Your Heart the Temple. Your Heart the Tent of Meeting - A Sermon for Beginners

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord (transferred), February 7, 2021 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, also known as Candlemas, is the climactic conclusion of the season of light, the season of Epiphany, that we have celebrated through these long, dark, cold (well, cold enough) winter nights. It started, as you recall, with the lighting of a single Advent candle and those prophetic words from Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you” to which the people responded, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). What is this light that has come? Does it have a name, a face, this light shining in the darkness? “Again Jesus spoke to them saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

The entire Advent-Nativity-Epiphany cycle is all about an honest acknowledgement and naming of the darkness that lies all around us, not because we are gloomy black-clad nihilists, but because it is important, essential, to recognize where true peace (not the mere absence of conflict), joy (beyond mere happiness), gratitude and abundance (not dependent on material conditions or who people tell us we are) is to be found: in Christ. It all starts with a glimmer of light, a leading star that draws the migrant Wise Men across borders to that shoved aside manger out back of the inn where infinity lies wrapped in swaddling bands in the muck and straw. The Wise Men depart by a different way, the way of reconciling, breach-repairing, love, the star no longer something they follow in the inky darkness of the heavens, but something that has risen in their hearts. 

It begins as inkling, a hint, a glimmer, of a new way of seeing and being in a world gone mad and it ends, today, forty days later, with Mary and Joseph bringing the child Jesus to the temple to offer the appointed sacrifices for the one who is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. The one who is the Temple--”But he was speaking of the temple of his body” (John 2:21)--enters the temple. Everything we know about the temple in those days is that it was a place of great hubbub. Humble peasants who have traveled from afar caterwauling babes in arms thronging about to dedicate their first-borns to God in accordance with the Law. Sharp elbows, dusty sandals, dirty diapers, heated haggling over the price of high-end turtledoves versus box-store pigeons (and some last minute mental home economics as to which they could reasonably afford), arguments over people’s rightful place in line…. Hardly a peaceful, serene “church” like we’re used to on Sunday morning. Hardly, in this part of the temple at least, a quiet, contemplative space to enjoy  the Tiffany windows to the background hum of whispered prayers before mass. 

In the Orthodox Church, the Presentation of the Lord is called something rather different. It’s called the “Meeting of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple.” “Big whoop,” as my kids would say. It’s an interesting shift in emphasis, though. We move from Jesus being presented in the temple, to an emphasis on meeting, clear-sighted recognition, and loving embrace. The emphasis shifts from something that happened to Jesus in the dusty past to something we are called to enact and participate in, even here, even now.

The reason I mention how utterly chaotic the temple was, is that it foregrounds for us the wisdom and discernment required by Old Simeon, and Ancient Anna to actually even see the child Jesus in the first place. Like the prophets of whom we spoke last week, they have been prepared--through ascesis, prayer, worship, immersion in the promises of scripture--for this moment to occur. They’ve become that open place where clear, heart-centered seeing happens--cor ad cor loquitor (heart speaks to heart), deep calls to deep, light recognizes the source of all light, the ground of all being through whom all things were made.

Not too different, I would say, from our own times. Rapid societal change brought on by a racial reckoning, a global pandemic that has taken millions of lives and revealed gross inequities in our healthcare system, the painful recognition of just how divided a country we have actually been these past decades--all of this sounds a lot like the only mildly controlled chaos of the temple. But like the prophet Daniel who was able to read the writing on King Belshazzar’s wall, to discern the signs of the times, Anna and Simeon have the practiced grace to cut through the noise and the commotion and see, sing, embrace, and proclaim that this child, in this place, is the Savior of the world. As meeting, rather than mere presentation, something new, something more adventurous, more costly, emerges. What if we are called, like Anna and Simeon, to that same purity of heart, that same clear-sighted perception unrefracted by the prism of ego, so that we, too, can meet Christ, see Christ, sing and proclaim Christ, hold Christ next to our fluttering hearts, and carry him into the world as the Balm of Gilead? What if we are each called to embody Anna-Simeon--fully integrated female/male perception with the eye of the heart, the undivided, unrefracted, eye of love?

Up until this point the story of the child Jesus has been all about God coming to us. As prophecy. As a leading star. As an incongruously weak and vulnerable child mewling in the feed trough. In the temple, the movement of God towards us, of “The true light, which enlightens everyone ...coming into the world” (John 1:9) comes to completion, “so that, as Fr. John Behr writes, “we can also say: let us depart in peace, for the glory of the God is revealed, enlightening those who sat in darkness.” He continues, 

But if the movement of God towards us is completed in this way, our movement now begins…. Although we have been given to see much more than Simeon--we have repeatedly, every year, been present at Christ’s birth, his baptism, his passion and his resurrection--we have not yet even really begun to see the Lord as Simeon did: to know that he indeed our rest, our eternal rest; to find in him the peace that keep us in peace through the storms of the sea of life; to be at rest in him rather than be blown about from one crisis to the next, from one emotional bruise to another; and to be focused on him, rather than on the thoughts which preoccupy us, each one seeming so important at the time, and leading to yet more habituated actions that we know we will regret.

Our movement now begins. Simeon had one chance. He and Anna spent their whole lives for that one moment of recognition that allowed them to depart in peace. Not just in peace, but as peace. They depart standing on that sure foundation, the strong rock, the castle that keeps them safe no matter what the world throws at them. We are blessed, Fr. John reminds us, in that we have the whole life, death, resurrection of Jesus every year to show us the face, the actions, the teachings and healings, the person of who Jesus later became. Anna and Simeon only had that one moment. A squirming child in the arms of a young Palestinian girl just past the age of puberty in a sea of squirming children in the arms of young Palestinian mothers. And yet, Fr. John tells us rather starkly, “we have not yet even really begun to see the Lord as Simeon did.” Familiarity breeds not contempt, we pray, but complacency, a lack of good old-fashioned zeal.

So how do we begin to see the Lord as Simeon did? How can we step into the living reality of  meeting, shed the shoes of habit, and discover again and again, here and now, that the place where we are standing is Holy Ground, to realize with Jacob that “Truly the Lord is in this place and I did not know it”? Did you notice that line where Anna is referred to as one who never leaves the temple? Do you think she’s set up shop next to the Holy of Holies and literally never leaves? Or Samuel--asleep next to the Lamp of the Lord… do you think he’s pitched his tent nearby for a little night light and warmth while he catches some ZZZs? These are clearly images, symbols, with a spiritual depth of meaning--symbols that point to a life lived in close proximity to God who is closer than thought, closer than breath, closer than consciousness, closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

The temple is not a physical location, just as the Church is not just a building, but any place we recognize, sing, proclaim, and hold Jesus close: casting all our cares on him, casting our broken and hurting selves on him that he might give ourselves back ourselves, selves rooted and grounded in him, that see with his eyes, touch with his hands, that perceive a thousand little Christs playing in the strangest of places if we look at right. The temple, of course, is Jesus. And he lives now in the Temple of Our Hearts--the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). Never leaving the temple means losing our so-called selves and being found in him, going under the waters and claiming, making real, making manifest in our daily lives, the grace of participation in his Risen Life that was made available to us through baptism. In silence, the time we tithe to God at the start and end of each day...calling on his Holy Name. In a spare moment at the grocery... calling on his Holy Name. During an interminable meeting made all the more excruciating by the litany of “you’re still on mutes...” calling on his Holy Name. We spend time, waste time (in the eyes of the world) gracefully in his presence. As Saint Ignatius reminds us, this way is open to all--cobblers, cosmeticians, congresspeople, cabbies, and castaways, in times of peace and in times of trouble:

She who desires to see the Lord within herself endeavors to purify her heart by the unceasing remembrance of God. The spiritual land of a person pure in soul is within…. The sun which shines in it is the light of the Holy Trinity. The air which its inhabitant breathes is the All-holy Spirit. The life, joy, and gladness of that country is Christ, the Light of Light--the Father. That is, the Jerusalem or Kingdom of God hidden within us…. Try to enter the [inner room] within you, and you will see the heavenly [dwelling places]. They are one and the same. By one entry you enter both. The ladder to the Heavenly Kingdom is with you. It is built mysteriously in your soul. Immerse yourself within yourself beyond the reach of sin, and you will find there steps by which you can mount to heaven.

Enter. See. Present yourselves to him. Meet him. Hold him. Sing him. Know his peace. Begin again and again. Amen.