Some Liturgical Notes on Sunday, February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple

(this short piece appeared in this week's edition of our parish newsletter, All Saints Alive).

The Presentation of Christ by Hans Holbein the Elder, 1500.

This coming Sunday, February 2, happens to be the fixed date for one of the Principal Feasts in the Anglican Communion.  The Feast of the Presentation of Christ occurs forty days after Christmas.  While it has other names, The Feast of the Presentation commemorates the occasion described in chapter two of Luke’s gospel, when Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the Temple.

As faithful Jews, in accordance with the law of Moses, Mary and Joseph were required to bring their firstborn son to the Temple to be redeemed (see Leviticus 12 and Exodus 13:12-15).  Think of it as a kind of christening service.  At the same time, Jewish law required that forty days after giving birth, Mary should present herself for ritual purification, as childbirth was considered to make a woman temporarily unclean.  For this reason, this Feast is sometimes called The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin.   Older Anglicans may recall the service of “The Churching of Women”, which can be found in the old Book of Common Prayer, and is a sort of Cristian survival of the Jewish rite of purification of new mothers.

The customary sacrifice for the presentation of a firstborn sun was a lamb, but Luke’s gospel mentions that Mary and Joseph brought two birds (doves or pigeons) which was an allowable sacrifice for poorer families.   This detail in Luke reinforces the idea of the humility of the Holy Family, and helps understand Mary’s Magnificat, which stresses the lifting up of the poor over the privileged.

Luke also includes two characters, Simeon and Anna, who both recognize the infant Jesus as the promised Messiah.  Simeon and Anna are both figures of patient hope and faithfulness, people who have been waiting their whole lives trusting that God would deliver on God’s promises.  Simeon’s words have become famous in liturgy as the “Nunc Dimittis” and are used in the Prayer Book service of Evening Prayer:

LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, / according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, / which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, / and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

Anna, a holy widow who lives in the temple, is described as a prophet, and is honoured in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as St Anna the Prophet.  The only time she appears in the lectionary in the Sunday gospel readings is when the Feast of the Presentation falls on a Sunday.

Finally, another name for this feast is Candlemas. In the western church, the service began with a candlelit procession, and the priest would bless beeswax candles to be used in the church in the coming year.  Some of these candles would be distributed to parishioners for prayers in the home.  At All Saints we have observed Candlemas in the last few years when February 2 fell on a weeknight, using the Book of Common Prayer, and have distributed candles.   We will be blessing and distributing candles this Sunday in honour of this ancient Christian practice.

How Are You Called? A Homily for the Baptism of Our Lord

Preached on Sunday, 12 January, 2025, at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke’s, Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.

  Readings for the day:  Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 

And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

My most treasured memory from this Christmas will always be a handmade card from Joy’s oldest granddaughter.   In the card she had written “Dear grandpa, I love it when I get to see you I could not wish for another grandpa”,  and when I read it, the room got quite dusty for a moment.  I got teary because I’m not actually her grandfather.  Her maternal grandfather has been dead for many years, and I was always just happy to be called Mike, out of respect to his memory.  However, this year she evidently decided to call me her grandpa, which means more to me than any of my academic or professional titles.

This experience led me to reflect on how we find our truest identities in our deepest and closest relationships.   We may be or have been a banker or lawyer, a teacher or beautician, but, if we are fortunate, we can say that at the core of our identities we are a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, a son or daughter.  It often seems to me that those who do well at retirement thrive because they can let go of their professional identities and find their true selves in their most intimate, familial identities.

Today in the life of the church, the Sunday after Epiphany, is often called the Baptism of Our Lord, but I think it could just as easily be called the Identity of our Lord.  Epiphany is that season after Christmas where we learn through Jesus’ words and deeds that the babe of Bethlehem truly is the Messiah, the Saviour.  Today we learn that the Magi were right to honour this child, whose royal identity is now confirmed by the voice from heaven in today’s gospel, for at his baptism, Jesus is proclaimed God’s beloved Son.  And the good news for us is that we receive this same baptism, confirming our identities as children of God, as brothers and sisters of our Lord.

To see how all this works, let’s start with John the Baptist.  We met John in Advent in this same place, Luke 3, and he was saying the same thing, that the one greater than him was coming.  "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming” (Lk 3   ) John had called people to repent and change their ways, and his water of baptism was essentially a common and ancient Jewish practice, ritual washing (mikveh) to be repeated as necessary.  

John is clear that Jesus is offering something different: “he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”.   Fire in the scriptures is destructive but it’s also transformative, like the refiner’s fire that the prophet Malachi mentions (Mal 3.2-3).   The Holy Spirit is likewise transformative.   The Holy Spirit has been at work constantly so far in Luke’s gospel.  

Holy Spirit comes to Mary and allows her to conceive (Lk 1.35); Holy Spirit comes to Elizabeth and allows her and her unborn son to see that the child Mary is carrying is the Lord (Lk 1.41).  Holy Spirit allows old Zechariah to prophesy that his son John will be the “prophet of the most high” (Lk 1.67).  And Holy Spirit comes to aged, patient Simeon and allows him to see in Mary’s child who will save all the nations (Lk 2.25-26).  

Suffice it to say that two chapters into his gospel and Luke has established the Holy Spirit as a big deal, as the power of God that makes the impossible possible, and which allows the faithful to see what God is doing around them.   This same power is now given to Jesus in the baptism that he offers.   And what is the purpose of this new baptism?  

John offers a clue in his metaphor of separating the wheat from the chaff.   The winnowing fork allows the grain to fall to the floor and the chaff to be scattered by the wind.  The grain is then gathered for the harvest.  The word gathering is huge.  The prophets promise that the Messiah will gather the scattered people of God (Is 11.17, Ez 11.17), and Jesus identifies himself as the shepherd who will gather the lost sheep together (Lk 15.3-7, Mt 18.12-14).  John thus hints that Jesus’ baptism is part of his mission to gather the lost and the loved and to bring them into the family of God.

As I said at the beginning, what happens in today’s gospel isn’t so much the baptism of Jesus (that does happen but is not described) as it is the calling or naming of Jesus.   The heavens open, the Holy Spirit comes down on Jesus (for the first time in Luke HS is described physically, appearing like a dove), and the voice from heaven announces that Jesus is "my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  This voice confirms what was said earlier (Gabriel told Mary that her son “will be called the Son of the Most High” Lk 1.32-33), so in part this episode is about confirming Jesus authority, but it’s also about placing Jesus within the particular familial identity that we call the Trinity.

While he doesn’t use the word Trinity, Luke here brings the entire family of God together: God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all working together and bound up in a relation to God.   And, what’s remarkable and wonderful for us, is that this is a family that we humans are part of.  Continuing from where our gospel reading leaves off, Luke then gives us the ancestry of Jesus through Joseph’s lineage.   We get a list of seventy-six generations, taking us through such notable figures as David, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, and Noah, until finally we come to Adam, who is described as “the son of God” (Lk 3.38).

I think Luke’s point here is simple and wonderful.   By bringing us back to Adam, Luke is saying that if Adam was God’s son by creation, linking us all to God by our common ancestry, something new is now happening.  Jesus, created in human form by divine action, is the new Adam, the new son of God, and Jesus has the power the bring us into a new relationship with God, a relationship untroubled by the sin of the original Adam and his human descendants.

Jesus’ baptism, and every one since then done in Jesus’ name, brings heaven and earth together.   Regardless of the age of the person being baptized, the same thing happens: we are named by our earthly name, but we are also proclaimed by our heavenly name, each of us a child of God, each of us beloved, all of us included brought into God’s family.   

I know that for some of us, the word “family” does not have positive associations.   Some of us come from loveless, dysfunctional, and broken families, and if that has been your experience, then I encourage you to lean into those words, “this is my child, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”.   Imagine God speaking these words to you in love.  Imagine Jesus greeting you warmly as brother or as sister.   What a wonderful and helpful antidote to the idea that God is distant and remote.  And, if you haven’t yet been baptized, perhaps this way of thinking about baptism as the place where we find our calling as children of God would encourage to consider baptism.

Let me finish by addressing an elephant in the room, the dwindling of baptism in our church.   It’s true that our font has scarcely been used in the time I’ve been here.  What was once the norm, infant baptism or christening, is now the exception as young adults have detached from faith.   Perhaps we need to think about adult baptism as the new norm, and gearing our messages and our outreach to adults and young adults who increasingly find themselves alone and alienated.

Writing in the Atlantic Magazine today, Derek Thompson says that we live in the “anti-social century”, when face to face relationships are collapsing among all ages, demographics, and ethnicities.  The result, says Thompson, is that more and more people live in isolation, and live in “fear, anxiety, and reclusion”.   Once we as church tried to reach the lost by offering Jesus as the cure for sin, but what if instead we offered Jesus as the cure for loneliness?  What if we leaned into the idea that baptism was about God calling us out of our loneliness and into God’s family, as God being eager, even desperate, to say to each lonely soul, you are my beloved child, and you’re not alone.  I think this is messaging that the church needs to pursue in the midst of this loneliness epidemic.

My heart sang when a young girl found the love to call me grandpa.  How many more lonely hearts out there would sing and soar to hear that they are God’s beloved child?