Candlemas

Candlemas

Malachi 3.1-5; Hebrews 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40

“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Luke 2.35

Have you ever had one of those moments, which is so perfect, so beautiful, that it hurts?

In my experience such moments are rare, but I remember well over thirty years ago on a clear, frosty night coming over the Sussex downs on my motorbike, and arriving, frozen, at a friend’s house in Steyning.

There was a huge log fire and the only other light was from candles. We lay on the floor in before the hearth listening to Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. Snow fell gently outside and the room was full of the beauty of dark and light, of music and companionship and the pain of knowing that the moment must pass.

I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows; because it is bittersweet: from the pain of bringing a child into the world who then brings such joy; to the pain of passing through death and into eternal felicity.

And yet we naturally and rightly long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible it would make for a dull existence.

Mary’s life was certainly bittersweet. All the confusion and shame of the conception, the agony of labour, the long uncomfortable journey, the indignity of the stable - all at last were past.

Now she brings her pride and joy, this six week old baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both Mary and this mewling baby-God are ritually unclean through childbirth. That was the Levitical law. They must offer two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, to buy back this firstborn son.

These are the dual aspects of this Feast, as Bishop Cosin acknowledges in the 1662 Prayer Book which he entitles: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called, The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin.”

It was primarily a Feast of Our Lord, rather than of his Mother, as the ancient collect which Father Richard sang earlier, taken from the 7thC Gregorian Sacramentary, makes plain.

And the blessing of candles? Well this was probably another example of that early Christian cross-cultural trick.

Take a pagan festival, any festival - like this one to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it.

Christ is the ‘Light to lighten the gentiles’, Simeon’s song which the choir sang as we started our service; so symbolically we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year and process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel-grey skies –Spring is coming!

And after a few centuries, no one remembers that it was a pagan feast of Imbolc & Oimelc which we have displaced with this Christian festival of light.

And while we are at it, let’s make St Blaise (February 3rd) the patron saint of Ear, Nose and Throat, and bless parishioners’ throats with the newly blessed candles to protect them from all the colds and 'flus so prevalent at this time of the year.

Of course our American cousins (pace those of you in the congregation) are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards. So Candlemas, which the puritans took over the pond, has become the much more politically correct, Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
there'll be two winters in the year.

Candlemas is a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of the 40-day feast of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple;
and yet we look forwards to Lent and Passiontide: the agonies of our Lord’s pierced Body; the anguish of our Lady’s pierced soul.

In some of the older rites where the blessing of candles took place after mass, the white and gold vestments of the mass were exchanged for penitential purple for the procession of lights.

Candlemas reminds us of Life as we Know It, dappled and pied with pleasure and pain.

Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bitter-sweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bitter-sweet wounds of affection.

The joyful comfort of lovers, friends and family is always eventually plundered by death and grief.

And with all our conviviality and social pleasures, who has not sat down and felt so alone, and but precariously loved?

We can be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, but constantly nagged by intimations of despair. Recession hits us when we feared all was going too well.

As Hazlitt put it:

Man is the only species who can laugh or cry because he is the only being who knows the difference between what is and what should be.

We can long for peace and yet stand looking at war.

We can reach for the stars and in minutes be only too aware of our human mortality and of the contingency of all things.

But the Light shines in the darkness: that spark of hope which God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life. And even in the gloom we can still choose to turn our back upon it. But the light beckons.

As Barrack Obama expressed it in his appeal to the American people:

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draw us to him, the source of all light: the bittersweet man of sorrows who has been through what we go through, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us in today's epistle.

We live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ, and so we have hope.

And like John Donne, when we have those fleeting, perfect moments we catch glimpses of the life to be when the shadows have finally passed and we pray with him:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion...

And with this confidence we shall not fear, even if

“A sword shall pierce through (our) own soul also.” Luke 2.35