A Homily for the Feast of the Presentation (Transferred)

A homily preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on February 4, 2024, the Feast of the Presentation (Transferred).

“For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel," says old, wizened Simeon, the “God Receiver” as he is known in the Orthodox Church. “Well, bully for Old Simeon,” we say, “I’ve never seen the Lord! Maybe this whole church thing ain’t for me.” Too often, “seeing Jesus” even “receiving Jesus” is figured as a special, mystical experience associated with mountain tops or precarious ladders reserved for the righteous and devout (like Simeon), or those proto-nun elite spiritual athletes like Anna who never leave the Temple or hang out only in monasteries.

But, of course, there’s nothing special or elite about Anna or Simeon. They are two more examples in a long, long line of how God in the Holy Spirit is present and active in the midst of the lives of unlikely, unruly, unremarkable ordinary people like you and me to reveal to us the salvation of the Lord–the convenanting, promising, God-with-us and for us whose final end and purpose is glory–that God may be all in all with peace, righteousness, and justice rolling down and not a single sinner left unredeemed. It is precisely to those whom the world deems “old and in the way” that God reveals Godself in flesh and blood, “so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

What does it mean to see Jesus? And where do we see Him? Theologies of Glory–accounts of human beings climbing their way to the presence of God tell us that a feast like the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple must contain something that we do, some special insight we attain, some disposition that we cultivate that performed correctly allows us to “see” Jesus. Two things happen in that scenario–either we scrunch up our eyes and hold our breath just right and see Jesus (at which point we become quite proud of ourselves and our efforts and feel pity for those who can’t scrunch up their eyes like us), or we can’t perform it well enough and throw in the towel retreating to the Church of the Holy Comforter on Sunday mornings instead of going to courts of Lord with the sparrows.

A Theology of the Cross, however, subverts the hubris of all human attempts to reach God. Karl Barth likes to remind us that Christianity is not a religion. In his strange new world of the Bible, religions are human attempts to get to God. Towers of Babel. No, Christianity is not another scaffolding job to reach distant deity. Christianity is the revelation of a Living Person–Jesus Christ who as a squirming, dirty-diapered baby comes to us as King. As one who weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus, and laments over Jerusalem God comes to us. As one “like his brothers and sisters in every respect,” God comes to us. As the abandoned, derelict, mocked, scourged, and scorned, the one who became sin for us hanging cursed on the tree God comes to us. 

God puts to death all attempts to reach him by our carefully prescribed efforts and comes down as our brother so that in Him we, too, might see the Glory of the Lord. Our pictures of a manageable and predictable messiah who accords with our self-improvement projects goes under the sign of the cross and we are made ready to finally receive the gift of God come to us. At the foot of the cross we are made to see. We rejoice in finally letting God be the subject of the verb: God the refiner, God the purifier, God suddenly come to his temple. After our temples that we build to get to God babble themselves quiet, we see that God is the builder who builts his temple in us, with us, for us. The most interesting thing about the church is God, not ourselves.

Luther calls the cross, “the safest of all things. Blessed is the [person] who understands this.” The safest of all places? How could this be? Because it is the end of all of our frantic attempts to storm heaven, earn, win, gain that which is freely given to us by God who wants to share his very life with us. When we let the cross do its work on us, all the projections (God as task-master, stern judge, coolly dispassionate watch-maker glancing idly on as things tick along) go under the water and the Living God is seen… descending. The cross’s desolate valley yields to a place of springs. Our deepest desire, our yearning for union and communion with the God who has loved us since before the foundation of the world and elected us in the person of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, burbles up, irrigates, slathers over us as Balm of Gilead for sin-sick captives. Homeward-turning love wakes up in us.

“The cross is the safest of all things,” because it clears the way for our true longing, our true yearning, our true desire for God alone, in Christ alone, by grace through faith alone. So, like all the scriptures that we stand under during the season after the Epiphany, the feast of the presentation ought not be operationalized, or turned into anything we can too easily grasp or comprehend. It is to be marveled at in awestruck wonder. That the God of Glory has acted, continues to act, and will continue to act in bringing all things under his most gracious rule. Our only role is to receive the gift and live out its sacrificial consequences in love for our neighbor.

The Presentation is not first of all about us, but what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus. He is revealed–plain as day–in the waters of baptism, in the words of Holy Scripture, and comes to us in the gifts of bread and wine. He meets us in prayer. He leads us in the power of the Holy Spirit into boundary-crossing solidarity with the least of these. He gives us his peace, not a managed, manufactured, confected peace that disappears at the first sign of trouble, or an inconvenient diagnosis. The Lord has come suddenly into the temple. Into our lives. Into our hearts. He has mangered with us in order to reveal the glory of God’s purposes right here, right now, in the midst of this rubbled world of strife and war. There is no other God lurking inscrutably over the shoulder of Jesus, our brother whose mighty acts show him to be a dancing to flutesong friend of sinners and tax collectors. For in him the fullness of God is pleased to dwell. He’s not hiding except from all the ways we expect him to reveal himself. 

Jesus is the place of springs. All other places where we seek to slake our thirst prove to be dry wells that leave a bad, Paxlovid taste in our mouths. Our true desire for God–hijacked by substitute gods, lords, and idols like power, prestige, and possessions–is unshackled, starts to stir in us, to burble up, starts to irrigate a soul exhausted and despairing of ever finding finding a lasting peace, a righteous and just world, apart from Him. And the church–so forgetful in the midst of its managerial mindset and pearl-clutching over so-called decline–has but one task: to be a poor, simple, receiving, open place where the disclosure, the unveiling, the glorious effulgent manifestation of God in the person of Jesus Christ as Lord can be seen and lived from. 

Like Mary, we’ll see all that is counter to the love and mercy of Jesus exposed and brought to light–”the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” And it won’t be a cake walk–a sword will pierce your own soul, too. Love is opposed, hated, crucified, and killed by the powers and principalities of this world. But what sweet assurance–that in our sorrows (personal and collective) God is working. Our difficulties and afflictions don’t mean God is absent or doesn’t love us. “The Lord has come suddenly into his temple,” quite apart from whether we think it’s a good idea, or happen to like it or not. How beautiful actually the temple of our daily life—leaky dishwashers, dirty diapers, and bills past due—where Christ meets us, and feeds us, and leads us! Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus. Come, (you who were before the foundation of the world) come. May we rest and nest in you Sweet Loving Jesus who has nested in us. May we live from your completed work. May we be bearers of your twittering song of boundary-crossing love in the midst of the sidewaysness of this muck and straw life where you have chosen to be our brother, our Savior, our Redeemer, our Friend.

Amen.