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 21st 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.
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.
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