The Sermons at Calvary

By Father Richard Humke

A DAY WITH MANY NAMES AND MANY MEANINGS

February 2, 2003, Feast of the Presentation, Calvary Church

Today we depart from our regular progression of Sundays to observe a day that has had a number of different names through the centuries, but which is now called The Presentation of Christ in the Temple. What I'm going to do this morning is mostly lecture and some sermon, neither of which may interest you, or perhaps both will. Nonetheless, I hope there is something that you can take with you today.

I said that today has a number of names, so let's get Groundhog Day out of the way right now. Is the groundhog going to see his shadow or not today? Are we going to have 40 more days of winter? Your guess is as good as mine, and we can leave it right there for the moment, though the groundhog will reappear shortly.

Each year on February 2 in the Church's calendar there comes this day called the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple. But February 2 doesn't come on a Sunday in most years, and so only those who keep up with the Church calendar take note of it in those other years -- and that is not many of you, I'm sure. There are hardly any holy days in the Church's calendar that are considered important enough to bump a Sunday -- that is, that can take the place of the Sunday observance.

So important is the Lord's Day (the biblical name for Sunday) in the worship cycle of the Church that it takes precedence over almost anything else that should happen to fall on a Sunday, except Christmas, All Saints' Day, Epiphany, a few others, and this day about which I am now speaking. That is one reason why you will find that most clergy are resistant to lay people's wanting to turn the Sunday worship into an observance of something else, usually patriotic but Mother's Day is another example, except in the most rare of circumstances, like the Sunday following 9/11. The Prayer Book is quite clear on that matter, and your rector is there to defend that policy. That does not mean that a prayer or a hymn cannot take note of some other matter, but it should be of minor proportion.

This is the last day in the Christmas cycle, which began with the First Sunday in Advent way back in early December. Today is 40 days after Christmas, if you can believe it (325 more to go), and the observance is the story in today's Gospel, namely the Jewish custom of taking the firstborn son to the Temple on the 40th day after his birth. So you see that our observance of that event in Jesus' life is this day, and not last Sunday or next Sunday, because we are remembering the Jewish custom of the 40th day.

It was required of a Jewish family that the first male child "to open the womb," to use a biblical phrase, be taken to the Temple to be given to God 40 days after his birth. He belonged to God, but he could be bought back from God, which is what our story today is about. The custom may be rooted in some ancient practice of child sacrifice, perhaps not in Israel itself, where the firstborn son might actually be sacrificed to the deity. Or it may be a recognition of God's gracious power as the giver of life.

Since the child on the 40th day was not sacrificed, and since he was not left at the Temple but returned home with his family, what actually happened was that a substitutionary offering was made in place of the child, though that is not mentioned in our reading.

That is the event in Jesus' life that we are remembering today, and so it is the reason for the name: the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple. It is the last event surrounding the birth, and after today the Church's eyes turn toward Easter.

That's one name for the day, and it is now the proper name, but I said that there were other names as well. The day was called at one time (and it was the preferred name in our older Prayer Books) The Purification of St. Mary the Virgin, and the first words in our Gospel today give a hint to that. When a woman gave birth to a child, she was considered unclean for a period time -- 40 days if it were a boy, 80 days if it were a girl. Don't ask. And an offering was made: "a turtledove and two young pigeons," as our Gospel today says.

So the appearance in the Temple by Mary today was her cleansing, so to speak, so that she could return to normal social life. (The whole matter of clean and unclean in so many areas of Jewish life at the time of Jesus is something that can't be discussed now, but you may recall that Jesus often ignores it with the people he associates with, and when sitting at table. It is one major reason that so much hostility is directed toward him: he does not observe the accepted norms.)

In the Middle Ages the day had still another name: Candlemas, so named because it was a day on which candles were blessed, but also because the song sung by Simeon in today's Gospel says that Jesus will be "a light to lighten the Gentiles." That's the "Nunc dimittis," which you will hear in various settings this morning. And get this: it was believed that a fine Candlemas meant a longer winter and a rainy one meant an early spring. So we have returned to Groundhog Day, from which we started, and that's where we will leave it all.

I told you there were a lot of names and that this would largely be a lecture. But what might this all mean? Is there anything beyond historical associations and folklore that we may draw from today's observance?

As I pondered the reading, two thoughts came to mind, and both of them are associated with children. I'm not going to do much more than suggest them to you, because I have used up most of my time; but I suggest them to you with the hopes that they may be interesting enough that at least one or two of you might want to think about them further. It will also illustrate a way, I hope you all will see, that pieces of Scripture can be taken and used in a meditative way to shed some light on our own lives.

First, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple on the 40th day to present him to God, to sacrifice him to God, so to speak. To sacrifice him to the God they worshipped. Someone has said that children are always sacrificed to that which their parents worship and adore. Think about that.

This same person has said, "...if the dominant value of a parent is to be fulfilled through career enhancement, then the child will be sacrificed to a job. If the parent's ultimate concern in life is to make money, then the child is sacrificed to greed. If the parent is focused on 'better than,' then the child is sacrificed to competition. If the parent is enslaved to alcohol or drugs, then the child will be sacrificed to addiction. If the parent bows down and worships perfectionism and control, then the child will be sacrificed to rigidity and 'looking good.'"

This feast reminds us that the spiritual world, like the natural world, abhors a vacuum, and that there is no neutrality. Something will fill the soul. The question for those of us who are parents is: "To whom or to what have we sacrificed our children?"

And the other thought comes from something that fascinated me toward the end of the Gospel: "When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth." After such great events as these which are told about today, they returned to the dailiness of life. And other than the one event when Jesus, at age 12, was lost at the Temple, we hear nothing more about Jesus' childhood and youth. He appears next as an adult man at his Baptism before he begins his public ministry.

So we might assume that Jesus returned to live a fairly mundane Jewish life in the country, in the little no-account town of Nazareth. I don't think that people paid much attention to him. He was, after all, only one more child, albeit the son of that man and woman who claimed that he was "special." But lots of parents claim that their child is special!

Those people could not have imagined that 2000 years later in some strange place called Kentucky there would be people who would remember that child who had only been swallowed up in the anonymity and dailiness of Nazareth. They could not have imagined that the teachings of the man this child grew into would be the teachings that billions of people claimed to be the teachings that governed their lives (though the claim was always far greater than the reality). If those neighbors might appear in our midst for just a moment, we might hear them say, "Who would have thought? Who could have imagined?"

Who knows what lies ahead for any child? Who knows what great things might come from any child?

As most of you know, I was in my last parish for many years; and one of the wonderful things about being in a parish for a long time is that I saw a whole generation of young people grow up. And when they came back to visit their parish church, as so many of them did because we always tried to make it an inviting place for children and young people -- as they came back from their colleges, from their law firms, from their hospitals, from their offices, from their studies abroad, from their various jobs -- when they came back as proud parents to show off their new baby -- sometimes I would find a little bit of myself standing aside and saying, "Who would have thought? Who could have imagined?" Because you see, there were times I wouldn't have given a nickel for some of them. But we never know the future that will unfold.

The Holy Child's life is shrouded in mystery. We know so little about him. But in a sense every child's life is like that, shrouded in mystery. Who knows what will be made of it? Who know how that life will unfold?

So in conclusion, you might take the story of the Holy Family going to the Temple on the 40th day after Jesus' birth and make your own sermon out of it. I've given you some hints of how to do that. I've shown you some paths you might go down. Make your own sermon out of the story because, you know, that's the only sermon that really matters.