by CCW | 2 February 2014 19:00
Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at Candlemas Choral Evensong, St. George’s Round Church[1], Halifax, sponsored by The Prayer Book Society of Canada, Nova Scotia and PEI Branch[2].
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.
“Light up now your candles at this evening service,” the seventeenth century Anglican divine, Mark Frank, bids us, “become we all burning and shining lights, to do honour to this day … Let your souls shine bright with grace, your hands with good works; let God see it, and let man see it; so bless we God. Walk we “as children of the light,” as so many walking lights; and offer we ourselves like so many holy candles to the Father of Light.” Such is but one of the many examples of doctrinal devotion occasioned by this feast as it is set before us in The Book of Common Prayer; a feast day and by God’s Providence falling upon a Sunday in the season of Epiphany and so to be celebrated in that context and on this day.
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” St Paul bids us in our second lesson this evening. It won’t have escaped your attention, I suspect, that you have heard that passage before and not so very long ago; indeed, as the Epistle reading on The First Sunday after the Epiphany. Candlemas brings out the deep logic of Epiphany. Epiphany makes known the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and makes known the divine will and purpose for our humanity. In a way, Candlemas concentrates those themes wonderfully, particularly through the interplay of these readings at Holy Communion and at Evening Prayer. Even more, the great Gospel for this day provides us with the occasion of Simeon’s song, the Church’s great evening canticle of praise, the Nunc Dimittis. There is the sense in which Candlemas is always with us; the sense in which this encounter, this meeting of meetings, is about nothing less than the continuing process of our “being transformed by the renewing of our minds”. For Anglicans that process belongs to the dynamic of the Prayer Book as providing a system of spiritual life and prayer, of service and sacrifice. That dynamic is about the interplay of justification and sanctification incorporating us into glory.
We may wish for winter to be transformed into spring, sensing like the Canadian poet, Charles G.D. Roberts, that the “germ of ecstasy – the sum of life” “lurks hid” “in the lonely ridges” of the harsh bleakness of the fields in winter, waiting “till the rain whisper in April and the crocus come”. The sonnet, Winter Fields, probably written at Windsor in 1890, is one of a collection of sonnets and poems written for the 1892 centenary of the poet Shelley. And yet, Candlemas opens us out to the realities of another spring, the spring of our souls as redeemed by Christ, our being in Dante’s lovely word “trashumanar”, transhumanised, by which we become more not less than who we are. Candlemas speaks to such realities.
I would like to consider the connection between Candlemas and Epiphany by way of Mary and Jesus. Few are the Gospel scenes in which Jesus and Mary are together; fewer still are the Gospel scenes which present a dialogue between Mary and Jesus. There are really only two; one from St. Luke’s Gospel, the other from St. John’s. They both reveal the essential features of the deep logic of the Epiphany season, being set before us on the first and the second of the Sundays after Epiphany; in other words, they are before us every year regardless of the length of the Epiphany Season which like the Trinity Season varies in length. You may think this mere pedantry but the pattern of the year unfolds no end of significant doctrinal and devotional ideas and concepts that have entirely to do with the dynamic of our life with Christ.
Luke tells the story of Jesus as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple at Jerusalem in the midst of the doctors of the law “both hearing them and asking them questions”. The bar mitzvah of Jesus, we might suggest, it shows at once the transition from boyhood to manhood as well as the lingering worries of parents not quite prepared to cut entirely the umbilical cord. This was before the digital umbilical cord of helicopter parents using smartphones. Jesus had stayed behind after the Passover unbeknownst to Mary and Joseph. They find him three days later still in the Temple amid the learned doctors of the Torah.
Here is the first dialogue between Mary and Jesus. “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing,” she says. Anxious and worried and understandably so, but it seems like a mother’s rebuke of an inconsiderate child. Jesus’ response is more astounding; a rebuke to his mother, it might seem, “How is it that ye sought me. wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Did you not know, he is saying. It reveals the essential divinity of Christ – he is doing the will of his Father, our heavenly Father. The story is an Epiphany story, an epiphany of Christ as the divine teacher as well as the human student. It marks the transition into adulthood, the stepping out into public life, the beginning of Christ’s public ministry in Luke’s account. The exchange is most instructive. It teaches us about Christ’s essential divinity through his humanity and through dialogue with Mary.
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany presents us with a second dialogue scene between Mary and Jesus. Found in St. John’s Gospel, it is the wonderful story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, “turning water into wine”, “God in man made manifest”, as the great hymn puts it. At the heart of it lies the teaching of the Epiphany season not only about who Christ is but who he is for us. Here in John’s account is the first miracle that Jesus did in which he “manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him”. The first miracle teaches us the purpose of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. We are healed and restored to fellowship and enjoyment of God and one another. Heaven is about our social joys.
At the heart of that story is the dialogue between Mary and Jesus. Two statements by Mary frame Jesus’ extraordinary question and statement. “They have no wine”, Mary says, to which Jesus responds in what seems to be another rebuke, “O woman, what is that to you and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.” How odd! Yet Mary seems to get it. “Whatsoever he tells you to do, do it”, she says. The rest unfolds in wonder and mystery, the mystery of the water turned into wine, indeed “the good wine”. We lack the wine of divinity, the means of our blessedness and joy. Mary has put her finger on the human predicament. We are radically incomplete without God and without what God provides and seeks for us – our good, our blessedness. It can only happen through the hour of Christ’s passion and resurrection, through the divine redemption of our humanity and that cannot happen simply at our demand, not even at Mary’s, but only by God in Christ. Powerful stories.
Candlemas, too, presents us with Mary and Jesus but here is the extraordinary thing. They are both silent. Jesus is the unspeaking infant; Mary the silent mother, “marveling at those things which were spoken of him” by Simeon before he tells her that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” for this child, whom Simeon has called Lord, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign that shall be spoken against” and to what end? “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Epiphany and Candlemas not only reveal God to us; they reveal us to ourselves. Neither Mary nor Jesus say a word; they are present together in the temple at Jerusalem. Yet even their silence is eloquent. It is, chronologically, the first time Jesus is in the Temple at Jerusalem but the story points to the purpose of his coming and to who he is. Simeon sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of all the hopes of Israel as well as the disturbing means of its being accomplished. As Abelard’s great hymn puts it, Simeon “made known to all this Light divine”. Christ is Mary’s “and the Father’s only Son/through whom our offering is made/By whom our ransom price is paid”… “the newborn Son/ who comes to rescue everyone.”
There is light but there is darkness too. There is life but there is death, too. The light of Christ blazing forth into our world overcomes every from of the darkness of human evil; his life triumphs over death.
We hear these Gospel stories. The challenge for us is to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” by what we are given to hear and see. Sometimes the silences are deafening and yet illuminating. Such is Candlemas. We are drawn into the purpose of the Epiphany, seeing in Christ our salvation and seeing that our lives are about being constantly turned to him; he is us and we in him through the increase of light and joy regardless of the sorrows of our souls. Here is the light that makes us lovely, the light that fills the temple with splendor, as Haggai suggests, the light of God’s glory. It demands something of us, to be sure, “that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” We see in Christ our salvation, full and perfect in him, but our challenge is to be turned more and more into what we see and hear.
I conclude with words from a sermon by Mark Frank.
The shepherds blessed God in the morn of his nativity; the wise men, upon Epiphany; Simeon and Anna, to-day. All conditions before, all sexes to-day; ignorant shepherds and learned clerks, poor countrymen and great princes, no condition out before, and both sexes in to-day. Sinners both of Jew and Gentile, men that most stood in need of a Saviour, before; just and righteous souls to-day; that we might know that there is none so good but stands in need of him one day or other, – that will want a Saviour, if not at Christmas, yet at Candlemas; if not among sinners, yet among the righteous, either first or last. Mary the blessed, Joseph the just, Simeon the devout, Anna the religious, all in to-day, secular and religious, of all sexes and orders; all come in to-day, as at the end of Christmas; like the chorus to the angels’ choir; to bear a part in the angels’ anthem, to make up a full choir of voices to glorify God for this great present, which brings peace to the earth, and good-will among men. (Mark Frank, First Sermon on the Purification)
Such is the blessing of Candlemas.
Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong, Prayer Book Society NSPEI
St. George’s, Halifax
Candlemas, Feb 2nd, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/02/02/sermon-for-candlemas-500pm-choral-evensong/
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