Sermon for Candlemas, 5:00pm Choral Evensong
Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at Candlemas Choral Evensong, St. George’s Round Church, Halifax, sponsored by The Prayer Book Society of Canada, Nova Scotia and PEI Branch.
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”
Candlemas is a blaze of light in the darkness of the bleak mid-winter, a blaze of light and hope in the darkness of our world and day. There is something wonderfully endearing and comforting about Candlemas, and, yet, it is a most complicated feast!
It is, after all, a double-barreled feast: the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of Mary, the fons et origo of the true meaning of all our commemorations of Mary is found in their conjunction, the meeting of them both in one celebration; a feast of Mary and a feast of Christ. There can’t be one without the other and here they meet in one. It is a feast of meetings, we might say, a veritable hypapante as the Eastern Orthodox Church styles it, an encounter or a meeting, for here is the meeting of Law and Gospel, the meeting of God and Man, a meeting together of men and women, of old Simeon and aged Anna, of Joseph and Mary; a veritable feast of images and persons. So complex and yet so compelling. And comforting, for it is the early harbinger of spring, the turning point from Christmas to Easter, mid-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Light signaling life; the triumph of light and life over darkness and death. As for that other meeting on this day, the Super-Bowl, that is entirely another matter!
And the encounter, the meeting, is in his temple; Templum Domini Dominum templi, “the temple of the Lord the fittest place for the Lord of the Temple”, as St. Bernard suggests. But how complex and intriguing, too, are the conceits of temple! Here is Mary, herself the temple, too, of the Lord, that pure, true and holy source of Christ’s humanity; no true temple anywhere that is not Mary, she who is defined by the Word of God, keeps the Word and ponders it in her heart and brings forth the Word. Such is the true meaning of our temples, our Churches. And we, are we not individually called to be temples of the Lord, too, even our bodies; our lives as lived for God and with God? To be sure. This feast calls us to be the living lights of Christ in the world.
