Day: February 2, 2023

Sermons

Sermon for Candlemas

“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. It is a double feast in which we honour both Jesus, 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.” For Eastern Christianity, it is known as hypapante, meaning meeting. 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 sacrifices of purification and 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 and the aged Anna; a meeting 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 or the bridge between the old and the new; thus the significance of hypapante or meeting in the Eastern Church.

The meeting signifies something more than just the passing away of the old and the inauguration of something new; it captures the sense of fulfillment. 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 that of hope. And 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 with its emphasis upon universality.

(more…)

Print this entry

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 February

I put away childish things

To be childish is one thing, to be childlike is quite another. It is an important distinction. To be childlike is to be open to wonder; the very opposite of what Chaucer called “childissh vanytee”, a lack of maturity and a kind of egotism.

The poet and writer, Mary Oliver, observes that “I am, myself, three selves at least.” There is the child in us that remains with us; “it is not gone.” There is “the attentive, social child” that seeks the certainties of daily life in routines, to what is regular and ordinary, “the ordinariness that makes the world go round.” But there is the third child in us that is open to wonder, “a self which is neither a child nor the servant of the hours” for “it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.” That child or self in us has everything to do with intellectual, spiritual, and artistic life, she argues.

We read in Chapel this week Paul’s great hymn of love from 1st Corinthians 13 and part of the story of Christ’s Presentation and Mary’s Purification, commonly known as Candlemas. It marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, from light to life, but by way of love, as Paul’s hymn makes clear. Christ is but an infant, an unspeaking child, carried in the arms of Mary, but old Simeon taking him up in his arms sees in him both the hope of Israel and of our humanity; “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the hope of thy people Israel.” He has a grasp of eternity in our midst.

Paul’s hymn is one of the outstanding works of literature regardless of one’s religious or non-religious identity. The word “charity” is the key word, explicitly mentioned nine times and implicitly another eleven times. It means love, but what kind of love? This little word in English carries a great freight and weight of meaning. Charity is the English translation of caritas, one of a number of different Latin words for love and the Latin translation of agape, one of a number of different Greek words for love. The King James Version of the Bible, the classical English translation which has had the greatest influence on the shaping of the English language since 1611, bar none, uses charity, an Englishing of the Latin, caritas.

Ubi est caritas et amor, ibi est Deus – “where there is charity and love, there is God.” A famous line from an 8th century poem by Paulinus of Aquileia, it captures prayerfully and powerfully how love is not simply something personal, emotional, romantic or sensual. Like Paul, it is talking about love as God. His hymn complements the scripture text you have heard repeatedly: “God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” Both John and Paul have an insight into the idea of eternal love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves which are in disarray. Yet to be reminded of the uncertain qualities of our human love as Shakespeare reminds us, (“In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes”), is also to be opened to its transcendent and eternal qualities. In this sense, love here is not something fleeting and fickle but constant and eternal, dynamic and active. Why? Because it is grounded in the idea of God himself and in his will for us. And it is transformative. It is about growing up in understanding and maturing in love.

(more…)

Print this entry

Prayers and liturgy

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin (also traditionally called Candlemas), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:22-40

Gentile da Fabriano, Presentation of Christ in the TempleArtwork: Gentile da Fabriano, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1423. Tempera on wood, Louvre, Paris.

Print this entry