Presentation of Christ in the Temple

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word…” Simeon, Luke 2:29

Dismissing is a word that sends us out into the unknown. The word itself has come to add to the fear of the unknown, as in wrongful dismissal or summary dismissal. It speaks to us of being overlooked, ignored, of not being granted a hearing, of finding ourselves surplus to requirements. It carries the bitterness of a workforce being laid off; or an elderly person, once looked to as a contributor to society, made to feel that they are a burden. To be dismissed may banish us to the past, bar us from a share in the future – or even a role in the present.

And yet to be dismissed, especially to find ourselves dismissed in peace, has a very different meaning. Simeon gives thanks to God for dismissing him in peace, and here the word is clothed with the weight not of a burden but of presence. It is the very opposite of being overlooked, ignored, not being granted a hearing, or finding ourselves surplus to requirements. The old man Simeon has been honoured – God has bound himself not to act in order to deliver his people without ensuring that Simeon is there to witness. Simeon’s prayers that God would, indeed, send his Messiah have been heard and answered; and Simeon has a particular role to play, speaking into the lives of Jesus’ parents, and of those who had also been waiting for this moment.

Simeon’s song is sung again day after day at Evening Prayer. To sleep is to step into the unknown, for to lie down to sleep and to rise again is a repeated rehearsal for death and resurrection, for resting in peace and rising in glory. And, of course, one night we might lie down to sleep, to discover that it wasn’t a rehearsal. But in joining with Simeon’s song we too acknowledge that God our master is dismissing us in peace: giving his permission for us to rest, his affirmation of us; and, for our part, choosing to allow that peace to embrace us, even though we recognise that the world is filled with danger and sorrow as well as deliverance and joy.

Dismissal is also how every time we gather around the Lord’s Table ends. Having seen a glimpse of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ, in our listening to the written word and our tasting of his presence in the bread and the wine; having seen a glimpse of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ at work in our lives and the lives of those gathered around us; we are then dismissed in peace: sent out into an uncertain world equipped to love and to serve the Lord. We are dismissed, as those who have been honoured to see God’s salvation with our own eyes; as those whose prayers have been answered, if not yet answered in full; as those who have a particular role and a particular dignity. We are dismissed to go out into the world, reflecting the glory we have beheld, bearing light to those around us.

And this is as amazing today as it was to Mary and Joseph. For here the two very different trajectories of dismissing come together: those the world overlooks and ignores and has no use for are the very ones whom God chooses to call and to send.

Second Sunday of Epiphany

Isaiah 62:1-5 and 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 and John 2:1-11

Last week, those of you who were here will recall that I invited us to reflect on our experience of being crushed and indeed torn apart by the circumstances of life; and how, in those very places, Jesus comes to us to gather us in to community and to honour our losses as holy memories that remind us of God’s presence with us, through good times and hard times alike.

This week, I want to help us to reflect on what happens next; and the word I want to focus on in particular is ‘delight’, which refers to great pleasure:

‘You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.’ Isaiah 62:4

The visionary Isaiah speaks to a community that has been through a crushing experience, has had their world torn from them in being carried far from home into exile, and who will return needing to construct a new normal. They consider themselves – and others consider them – to be forsaken by God; and understandably so; but Isaiah has been caught up in another story that is about to unfold: ‘the Lord delights in you’.

The Lord delights in you. You, unlikely community of broken people – you are those in whom the Lord delights.

We see the same story unfold in our reading from the Gospel According to John, where Jesus delights to join in with the joy of a wedding celebration, and most fully demonstrates that delight when the hosts are hit with the social disaster of running out of the means to provide for their guests, by transforming water into fine wine.

And we see the same story unfold again in our reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, where the Holy Spirit delights in an unlikely group of bickering, competing people, and demonstrates that delight by giving to each gifts for the common good.

God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, defined as ‘I delight; therefore, I AM’.

Allow me to say it again: the Lord delights in you. You, unlikely community of broken people – you are those in whom the Lord delights.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

How does that transform your perception of God?

People often tell me that they believe that God exists, and that God is good, but they can’t imagine that God is particularly interested in them. Interested? God delights in you; is crazy about you!

How does that transform your perception of yourself?

Again, people often tell me how unworthy they feel; surely God must be disappointed in them. But what happens when someone is told ‘you are beautiful’? Their face lights up; their hidden God-given glory shines forth.

How does that transform your perception of the people sat around you?

Can you see their glory? Or just their brokenness?

I want to say something about the artwork currently installed in the Minster, marking Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece over there, near the entrance, is ‘Babel’, Barrie West’s work relating to the global arms trade. It depicts businessmen (crafted from toy soldiers) climbing over a glittering tower constructed of guns. We have deliberately positioned it at right-angles to both the birth of the Prince of Peace – depicted in the south transept – and his crucifixion – depicted on the wall of the Bede Chapel. Here, one of the greatest idols of our times is held in tension, caught in the cross-hairs of love. Here, we too are held in tension.

As we look at the world, there is much that could be termed Forsaken and Desolate. When we look around the room, when we acknowledge one another, sisters and brothers, there is much in our own experience that could be termed Forsaken and Desolate. But there is also another story unfolding – and one that needs present-day Isaiahs, and Johns, and Pauls; male and female, young and old, Mackems and those for whom this is our adopted city; to proclaim it into being, on earth as it is in heaven.

The Lord delights in you. Pass it on.

First Sunday after Epiphany (CW)

Isaiah 43:1-7 and Acts 8:14-17 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

‘His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ Luke 3:17

The word ‘epiphany’ refers to a revelation, a sense of knowing something from God, not necessarily out-of-the-blue and not necessarily claiming to know in full; but, perhaps, an invitation to set out together and see what we might find. In that sense, epiphanies have beginnings, but no ends. As I turned my attention to preaching in this season of Epiphany, I had an epiphany of my own: the sense that God wanted me to focus on just one word each time I spoke, to explore one word that God would draw my attention to, and see what might come of it. The word at 8 o’clock this morning was ‘stature’, and the word for this sermon is ‘chaff’.

John sets the scene for Jesus’ ministry by describing it as being like the work of winnowing. Winnowing is part of the process of harvesting grain. Ripened wheat was cut and brought to a flat area of exposed rock. There it was beaten against the floor, to separate the seed heads from the stalks. The seed heads were composed of two parts: the edible grain, and its protective outer husk, which was inedible to humans. So – once enough seed had been set aside to plant next year’s crop – the next process was threshing. The harvesters would take a wooden sledge, with wooden teeth and perhaps iron on the underside. They might sit a young child, too small to be of other help, on top for ballast; and the sledge would be dragged back and forth across the threshing floor to tear the husks from the grain. Next came the winnowing. The harvesters would take a wooden fan, or fork, and throw great scoops of threshed wheat into the air. The heavier grain would fall back to the ground, while the lighter husks – now known as chaff – would be blown aside by the breeze. It would not carry far; just enough to fall to the side, and be sweep away from the harvest. This throwing action would be repeated again and again until what was left on the floor was a pile of edible grain, which was then gathered into sacks and stored away; and a pile of chaff, which could be added to animal feed, or ploughed back into the soil, or be burnt.

This agricultural process was well-known to most people in biblical times. The rocky outcrop David had bought, on which his son Solomon had built the temple, had been a threshing floor. Within the collected wisdom of their royal courts, the Psalms and the Proverbs, the winnowing out of chaff came to be used as a metaphor for enacting justice: the process of removing the wicked; a process which involved both hard work, and a kind wind; both the responsibility of a human king, and the intervention of God.

But to say that the end of chaff can represent the end of the wicked does not mean that chaff necessarily refers to the wicked, or to wickedness. Even if John’s expectation was that Jesus would separate-out the wicked from the righteous, or purify the repentant of all their sins, as Jesus’ ministry unfolds we will see him give new meaning to existing images, and confound the expectations of even those who recognised him to be the Messiah.

Consider this: that Jesus’ ministry might be described as coming to those whose lives had been crushed; from whom something good, something protective that had sheltered them and allowed them to grow, had been stripped away; and that he then takes the time, puts in the effort, to sift those lives in order to bring out something valuable, something that is good and has purpose, from the threshing.

But what, then, of the unquenchable fire? Does that not speak of judgement? It might; but then again, fire also represents God’s presence in our midst. Consider the Exodus: a handful of people sown into Egypt have become a vast harvest; they have been crushed by their hosts, the protection they had once enjoyed torn from them; God brings them out, and manifests himself as pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. And their time in Egypt, good and ill, from Joseph saving the nations from famine to Moses confronting Pharaoh, becomes an everlasting testimony to God’s promises.

Before Sunderland, our family lived in Southport, in the North West. It was a good husk, surrounding us. But the process of finding a permanent post beyond curacy was something of a threshing. By the end of it, we were gathered up and brought here. But the years we spent there – the gift of friends, of community, of little village shops, a good school, the sand dunes, a spacious house with a real fire, a prayer labyrinth in the garden – are fuel to our testimony of who God is and what he is like, of God with us.

Many of us have gone through a threshing in the past year, where people and places and familiar tasks that have given shape and shelter to our lives have been stripped away from us. Through bereavement. Through job insecurity. Through leaving all we have known and seeking asylum in a strange land. For some of us, we knew Jesus before we found ourselves at the threshing floor; for others of us, we met him for the first time as he came alongside with his winnowing fork, to gather us into a new community.

And that is what he does. Gathers us in, with others. And more: whatever has been torn from us through the circumstances of life is not thrown aside, or trampled underfoot; but this, too, becomes a lasting reminder that God is with us, has been with us, and will be with us through all the sowing and reaping that is to come. And that should be most fittingly so in the place where the threshing floor becomes the temple, in the place where we – crushed as we are by life – gather to worship.

We set aside the second Sunday of the month as an opportunity to come forward, during the sharing of Communion, for prayer for healing, of body, mind, or soul. If my reflections on chaff have touched you in a particular way, and in response you would like someone to pray with you, please do take this opportunity, which takes place in the Bede Chapel.

First Sunday after Epiphany (BCP)

Romans 12:1-5 and Luke 2:41-52

‘And Jesus increased in wisdom, and stature, and in favour with God and man.’ Luke 2:52

The word ‘epiphany’ refers to a revelation, a sense of knowing something from God, not necessarily out-of-the-blue and not necessarily claiming to know in full; but, perhaps, an invitation to set out together and see what we might find. In that sense, epiphanies have beginnings, but no ends. As I turned my attention to preaching in this season of Epiphany, I had an epiphany of my own: the sense that God wanted me to focus on just one word each time I spoke, to explore one word that God would draw my attention to, and see what might come of it. The word for this sermon is ‘stature’.

The Greek word in question can refer to the ‘span of years’ or ‘height’. At face value this is simply a statement that Jesus grew older and taller, progressing through infancy and childhood, through the physical changes of adolescence to adulthood. It is an utterly unremarkable observation, given that, all things being equal, it is inevitable. Except, of course, that all things are not equal. Jesus’ closest contemporaries were murdered in their infancy at the orders of a paranoid king; and doubtless others around him died of natural causes, as babies and children do today, even in the West, even if we try not to think about it.

There are no acceptable answers as to why some live and others die. There is only solidarity with humanity in our joy and sorrow, or distance, denial. In the incarnation, at (literally) breath-taking personal risk, God chose to fully-identify with us.

But, like children, words grow, change, take on new form and meaning once birthed into the world; and in the fullness of time (long after the Gospels were written; indeed, long after King James authorised a translation of the Bible into English) the word ‘stature’ took on a figurative meaning, of intellectual accomplishment or of moral standing. More recently still, the word ‘stature’ has fallen out of fashion entirely. We might have a sense of what ‘wisdom’ and ‘favour’ look like; but ‘stature’ is perhaps lost in the mix.

Stature is a physical thing, but surely more than size. The Queen, for example, has immense stature, and she is only 5’4’’ tall. It is, rather, to do with how we inhabit ourselves, as souls that have been given bodies.

Jesus summarised the whole of the Law and the Prophets in loving God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and your neighbour as yourself. If wisdom is making good or godly choices (the heart, the seat of our will), informed by good or godly thought and good or godly feeling (the mind, the seat of our intellect and our emotions), then stature is the physical projection of wisdom into the world (our strength, directed in love of God and neighbour). Or to put it another way, if stature refers to the span of our years, who gets to shelter under that span?

I am 6’1/2’’, an achievement that I can take no credit for; but for which I can take responsibility. Indeed, if I want to increase in stature, as Jesus did – and as a follower of Jesus, I want to grow in the ways that he grew – then I must love God and my neighbour through how I embody my embodiment.

For example, I know that I am a man of greater stature when I take someone’s hand and look them in the face as I speak and listen to them, than I am when my body language makes it clear that I consider being somewhere else and attending to something else more important to me, more worthy of my attention. And in this sense there is real evidence that smart phones, sold to make us bigger, to extend our reach and our connection, are in fact diminishing our stature. That in itself is a challenging thought, in the world we appear to live and move and have our being in.

Through the years, the Church has perhaps devoted more energy to the management of ‘sins of the flesh’ than it has to nurturing increasing stature. Stature involves stance, in relation to others: neither aggressive, nor defensive; but open, looking for the good in others, delighting in them without seeking to possess or control. If we have thought of stature at all, we have focused on the instruction of the young, rather than our own life-long following after Jesus. But we don’t finish with stature when we stop growing physically: stature is the evidence of wisdom; and those who increase in stature, however young or old, will grow in favour with God and – generally, though not universally – with those around us. As we seek to finish the race before us, may we each increase in stature through the year ahead, even as our bodies slowly start to wear out…