into a holy Lent, a Lent that your new rector will share with you. Keep your eyes and ears open! I hope that those with ears to hear may reflect on what all of this suggests for a congregation about to welcome a new rector. Be loving and patient and gentle and kind and not arrogant or rude and not focused on building booths, but on making the journey together. Always with God’s help.

But there is one caveat I need to share with all of you. All that I have said to you so far today is shaped by the Western Christian liturgical calendar. While there may be differences between Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, we all follow this same basic path from Epiphany to the Jordan River and then ultimately to the Mount of the Transfiguration; and from there to Ash Wednesday and ultimately to Easter morning and our songs of alleluia. As the hymn I mentioned earlier puts it, “…from there thou leddest them, steadfast to Jerusalem; cross and Easter day confess, God-in-man made manifest.”

My own experience of the Christian tradition, however, even when it has been quite ecumenical, has still tended to be very western. My experiences in the Holy Land, however, have reminded me that at its heart, Christianity is more of an eastern religion than a western one.  You feel that and smell it and see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Nativity or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It really is true that in Christ there is no east nor west. But you experience that in a much deeper way when you worship with the Orthodox, whether Greek or Russian or Ukrainian or Syrian or Armenian.

In fact, you don’t have to go halfway around the world to experience that part of Christ’s Body. Worcester has ample opportunities to experience what I’m talking about as perhaps some of you know. When I was serving in Holden, I used to have my confirmands visit churches in Worcester outside of our tradition; they soon learned that the Orthodox take way more than an hour to worship!

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York and one of the leading liturgical scholars in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. I’ve re-read his book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha, many times now.

The weeks immediately preceding Lent are very different than what I have been describing as the journey that has brought us to the Mount of the Transfiguration. The Orthodox focus on five themes before they begin the Lenten journey: Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and then finally, Forgiveness Sunday. In other words, they get ready not with a long Epiphany season but with these five themes: desire, humility, return, judgement, forgiveness. Since Orthodox Easter falls one week after our western Easter this year – on April 19 – next Sunday is when our Orthodox siblings will be celebrating Forgiveness Sunday.  

A friend of mine who was a student of Schmemann’s once described to me how this works. The liturgy for Forgiveness Sunday involves an elaborate dance as each person in worship is able to say to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.” Now most of you know how hard it can be for us to forgive someone who has hurt us very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because, to be honest, that might not yet be true. Rather, it is this: “God has forgiven you.” Even as this dance is unfolding the choir is singing Easter hymns.

The theological point, whether one is shaped by eastern or western Christianity is the same: Lent gives us forty days to work on forgiveness and reconciliation. But there is something sensible to me in beginning with the reminder that God gets there before us. When we confess our sins, when we truly repent, the good news of the Christian faith is that God does indeed forgive us. Lent, then, becomes a time for us to try to live more fully into that reality—a journey toward Pascha. The journey that claims us as Easter people.

The holy season of Lent is an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s abundant love, which then allows us to more fully embrace the Paschal mystery by becoming instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation. It is not meant to be a private time, even if confession is personal. Lent is about being liberated from sin. The triumph of sin is well-known to us: that experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred. The first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, however, is forgiveness, for it opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality.

“To forgive,” Schmemman writes, “is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.” There is an atmosphere created in Lent, he says, a state of mind that our worship creates. This spirit of Lent is meant to help us to experience the “bright sadness” which is the message and the gift of Lent. We are invited to enter this season of “bright sadness” in order to experience that mysterious liberation, a liberation that makes us “light and peaceful” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.” 

Maybe that image gives us our connection between east and west! Maybe that is where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday. It gets us to, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter" which I think is in fact about forgiveness. And maybe it’s the perfect place to start the journey with a new rector and with the reminder that neither John nor all of you will get it right all the time.

Forgiveness gives us the chance to remember that the Church’s one Foundation really is Jesus Christ, her Lord. Hold onto that truth, as the journey continues. Always with God’s help.

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Today I was at Trinity Church in Whitinsville with two congregations that have shared a pastor for a while now; Trinity and St. John's, Millville. I preached while their interim priest presided at the Eucharist. And then we gathered to talk about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for them. Today's readings can be found here.

It’s hard to know for sure exactly which hill Jesus and his disciples climbed for “the Sermon on the Mount.” The Sea of Galilee is surrounded by hills, and it could have been any one of them. As you may recall, Luke doesn’t even remember it as a hill – he calls the same sermon the sermon on the plain!

Such discrepancies are not troubling to most preachers I know. More often than I can count, I’ve met people at the door after a sermon who told me they heard “exactly what they needed to hear, as if I was speaking just to them.” I am often surprised, however, by what they heard me say! Sermons are meant to be heard, and internalized and those have as much to do with the hearer as the preacher.

In any case, back to Jesus. Most likely what we call “the Sermon on the Mount (or Plain)” wasn’t one sermon preached on one day. Both Matthew and Luke, after all, are reconstructing what we call “the Sermon on the Mount” some fifty years or so after these events took place. Jesus certainly went away with his disciples to escape the crowds more than once. And they weren’t always quick to understand so he probably had to say a lot of things more than once.

So maybe they went to various places around the lake – what we call the Sea of Galilee. Or maybe they did have one favorite spot. Either way, he taught them over time, and they remembered what he said and eventually the disciples passed those teachings on to the second-generation disciples who wrote it all down.

Now, having said all of that, there is a “however.” With Episcopalians there always is. We prefer both/and to either/or! At least since the fourth century, pilgrims who have traveled to the Holy Land have claimed one particular place as the Mount of the Beatitudes. Whether or not it was originally the holy place, it has become a holy place as pilgrims from north, south, east and west have gone there to pray for at least sixteen hundred years now. It is what is sometimes called in the Celtic spiritual tradition, a “thin place” where the hills are alive with the sound of music. I’ve been up there five times now, in pilgrimages to the holy land.

The current church built on that site was designed by an Italian architect named Antonio Baluzzi. It was built in 1938 and is run by the Franciscans. It’s a quiet and peaceful place that overlooks the lake (“Sea of Galilee”) and as you look down the hill you can see so many of the places prominent in Jesus’ ministry, including Capernaum, where he made his home. The gardens at that Church of the Beatitudes are meticulously kept and you can walk and think and pray.  It’s quite conducive to “considering the lilies of the field” and the “birds of the air.” So whether or not it is the place, I can attest to you that it is holy ground.

On a warm afternoon I spent there in 2010, there was a large group of Chinese Christians who beat us there. Their spirituality was not nearly as contemplative as our group’s. In fact, they seemed downright boisterous! But as I watched them posing for a group photo, I was profoundly conscious of the fact that it cannot be easy being a Christian in China, and clearly being able to come as a group to the Holy Land made their hearts glad; and so once I got over my feelings of superiority it made my heart glad too.

The readings for last weekend, the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, take us to that place, the Mount of the Beatitudes. (Last week I opted for the readings for the Feast of the Presentation where I was preaching but I'm told you stuck with Matthew 5 here. A quick review:

Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

Today’s gospel reading is a continuation of that time apart, as Jesus continues to deliver this teaching to his disciples. As Matthew tells the story, Jesus saw the crowds and was trying to get away…so he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. It is to them—and by extension to us—that Jesus goes on to say the words we heard today. Try to imagine yourself on the hillside, leaning in, with the lake down below and a soft breeze blowing, and the lilies of the field in full bloom, and the birds of the air singing:

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

“You are salt. You are light.” Elsewhere, Jesus will use the image of yeast as well:  the Church as like leaven that makes the whole loaf rise. All of these are little metaphors, metaphors of smallness. If you want to make a loaf of bread you don’t just start opening up cakes and cakes of yeast. It doesn’t take that much. A little bit of leaven is all it takes to make the whole loaf rise.

And we all know the health problems that too much salt can cause us. But in the ancient world, before refrigeration, salt quite literally helped to preserve life. Low sodium diets are good and smart and healthy but even today you can’t live with zero sodium. In addition to being a preservative, salt just tastes good—as long as it’s in moderation. The late, great Lutheran Bishop, Krister Stendahl was fond of saying that Jesus told the church to be the salt of the earth, not to make the whole world into a salt mine! His humorous words suggest that our mission is not to make every person on the planet a Christian. Rather, Jesus challenges those of us who do claim him as Lord to act like Christians. Because “if salt loses its taste, then what good is it?”

Perhaps the most powerful of these metaphors, at least for me personally, is the call to be light. The Church is called to be a light that shines in the darkness, a beacon. You don’t need me to tell us about the darkness of this world. This world is God’s world and it is filled with beauty, to be sure. But it can also be a pretty scary place: a place or wars and rumors of wars, of violence and degradation, of lies and mistrust. Sometimes it can feel like someone has shut out the lights. Even darker still is the dark night of the soul. There are times in our lives when the darkness seems too overwhelming; and it’s not that external darkness, but the internal kind, that we most fear.

And yet: here are Jesus’ words, echoing down through the centuries from that Galilean hillside to this time and place. We have two choices when the world is dark: we can curse the darkness or we can let our little lights shine. And even though we are prone to forget it sometimes, one little candle in a darkened room really does change the whole space. What was scary and dark can, in an instant, become a holy and luminous place. One tiny little flickering candle can guide us on our way, and helps others find their way as well. It’s why every Advent as the days get shorter we light one candle at a time and pray for peace, and joy, and hope, and love.

These metaphors for being the Church are about small things: yeast, light, and salt. And I think that is truly good news. Even in that first setting, Jesus is away from the crowds and with just the twelve. Jesus doesn’t start a mega-church. Rather, he forms a dozen disciples. Don’t ever doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. The fact that you and I are here today is proof that it can be done, and it isn’t done with smoke and mirrors. It’s done one little step at a time. From day one of his public ministry around that Sea of Galilee, from the moment he called Peter and Andrew and James and John, Jesus was asking a small group of ordinary people to do extraordinary things—with God’s help. He called them apart to teach them how to be light and salt and yeast.

And of course that work continues to unfold, here and now, in this place and down the road a bit at St. John’s and across our diocese. That is the message, the good news: that we are entrusted as members of Christ’s Body to pass along to our neighbors. We are witnesses to the joy and wonder in all of God’s works. We are called to be faithful, one day at a time, in small ways. We need to show up and try to live into the promises we renew every time we come to share in the Holy Eucharist: that little tiny bit of bread and that little sip of wine that remind us of the promises we have made and that have been made on our behalf to keep growing into the full stature of Christ. One day at a time.

We live into our calling to be salt, and light, and yeast every time we show up. Every time we offer a smile instead of a scowl. It happens when someone knits a prayer shawl or sends a card to a shut-in or picks up the phone to reach out to someone who needs an encouraging word. Or goes to visit a friend in prison, or in the hospital. You and I are not called to do great things. We are called to small things well and with intentionality; the things that are right before us.

Jesus talks in the Sermon on the Mount about the Church’s vocation to be salt, and light, and as I mentioned, on other days he speaks of yeast. Elsewhere he also talks about the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed. These are all of a piece. When we live these words, the Kingdom of God is very much in our midst: and we are transformed and healed and strengthened for the journey. By God’s grace, that mustard seed grows into something larger, but the work to which we are called is about the little stuff, the stuff it’s easy to overlook. What we discover (or at least what I have discovered as a pastor) is that when we focus on the small things, then together we truly can accomplish even greater things than we had imagined.

This is why the Church doesn’t need superheroes; just saints—the kind you meet in shops and in lanes and at tea, the kind who are fishermen, and doctors and teachers, classmates, snow plowers and insurance salesmen and nurses.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. Don’t worry about doing big things. Just pay attention. Just keep listening to Jesus, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. Just keep on doing the work that God gives you to do today; wherever you may find yourself.

God will take care of the rest. God gets to be God. Thanks be to God!

Feast of the Presentation

As mentioned in this sermon, preached at St. Matthew's in Worcester, I arrived in The Diocese of Western Massachusetts twenty-two years ago. So hard to believe! I'm at St. Matthew's in between the departure of a fantastic interim priest and the arrival of their new rector, coming to us from Long Island. The readings for The Feast of the Presentation trump those for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, and can be found here.

I came to this diocese twenty-two years ago when I arrived at St. Francis, Holden, to serve as their fifth rector on February 1, 1998. I stayed there a little over fifteen years before accepting this current call as Canon to the Ordinary in 2013. The DNA of St. Francis was profoundly influenced by the lay people who started praying Morning Prayer in Holden in the late 1940s and early 1950s and then convinced Bishop (“Appy”) Lawrence and the people of St. John’s, Worcester to start a mission out there in the suburbs. By the time I arrived in Holden most of those founders who had guided a fledgling house-church into a thriving dynamic parish were in their seventies and eighties. One of the sad but holy aspects of my time in Holden was to bury many of that founding generation of saints.  

The last of those founders is still alive, however. Helen Wisner will turn 96 this year. Helen was one of those amazing saints that you pray every congregation has at least one of. She was a long-time choir member until she just couldn’t do it anymore. Like so many saints she was not unacquainted with sorrow and grief. In fact, while I was in Holden we buried both her husband and her son. But I think her greatest ministry of all was this: she adored and encouraged young people.

Every time we had a Baptism—no matter how loud the baptismal candidate may have been—Helen would say, “so beautiful, so amazing.” Every time we had the youth lead worship and would bring out the bass guitars and drums, Helen would say the same thing: “they are so beautiful, so amazing.” She was not the kind of old lady who felt the youth of today are a problem. She adored them and she let them know it. She knew that kids were not just a part of the future Church, but the most alive part of the present Church. While firmly rooted in the history of St. Francis, she was never nostalgic for the good-old-days. Rather, Helen was there to cheer on and encourage every change that unfolded while I was rector of St. Francis. She got in her bones the Biblical witness to share the rich heritage of the past with our children and our children’s children and then let it go.

So beautiful. So amazing. Here is the thing: to pass on the faith of our fathers and mothers to a new generation is to recognize that it is “living still.” We don’t pass the faith on like a carefully wrapped package. We pass on a living faith and as it is embodied in a new generation, in a new context, a new day dawns as we are guided by the Holy Spirit into all truth. When that happens it is always “so beautiful, and so amazing.”

And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. It is tempting for 21^st century Christians to see this moment as something like a Baptism: Mary and Joseph bring baby Jesus to the Temple forty days after his birth. Calling this day the Feast of the Presentation reinforces that reading. And maybe that’s a part of it all. But the truth is that this journey is more about Mary than it is about Jesus.  As Luke tells us, they came because of the Torah of Moses.

What would happen if we called this day the Feast of the Purification of Mary? They were, after all, first-century Jews, not twenty-first century Christians. They didn’t know yet they would be the stars of something called the “new” testament! They just had The Testament, the Word of the Lord given in the call of Abraham and Sarah and in the Torah and the Prophets and the Writings. And in the twelfth chapter of Leviticus it says this: after a woman gives birth to a son she is to go to the temple to be made ritually clean again and to “present a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering.”

The assumption was that childbirth made her “unclean.” Understanding that concept in English and within our Christian world-view is a real challenge. Unclean sounds like dirty to our ears, so this is easy for us to misunderstand. The Hebrew word, tum’ah, is all over the Book of Leviticus and central to the priestly worldview. But it doesn’t mean impure or contaminated or defiled, even though all those words sometimes get used in English. Without getting too crass here, it’s helpful to remember that in the Leviticus world-view, excrement is not tum’ah.  Because tum’ah is not about dirt. It’s about “life forces.” It’s a sense that blood—literally the life-force running through our veins—when it escapes (as in menstruation or birth) leaves a kind of residue behind. And before one encounters the Holy again one needs to acknowledge this ritually.

Now let me just say that I don’t pretend to grasp that worldview completely nor even to share it. So it’s not the task of this sermon to defend it. My job is just to be clear about the Levitical world-view and why it is that Mary and Joseph come to the Temple in the first place. They ascribed to this world-view. And it’s more about Mary than Jesus. It’s about the call of God’s people to holiness. And in this understanding, the ordinary stuff of day-to-day life, including birth and death, can leave a kind of residue behind. So one goes to the Temple…

There is a provision in the Torah for people who cannot afford a lamb as a sacrifice for this ritual: “if her means do not suffice for a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons.” (Leviticus 12:8) Since Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph took that second option, he is telling us that they couldn’t afford the sheep. He’s telling us in code-language that Jesus grew up poor, that this man acquainted with sorrow and grief did not grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. That should catch the attention of us, who are called to follow him, because when we encounter the poor in our own day we are meant to see the face of Jesus. It should catch our attention because Jesus didn’t scapegoat the poor or call them lazy; he loved them and stood in solidarity with them. He was one of them.

Anyway, as we heard in today’s gospel reading, Mary and Joseph and forty-day old baby Jesus arrive at the Temple in Jerusalem some sixty miles or so from home in the days before interstate highways and automobiles. And there they encounter two senior citizens, Simeon and Anna. Simeon was “on duty” as a priest. It was a rotating job, not like being a permanent rector, but more like being the supply priest. So he happened to be the guy there for this event. Or maybe if we don’t believe in coincidences then we might say that he was destined to be the priest on duty that day. And he recognizes at some deep intuitive mystical level that as a Jew who has spent his life waiting for messiah he can now depart in peace, because this is the one. His eyes have seen the glory of the Lord:

                              Lord, you now have set your servant free

                             to go in peace as you have promised.

                   For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior

                             whom you have prepared for all the world to see:

                   A Light to enlighten the nations,

                             and the glory of your people Israel.

We pray these words at the end of each day at Compline. It’s like an adult version of “now I lay me down to sleep…” If we should die before we wake it is without fear, for we are a people who have seen and known and loved this Jesus and even more importantly have been seen and been known and been loved by the one whose love is deep and wide.

There was also a prophet there: Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. An eighty-four year old widow. I bet you’ve known someone like that in your life. She never left the temple, but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that very moment she came by also, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.  Anna is the first in a line of prophetic disciples who will preach about Jesus to all who were looking for the redemption of Israel: messiah has arrived, bringing about a new era and the dawn of a new day. This old lady in her mid-eighties - who has spent her whole life steeped in a rich tradition - this daughter of Abraham sees something new and life-changing about to happen. And so she goes and tells others what she has seen. 

So amazing…so beautiful.

This Feast of the Presentation which we celebrate this weekend (sometimes called Candlemas) comes in the midst of this long Epiphany season, reminding us that we are called to let our light shine in the darkness. The problem is that sometimes we aren’t so sure we have that light, or at the very least that it’s gotten pretty dim. We may feel like we don’t bring much to the Table, or even that we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs underneath it. We may feel too old, or too tired. 

But here’s the deal: we are made worthy, we are holy enough, good enough, to let our little light shine in the darkness because that light of Christ refuses to be overcome by the darkness of this world. We can be like Anna, or Helen, or any of those old ladies you may know (and men too!) who are faithful and wise and holy.

So here is my prayer for you, St. Matthew’s, as you prepare to welcome a new rector. That you will channel your inner Anna (and your inner Helen) and also your inner Simeon, and that you will be amazed at what is new and that you will see beauty in it. That you will trust the Holy Spirit to lead you to a new day. That you will let your light shine in the darkness, and trust that the darkness will not overcome it. That you will offer your blessings to all the little children of the world who are presented here and love them and raise them into the full stature of Christ to claim them and mark them and seal them in the name of the One who was also once a forty-day old baby and who is, even still, the Light of the world.