Candlemas

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

“And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
Luke 2.35

I sometimes sit in church here after the 6pm mass, when the lights are out and the west doors locked, but the votive candles are still alight at all the shrines around the church.

There is quietness and the strange beauty which flickering candlelight brings to a house of prayer; the lingering smell of incense, the aroma of God; dark, cavernous shadows and pools of golden light.

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows, because it is bittersweet: from the pain of childbirth to the joy that baby brings; to the pain of passing through death and the joy of the mystery of heaven.

At a more mundane level, as I sat in the pub with four old school friends after Christmas, they all looked the worse for wear – not those bright eyed boys from the 1960s – with myself as an obvious exception; but then, what stories they had to tell! The bitter-sweetness of having a life.

But of course we always dream and long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible, it would be dull existence.

Our Lady 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 is past.

It’s six weeks after Christmas, and now she brings her pride and joy, her baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both she and the baby God are ritually unclean through childbirth. They must offer the two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, for the firstborn belongs to the Lord and must be redeemed.

Mary and Jesus represent the two aspects of this Feast we keep today, as the 1662 Prayer Book entitles it: “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 I 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, to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it; Christianize it!

So because Christ is the Light to lighten the gentiles, we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year.

And like our pagan ancestors, we process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel grey skies of winter and hoping for signs of spring.

Of course our American cousins are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards.

So Candlemas, a Christian feast, becomes the secular celebration of Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

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

A sunny Candlemas means the severity of winter will continue – the groundhog will return to its sleep. But if it is dull and overcast, the worst of winter is past.

Candlemas is also a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple; and yet we look forward towards 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 pain. Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bittersweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bittersweet 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 sometime and felt so alone and lonely.

We should be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, while knowing that we are constantly nagged by intimations of despair.

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 year after year at war and violence.

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 that God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life, but in the gloom we can see the beckoning light of Christ. Or to use CS Lewis’s metaphor, ‘God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.’

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draws us to him, the source of all light, our comfort and joy.

At the altar we see 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: like us; tested like us. Here at the altar he is crucified and yet exalted; the Lamb that was slain who yet lives.

And we live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ.

John Donne lived his life to the full, and knew pain and pleasure, shame and holy exultation. His vision of heaven was of a state of being where these two sides of human life and human nature would be miraculously transformed into the equanimity of Christ our Lord; perfect composure.

So he prayed:

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 in the Gospel, as we celebrate this Candlemas, we shall not fear, even if

“A sword will pierce through (our) own soul too.” Luke 2.35

Epiphany

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1

I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.

The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were.

What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives?

I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.

In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.

This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written as Eliot was going through his own mid-life changes in 1927 when he gave up agnosticism and was baptised.

The poem ends with one of the Magi reflecting on their momentous journey:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth

and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise, if you like, Three Deaths.

1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.

"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."

In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)

Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.

But wait a minute, we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. So let’s look at the second death.

2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith.

But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain.

I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.

There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing paralyze me from holding on to my own Christian faith.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.

3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.

CS Lewis puts it this way:

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)

Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).

Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead.

This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition and is only ‘gone’ when we pass through it to a fuller life.

This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.

I’m a person who always gets very emotionally attached to the community I find myself in. So ever since primary school, I have wept whenever I have left any community: schools, university, colleges, churches. I always wanted to stay.

But of course I have realised as the years have passed that all these little deaths have been necessary if I am to flourish and grow.

Every death has led to a new life.

Or to put it the other way round, as we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1