February 2, 2025 - The Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. It is very good to be with you again this morning. It has been what has felt like a year since I spoke to you last from this pulpit. The last two weeks, the last fourteen days have each brought their own new mind-boggling developments in the world of politics, in the governance of our nation. I preached last fall that we are not to have the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other as if they are equals, but to interpret the events of the world through our Bible, through our Christian faith. And so, as your priest, I will try to do that for us this morning... but goodness, there’s just a lot.
Faith organizations and Christian denominations that land across the traditional political spectrum have struggled with the events of these last two weeks, especially with the freezing of aid that has long been offered to those who assist refugees. Our own Episcopal Migration Ministries, which Father Jim mentioned in his sermon last Sunday, laid off 22 people this week due to a newfound lack of federal funding. The organization I worked for after college, Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, was left scrambling as funding to PEPFAR, the wildly successful global AIDS relief program that has saved an estimated 25 million lives, that funding was put on hold. The website for USAID, the Agency for International Development founded by John F. Kennedy, was taken down yesterday, leading aid organizations to panic about their future and the futures of those they serve. The infamously cruel base at Guantanamo Bay is now being reopened for housing migrants. Planes are crashing. Transgender patients in New York were refused treatment yesterday, a transgender veteran committed suicide at a hospital last week. Legal immigrants are being arrested outside churches, others are hiding in their attics.
Quite simply, no matter your partisan political affiliation, no matter who you voted for, it has been a heavy, heavy two weeks for anyone with a heart, as testified by prominent Christians across the political spectrum. Some of you asked me last Sunday if I was doing okay, as I wasn’t my usual lively, chipper self. Well, (gestures wildly), there’s just been a lot happening. So, how do we go on, how do we continue here? You did not come here this morning for a recitation of the news. Father Jim rightly preached last week that it is the church’s job, following Jesus’s inaugural address and Bishop Budde’s sermon, to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim justice and mercy. Abbey told me last night that we probably all just needed a little bit of hope today.
Thankfully, we have the Spirit and our lectionary to guide us this morning, we have a story different from and larger in scope than the story of the news to ground ourselves in, to look to for strength as we live by faith in this world of difficulty and uncertainty. Today, strangely, even for those familiar with the lectionary and liturgical seasons, we have a brief departure from the season of Epiphany to wade into the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple. This day is always celebrated on February 2nd in the Christian calendar, and no, it is not Punxsutawney Phil or Groundhog Day related. February 2 falls on a Sunday this year, and so today we get to read and tell this story instead of our usual “fourth week after the Epiphany” passages.
And the story we get to ground ourselves in today is a good one, one that gives us a three-pronged Christian approach to the difficulties of today. It is the story of baby Jesus being dedicated, essentially; the story of Simeon and Anna, two of the very first gospel preachers; the story of Mary and Joseph bringing their infant son to the temple for the Jewish rite of purification; the story of Candlemas. This story, in some parts of Christian tradition, brings an end to the season of Christmas, so if you still have your Christmas tree up, it really is time to take that thing down. Especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but also for many Roman Catholics, this is a day for the blessing of candles to be used year-round, candles of course used to represent Christ, the light of the world. We put a heavier emphasis on the Feast of the Epiphany in the Episcopal Church (and especially around here this year), but today is indeed a special day for Christians, one I will use to focus us on the proclamations of the two people present, Simeon and Anna.
Simeon is described in this passage as a righteous and devout man, guided by the spirit. Tradition holds that he was elderly; some commentators argue he was over 100, but it never makes that clear in the text. Instead, it simply says that he was waiting to meet the Messiah, having been promised he would not die until he had seen him. When the Spirit guides Simeon into the temple and then he sees Mary and Joseph bringing Jesus in, he takes Jesus in his arms and sings, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,” recognizing all that he had hoped for was now complete. The words of this song, the Song of Simeon, have been prayed every night by monastics for generations, they’re in our Book of Common Prayer as a daily part of the Evening Prayer service on page 120. Seminarians in Sewanee, Tennessee, read or sing them nightly in chapel. There is peace, knowing we have seen the long-awaited Savior who would show us the embodied love of God, who is not only for the Jews, nor only the super religious, and certainly not only the wealthy and the privileged, but for all peoples, all races and genders and socioeconomic statuses, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to the people Israel.
Anna gets in on the praising too. One of the few women mentioned by name in the gospels, Anna is a prophet of great age, a widow, an eighty-four-year-old living in the temple, worshiping and fasting and praying night and day. She sees Jesus and cannot help speaking to everyone about who this child would be, how redemption had finally come. She doesn’t grab baby Jesus and hold him aloft, maybe she has a little more self-restraint than Simeon, but surely, seeing the Messiah after eighty-four years, she has ample reason to be celebrating, and she cannot contain her joy, praising God for this child, for the incarnate son of God, for the one who would come to show us the way to life in him.
For the vast majority of church history, Christians have had little to no say in who ruled over them. Caesars, tyrants, kings, queens, dictators, they have all come and gone. Simeon and Anna were no exception. These elderly, devout Jews suffered for decades under Roman oppression, under Ceaser, under King Herod, and in today’s story, they met God, incarnate as a baby boy, born to two religious, Jewish parents. The sacrifice offered in today’s text indicates Mary and Joseph offered a pair of turtledoves or pigeons for Jesus’s purification. The standard offering according to Jewish law of the time was a lamb, but if you couldn’t afford a lamb, two birds would do. Mary and Joseph were poor, they were migrants, they had their baby in a manger and then were refugees in Egypt on the run from the law, from the cruelty of a power-obsessed and fearful King Herod.
In this month’s Christian Century, Kelly Brown Douglas writes an article called “What does it mean to be a Christian in these times?” As a professor of theology at Harvard Divinity, she said she gets this question a lot, and if I’m honest, I’ve asked it a lot myself of late; I’m sure you’ve wrestled with this too. Her entire article is worth a read, I’ve posted it on Facebook, but after pleading for our own political engagement, after arguing that God enters history on the side of the marginalized, after reminding us of the work of the cross and its full significance, Kelly Brown Douglas writes this, “to be a Christian in times like these means what it should mean at any time... there is no time when we are not called to be committed to making real the justice of God... being a society where the humanity of each and every human being is honored and respected.”
Friends, it is clear today that Christ’s call in last week’s text to live lives of justice and mercy, that Brown Douglas’s call here... well, that’s going to take some work, perhaps more so than in previous eras and under previous administrations. The world is sadly broken; of late, we can feel it in our bones. But today, we also have the testimonies of Simeon and of Anna, that the very light of the world is now with us, and that can give us peace and give us joy and call us to something new and real and good. These two elderly, devout Jews had surely been through a lot in their many years under Roman oppression, and still they could not help but celebrate the light found in this little baby Jesus, knowing what it would mean for the world.
The stories of heartache in our nation will likely not get easier in the days, weeks, months to come. No matter who we vote for, pain in the lives of others should be heartbreaking, and it has a tendency to draw us toward despair. I challenge you this morning, and yes, I challenge myself too, that when we feel that despair taking hold, that powerlessness in the face of (gestures wildly) all of this, that we instead turn to this Presentation story, to baby Jesus being recognized as the Messiah, to the peace and joy of Simeon and Anna, two elderly, devout Jews who had been through a lot under Ceasar and Herod. When we feel despair taking hold, I challenge us to not simply sit in front of our TVs or phones and fall deeper into that despair, but to get involved in the loving work of justice and mercy, to find ways to show love to our neighbor, to live “good news to the poor” and to live that good news loudly.
God is still at work amid the pain, amid the cruelty. And we are invited as Christians to join in God’s redeeming work in the world, working toward a society where all are honored and respected and loved.
The promises of God to Israel were fulfilled in the sight of Simeon and Anna that day in the temple, and the promises of God to us are still good and real and true, that blest are they who dwell in God’s house, that God is able to help those who are being tested, that God is overflowing and abundant love, and that that love will always win. May we remember that this week as we cling to Simeon’s peace and Anna’s joy and then get to work in love, letting our light, the light of Christ, shine in this broken world. Amen.
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