Year: 2016

“A Light to lighten the Gentiles”

This is an ancient feast and an ecumenical feast, uniting both east and west. Its full title suggests something of its rich significance, a double feast in which we honour both our Lord and his Mother Mary, our Lady, in one festival. It is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin”. But its simpler and more usual name is Candlemas. These are all terms and names which contain a host of associations.

Its most basic sense is the remembrance that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth to offer the required and ancient rituals of purification and the presentation of the first-born.

Luke alone gives us this story. The focus is on the encounter between the Child Jesus and the Old Man Simeon; a meeting which is rich in significance.

The Song of Simeon is the Nunc Dimittis, for instance, which has long been a feature of the Church’s evening sacrifice of prayer and praise. It is, we might say, the Song of Candlemas. It signifies the meeting of the Child Christ and aged Simeon. It signifies the bridge between the old and the new. In the Eastern Church this feast is known as “Hypapanti” – which means “meeting”.

The meeting signifies something more than just the passing away of the Old and the inauguration of something new; it captures as well the sense of fulfilment. There is the sense that what was looked for is actually more than what was expected.

Simeon and Anna are in the temple at Jerusalem waiting, watching and hoping. The overarching theme here is hope. What Simeon beholds in Christ is the hope of the Old Testament brought to an intensity of expression, to its fullness of meaning. It marks the inauguration of something new, ultimately we may say it is the Church; but this does not mean the eclipse of the old so much as its redemption and the purification of its intention; “a light to lighten the gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” This is its ringing theme and song.

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“How readest thou?”

At the heart of the Common Prayer tradition is the Eucharistic lectionary, a creedal way of reading the Scriptures and one which, at the very least, has the virtue of being able to say what the Scriptures are and why and how they should and can be read, a lectionary, too, which is at once catholic and ecumenical.

We meet for Evening Prayer, a wonderful service which provides us with the luxury of luxuriating in longer passages of Scripture than that to which we are ordinarily accustomed and especially for extended passages belonging to the wonderful narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the story of Joseph which we begin to read tonight. But the Gospel this morning about the parable of the Sower and the Seed provides the interpretative framework. It complements the question raised in this evening’s second lesson, “How do you read?” “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.” There is a parable and there is its interpretation. The parallel to tonight’s second lesson could hardly be clearer. The force of the question, “how readest thou?” could not be greater.

The year 2015 marked the 30^th anniversary of The Book of Alternative Services here in Canada and in some sense the anniversary of the founding of The Prayer Book Society of Canada. The conjunction of the two is at once necessary and unfortunate. What was unfortunate is that it appeared that the Prayer Book Society arose and exists essentially in reaction to institutional authority, particularly, the Bishops in their mistaken and misguided attempt to impose the new alternative liturgies upon parishes over and against the constitutional principles of the Anglican Church of Canada and the doctrinal magisterium of an Anglican Christian identity embodied in the principles of the Common Prayer tradition. What is necessary is the task of upholding and reclaiming the fullness of our spiritual identity and life.

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“Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.”

Misunderstood and often overlooked, the three Pre-Lenten Sundays, with their exotic and strange sounding names, provide a necessary preparatory interlude between Epiphany and Lent. Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are vestiges of older patterns of the biblically based practice of the Quadragesima, the forty day period of fasting, penitence and prayer commonly known as Lent – a term for Spring from Old English referring to the lengthening of the days – which marks our participation in the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. The pre-Lenten Sundays point to different ways of marking the forty days of Lent. Septuagesima, the week of seventy days, Sexagesima, sixty days, and Quinquagesima, fifty days before Easter, these Sundays have coalesced to form a transitional season having its own intrinsic spiritual character.

They warrant our special attention. Displaced by radical changes in the ordering of the ecclesiastical calendar and the lectionary pattern of scripture reading in recent times, their educational, spiritual and practical significance has been largely ignored. Yet the spirituality of these Sundays is really about appreciating certain crucial and defining features of Christian moral doctrine and life. It has to with the classical and the theological virtues; in short, with the rich interplay between nature and grace that shapes character. These Sundays carry forward a theme which we have also seen in the Epiphany season.

The scriptural lessons on these Sundays prepare us wonderfully for the journey of Lent as the journey of our souls to and with God in Jesus Christ; in short, our whole life. Ultimately, they ground us in the way of our journeying, at once presupposing and anticipating the way to Jerusalem. They prepare us by way of the forms of love. Lent, after all, is the pilgrimage of the soul in love. The love of God perfects and renews our loves. These pre-Lenten Sundays are all about the interplay of the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice with the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

As such they offer a powerful narrative of the love which perfects our humanity and which engages critically with the assumptions of the therapeutic culture. They recall us directly to the moral discourse of Christianity with its rich legacy of terms and categories which speak profoundly to the nature of the soul in its desiring. In short, they belong to the theology of amor, love.

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