30th January 2021
Parish Church of St James, Louth
Malachi 3.1-5; Hebrews 2.14-end; Luke 2.22-40
+ May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen
I had a parishioner exclaim to me this week that she dearly wished they would give the number of babies safely born alongside the number the virus has robbed us of every day. Each and every death is a great sorrow, and must be mourned, but I think we have all found the relentless statistics hard to bear—both because they say too little, as well as too much.
Birth and death, dark and light. These are very much themes that play against one another in the Feast we are keeping today with its three names: Presentation, Candlemas, and Purification. And the doubleness feels appropriate for this time of year, when days slowly lengthen but winter still has us in its grip. And for this year in our times, when we have to work so hard to find our brightness.
At the Presentation we have, on the one hand, the joy of a new child—and the overwhelming joy of a recognised saviour. But at the same time we have the death, even though received with gladness, of Simeon. And we have the prefigurement, in this offering of Jesus at the temple, of his ultimate offering made on the cross—and in Simeon’s words the sorrow that will bring to Mary,
his mother, and so to the whole church aware in that moment of what humanity is capable.
There is still an equivalent of the purification Mary and Joseph come for, forty days after the birth of Jesus, in our Church of England liturgy. Because, I suppose, I had a game vicar at the time and a love of all things recondite and antique, I’m one of a vanishingly small number women of my generation who can say she has been ‘churched’. You can find this service in your Book of Common Prayer. It is quite simple, and in many ways beautiful in its focus and attention on the woman and what she has been through. And although ‘the great pain and peril of child-birth’ may not be quite what it once was, there had still been both for me. And the request for safe passage through her life to come at this dramatic turning-point in someone’s life certainly felt appropriate.
In that ceremony of churching, and in the Jewish presentation and purification in our Gospel a struggle, an ordeal is acknowledged and faces are turned towards what is to come. It strikes me how much this is a motion we all continue to need.
As, week by week what we have come through so far. We will need something larger, more national, whenever it is possible to say this is all at an end. But on a Sunday, a day both between endings and beginnings, a day to reflect and renew, we all have a chance for our own purifications, presentations.
We have two images for purification in our reading from Malachi: ‘refiner’s fire’ and ‘fullers soap’. Both are quite extreme, the one boiling hot, the other caustic and chemical. What brings us to new life is not necessarily gentle, just as there has been little that has been gentle about the crises we are nested in. But we are still called to look into the heart of the flame and see the bright metal to come, to understand that beneath the pressure and pain of the scrubbing fuller the bright felted fleece might emerge. To believe in the craftsman who is bringing us up into the light of day, to gleam anew.
Already in corners of your gardens as of the Rectory garden, you will have seen the white flowers that are called, for their colour and their timing, ‘candlemas bells’. Snowdrops. Bright against the dark, wintry earth, they call us to light our hope brightly again, to rekindle our spirits, and to open ourselves to the ‘purifying’ God is able to bring us. I pray for strength, and hope, and fresh renewal for all of us this Candlemas Sunday. Amen.