Dedication, Trust, and Longing: Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

Today is the 40th day after Christmas, and so, since it involves music, we are celebrating that ancient feast of Candlemas at the 10:30 service. Unless you’ve been living under a log, you know this is Super Bowl Sunday, which people are almost never neutral about, they either love it or sneer at it. 

It’s also Groundhog Day this weekend, which by the way is the subject of one of my favorite theological comedic films of all time, so for those of you who have been praying for snow, knock it off so the little rodent can 86 the rest of winter for once.

Our readings, however, reflect another great feast in the church calendar, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, where we remember Jesus being dedicated to God in the Temple and the joy his presence caused to Simeon and Anna. 

In all of our readings this weekend, we hear of focus on holy places and spaces: Malachi is attempting to prepare the people of Israel to be able to worship once again in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This is necessary because during the years of exile, the people’s collective memory of the parts of the covenant attuned to prayer in the Temple had faded. 



Psalm 84 also starts with an outburst of joy as the psalmist stands within the boundaries of the Temple. I wrote about these first verse of Psalm 84 in my priest’s reflection in the Beacon this week. I love these opening verses from the Common English Bible translation:


               How lovely is your dwelling place,
                  Lord of heavenly forces!
               My very being longs, even yearns,
                  for the Lord’s courtyards.
               My heart and my body
                  will rejoice out loud to the living God! 
               Yes, the sparrow too has found a home there
                  the swallow has found herself a nest
                  where she can lay her young beside your altars,
                  Lord of heavenly forces, my king, my God!
               Those who live in your house are truly happy;
                  they praise you constantly. (Common English Bible version)


The image of the sparrow and the swallow, two tiny birds who could both fit in the palm of one hand, so fragile and vulnerable, nonetheless knowing that they were safe by the altars of God—that really speaks to me. They feel so safe they have made their homes, their nests, right up alongside the altars of God. As I wrote about on Thursday, the utter transformation of the holy temple of God described here becomes even more vivid when we consider that in other biblical testimony, including our gospel, birds were more likely to be sacrificed near that altar than find their home there.

The original Hebrew words used are even more vivid and direct. The word for “lovely”—yedidot-- is never used to describe an inanimate object like an altar except in this psalm: the other place where yedidot shows up repeatedly is in the Song of Songs, that beautiful ancient love poem that is so frank in describing the delights of one’s beloved, especially physically, that apparently the makers of the Revised Common Lectionary could only countenance one tiny part of it to be included without making all of us blush. It’s used to describe someone so lovely as to inspire not just longing but sense of wonder as honey-sweet as looking at a magnificent artwork or hearing a transcendent musical masterpiece.

That feeling of safety and security, of being at home near the altars of the Holy One, is something I see shining from the faces of our little ones every Sunday as they gather near the lectern and edge as close as they dare to the area around the altar known as the chancel. They lean in, drawn irresistibly and with joy and a whole-hearted embrace of worship. As they lean through the altar rail, I always rejoice at how safe and secure they feel, and how fully they bare their hearts to God, how they know they have found themselves a home here, just as those wee birds in the psalm have done.

Our gospel reading, too, focuses on the power of worship and prayer in the description of Jesus being presented and dedicated to God at the Temple, as all first-born baby boys were, part of God’s claim upon the first-fruits of all flocks, herds, fields, and families. Jesus’s dedication to God in the Temple as the first-born son reflects the belief that we give to God from our abundance, not from our left-overs.

As our gospel notes at the beginning, Jesus’s dedication to God by his parents was part of a broad set of commands in the Book of Exodus, in commemoration of God’s abiding care and protection over Israel as they journeyed from the oppression of slavery to the abundant promised land that lay ahead of them. In other words, the presentation of Jesus in the Temple was an act of offering God our very best, an act of gratitude and proclamation for all that God had done and was doing for the people of Israel as a worshiping community in both past and present, while expressing trust in God’s continuing care and protection of God’s holy people in the future.

The actual dedication of the precious baby Jesus in that same Temple praised in Psalm 84 happens off stage. But the consequences of Jesus’s dedication are profound. For instance, Jesus encounters two devout, elderly worshipers devoted to worship, prayer, and praise in the Temple: Simeon and Anna, who is also named as a prophetess. Simeon’s longing to see what is called “the consolation of Israel” was keeping him alive, and so notice that here again we hear the word “longing” connected to worship. That consolation or comfort that Simeon longed for was the birth of the Messiah.

Our gospel says that Simeon was guided by the Holy Spirit to come to the Temple—and he listened, even though he could have ignored such nudges. I mean, how many times have you resisted the call of the Holy Spirit in your life? God knows, I did it for years—because the thing is, once the Holy Spirit takes charge, YOU no longer are. You are putting yourself in the hands of God, and that loss of control is way scary for most of us, if we’re honest.

Simeon put his faith and trust in God when God spoke to him—and when his hopes and longings were fulfilled through that willingness to trust in God’s direction, he sang another one of those joyous songs of praise and gratitude for which Luke’s gospel is so famous. It’s a song prayed or sung regularly at the close of Evening Prayer services.

Likewise, when Anna sees the infant Jesus—I like to think that she took him in her arms too, and who denies sweet old ladies or men anything?—and herself rejoiced and explained how THIS child was the fulfillment of all of the people’s hopes and Savior from all their fears and uncertainties. I imagine that each time that sweet holy baby looks into the eyes of those elders, he too lets out a shriek of joy and probably pats a weathered cheek or grabs hold of a finger or nose out of recognition of how the power of prayer brings all things together.

What can we make of all this? First of all, we see the sense of peace, the making tangible the promise of God’s love for us in these Biblical passages.

We are reminded that the longing and appreciation we feel when we enter our holy spaces, including especially this space here at St. Martin’s, is a two way street—that same love and longing we feel to be in God’s presence and bask in that beauty is similarly felt by God, who repeatedly seeks us out and calls to us. Even in at our most pessimistic, distrustful, fearful, hard-heartedness, God still delights in us and calls us to the miracles that abound when we put our trust and faith in God. We too, at this moment are being called to dedicate ourselves anew to living lives grounded and founded in our relationship with God.

We are also reminded of the incarnational understanding embedded in this passage. We see coming together here three generations in one small story: baby, parents, and wise, devout elders—just like our worship brings us into this space every single time we meet to offer our prayers and praises to God together-- despite our differences in ages or stages of life.

We are reminded that holy places like the Temple in Jerusalem or the nave and chapel here at St. Martin’s exude the echoed melodies of hopes fulfilled, of dreams not deferred but brought from imagination into reality, of grief made bearable because the load and labor of adjusting to our losses is shared among us and because those in grief are supported through us.

We are reminded of the fact that Jesus coming into humanity, with all its messiness and fear of failure, actually consecrated this fragile stuff of which we are made, and shows us that it is possible for us to walk in the path of hope and reconciliation to which God calls us. We are reminded that Jesus asks every day to be welcomed before the altar of our own hearts so that they may be strengthened not just for our own sake but for the life of the world, of the neighbors we are called to love and serve.

And as we prepare to embark on our capital campaign and as we continue to work to make our commitment to the life-changing work of this parish not just self-supporting but joyfully, abundantly so, we are reminded of the beauty of God’s altar—how lovely is the dwelling-place of God both inside of us in our hearts and surrounding us in the holy spaces in which this community is centered. Together in faith, we start with a season of prayer before this campaign during what is still called nativity-tide. In our prayers, I ask that we all remember that we pray to pledge to each other our common support as a community. We are calling each other into collaboration with ourselves but most importantly with God, who is, as Isaiah famously proclaimed, about to do a new thing—now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?

We are grounding ourselves in prayer as we seek to lean into our trust of God--our God of abundance who is endlessly renewing and creating. But our success as disciples depends upon being willing to let go of our fears of scarcity to make room for the conversion of our hearts to reflect God’s generous grace and support in our relationships with each other—including our relationship with money. God’s abundant love for us calls us to boldly share in making stronger this community of disciples by—literally-- putting our house in order

We start in prayer so that we may bravely envision a future where financial challenges no longer become a self-fulfilling prediction of stagnancy, where instead we take control of taking care of our needs ourselves, buoyed by God’s abiding love and faith in us. Too often, we only see what we lack, and that gives us permission to fail to act on our mission and ministry out in the world. We get tunnel vision and succumb to inertia, because we are so convinced that there is not enough.

But with God there is always enough.

God doesn’t call us to tread water, much less flail about in fear, exhausting ourselves. God calls us to realize that sometimes the waters rise so we can remember that we have the ability not just to float but to be propelled forward. It is then that we remember that we are not people whose worship centers around a prayer book for nothing. We are reminded that prayer is not a monologue, but a conversation from beloved to beloved

Just as Simeon lived a life secure in his faith in God’s promises, just as that swallow builds herself a nest alongside God’s altar, so we too are called to proclaim the blessings we have already received and to put them into the service of building the kingdom of God with boldness. By putting our trust in God as the foundation of all we are and all we have, we are assured that we will be blessed by seizing the opportunity to allow faith rather than fear to lead the way. Just like Anna, we can put our resources to work for the kingdom—and wonders will be revealed before our eyes, and our hearts and our bodies will rejoice before the living God who calls us to renewal, dedication, and faithfulness. 

Amen.



Preached at the 505 on February 1, and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on February 2, 2020, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 84
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40