Looking forward to Ascension & Pentecost

Address given at St Mary's Cathedral, Limerick on 25th May - the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year A - for Sung Matins, rite 1

1. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Joc Sanders, and I come from Nenagh.

·         It is a very great privilege for me to be invited to lead you in worship here today in this magnificent ancient cathedral. I love the traditional language of rite 1 - for me, and for many of you I’m sure, it takes me back to childhood – it has a deep resonance. And how wonderfully the singing of the choir and the organ accompaniment enhances our worship – we are blessed by it, and on your behalf I thank them for it! It is all part of the rich heritage of our Church which gives us so much to be grateful for.

·         Another part of this rich heritage is the church calendar and lectionary, which we have inherited from the undivided Catholic church of ancient times. It leads us through the year in an unending cycle, to reflect on the story of our salvation. This is the 6^th and last Sunday of Easter. We continue to celebrate the central event of our faith, the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

·         But today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 14:15-21) leads us to look forward, to peek over the horizon so to speak, toward the great events of the Ascension - which we will celebrate on Thursday - and Pentecost in 2 weeks time - when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit which Jesus promised us.

·         The reading is just a small part of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples. John sets the scene as after the last supper. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet to teach them his example of service. He knows how things will play out. Judas Iscariot has already left to betray him to the authorities, who will arrest and execute him. Time is short for Jesus to prepare his followers for what must come, so his words are dense with meaning. Let me reflect on what they mean to me.

2.       ‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you’, says Jesus.

·         Even as Jesus endures Judas’s betrayal and waits to be taken to his death, he puts aside his own distress to comfort his disciples. He loves them. He will not desert them. And he promises he will continue to be present for them, whatever befalls.

·          ‘In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me’, he says. The Gospels tell us the risen Christ appeared to the disciples between the Resurrection and his Ascension, when he returned to his Father - they experienced his presence physically. But I do not think this is what Jesus means here. Jesus is looking beyond the day of Ascension, up to our own time and beyond. Throughout the ages Christians continue to experience Jesus’s reassuring presence, as friend and brother, saviour and redeemer. As Matthew (28:20) tells us, Jesus said, ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’. Jesus is alive for us.

·         ‘Because I live, you also will live’, says Jesus. We live – we can be fully human as God wants us to be – because we know, as Jesus tells us, ‘I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you’.

3.       ‘I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever.

·           Jesus promises his disciples they will receive the gift of another Advocate - ‘the Spirit of truth’, the Holy Spirit - to teach and support them as a mentor. As we read in Acts, they did indeed receive the Spirit, on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit led them to go out boldly, declaring their belief in Christ, to make disciples of others. The disciples they made in turn received the Spirit and did the same, and so on - down through the years, the centuries, the millennia. Christians continue to be inspired by the Spirit to this day. The result is the Church we know, in all the glorious variety of our traditions. The Spirit will be with us for ever, Jesus promises, helping us to discern the truth.

·           Notice, Jesus asks the Father to send the Spirit. He does not ask him to send scripture – not the Gospels, not the letters of Paul, nor any other scripture. The primary gift Jesus asks for us from the Father is the Spirit, the Spirit of truth. Scripture is secondary – while we believe it is divinely inspired, we must also believe that we need the Spirit of truth to help us interpret it and come to discern the truth.

·         The disciples recognised the Spirit when they felt it working in them and saw its effects in others. So can we. ‘You know (the Spirit)’, says Jesus, ‘because he abides with you, and he will be in you’.

4.        ‘If you love me’, says Jesus, ‘you will keep my commandments’.

·         We need to take these words very seriously, I think. Jesus loves his disciples, but not in any soppy, sentimental way. His love demands obedience from his disciples. Just as loving parents demand obedience of small children, so that they do not run in front of cars, or burn or electrocute themselves.

·         ‘Those who love me will be loved by my Father’, continues Jesus, ‘and I will love and reveal myself to them’. We cannot expect to feel the loving presence of Jesus, nor the love of God the Father, unless we are obedient.

·         But just what are these commandments of Jesus? We surely need the continuing help of the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, to enlighten us. But scripture is pretty clear on the bones of it, I think.

o           Matthew (22:36-40) tells us that when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he answers, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

o           And John (13:34) tells us that Jesus says shortly before today’s reading, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’.

·         If we follow these 3 commandments, I don’t think we can go too far wrong. But we need the help of the Spirit to do so. And when we fail, as we surely will from time to time, we need to seek the forgiveness that God freely offers to those who are truly penitent.

5.       So to finish, I hope you will take 3 things away from my words today:

·         1^st, as we celebrate Ascension Day on Thursday, let us give thanks for the continuing reassuring presence of Jesus, our friend and brother, our saviour and redeemer.

·         2^nd, as we look forward to Pentecost in 2 weeks time, let us give thanks that the Spirit ,which the Father gave us at Jesus’s request, will continue to lead us to discern his truth.

·         And 3^rd, let us pray that the Spirit may guide us to keep Jesus’s commandments: to love God, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to love one another as he loves us, so that we may know the loving presence of Jesus and the love of his Father.

Sheep & Shepherds

‘The sheep follow (the shepherd) because they know his voice’,

… says Jesus, in today’s reading from St John’s Gospel (John 10:1-10).

I don't know about you, but these words always used to puzzle me. It just didn’t chime with my own experience.

I used help move sheep on my Grandfather’s farm as a child. Those sheep certainly didn’t recognise anyone’s voice, let alone mine aged 12! You couldn’t lead them. In fact it was the divil’s own job to stop them charging off the wrong way. We stood in gaps, we waved our hands and we hunted them as best we could to their new field of fresh grass, but they just wouldn’t follow! Surely, I thought, shepherds in Jesus’s time must have had a very different relationship with their sheep to us.

But then some years ago a wise farmer explained it to me. He was amused by my difficulty moving sheep. ‘I never have any difficulty getting my sheep to follow me’, he said. ‘I just carry a bag of meal with me, and they come running.’

There’s more than one way for a shepherd to lead his sheep - the sheep follow the shepherd they know will feed them!

‘The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing’.

So begins the 23^rd Psalm we read earlier. We all love it, don’t we?. It is such a favourite because it is so filled with comforting images of God caring for us and keeping us safe.

This metaphor of the shepherd runs right through Hebrew scripture – our Old Testament - hardly surprising, because the Israelites were a pastoral people.

God is often likened to a shepherd in the scriptures, as in Psalm 23, or as Isaiah put it beautifully (Isaiah 40:11): “(The Lord God)  will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

But Ezekiel 34:2 applies the metaphor to the leaders of Israel, in a great indictment for their bad leadership and corruption: “Ah you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?”  They are bad shepherds. The same indictment might be made of some of the great and powerful of our society!

Jesus chooses to use the same metaphor in today’s reading.

It is the first part of a longer parable about his relationship with his disciples. In the very next verse, which the lectionary keeps for another day, Jesus continues “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is lovely and familiar, isn’t it? We have all seen the pictures of the strong self-reliant country man keeping his little flock safe from harm, carrying the lost sheep back to the flock on his shoulders.

In the rugged Judean countryside sheep had to be kept in a sheepfold at night to prevent them straying into the crops, and to protect them from wild animals and rustlers. In the two halves of the passage we have just heard, Jesus is probably talking about two different kinds of sheepfolds.

The first kind is a large communal fold near a village, surrounded by fences with a gate. The village would employ a gatekeeper to protect the sheep in the communal fold. In the morning the gatekeeper would open the gate to the shepherd who would call his own flock out. The other flocks wouldn’t recognise his call and would stay behind until their own shepherd came.

The second kind of sheepfold would be up in the hills, far from the village, and much smaller. It would be used in summer when a single shepherd would stay out with the sheep for days or weeks on end. To protect the flock at night, the shepherd would lead them into a small enclosure, perhaps just a dry-stone wall he had built. Instead of a gate, he would lie down to sleep in the entrance where any movement in or out would wake him up. I’ve found similar structures up in the Burren hills which may have been used in the same way. When Jesus said “I am the gate”, he meant it quite literally!

In the parable of the sheepfolds, and by calling himself the good shepherd, I think Jesus is quite deliberately doing two things:

Firstly he is promising his disciples - those who recognise his voice - that he will care for them. He will keep them safe and feed them. “Whoever enters by me will be saved”, he says.  They “will come in and go out and find pasture”. It is also a promise to us, today.

But secondly Jesus is implicitly accusing the leaders of his own day – the Pharisees he was talking to - of being bad shepherds, just as Ezekiel had done centuries before. “All who came before me are thieves and bandits;” he says, “but the sheep did not listen to them”. Today we must still be alert for thieves and bandits who try to mislead people, as much as in Jesus’s time.

Jesus’s disciples still need leadership today.

Jesus will always be our Good Shepherd, of course. We should hold on to that comforting, familiar image, and listen to his words as he leads us to find good pasture. After all he has told us “Remember, I am with you always.”

But Jesus has handed on a shepherd’s mantle to others too, starting with the apostles. John (21:15-17) tells us that Jesus said to Peter “Feed my lambs … tend my sheep … feed my sheep”. Bishops from that day to this have inherited the shepherd’s mantle.

Bishop Trevor will be retiring in July. When he leaves we will miss the wise and loving Christian leadership which it is a bishop’s job to give us. There are many challenges his successor must lead us to face. As a Christian flock we face schism in our Anglican communion. As a nation we struggle to build a just society as we emerge from the economic crisis. As a species we wrestle with resource depletion and global warming. The thieves and bandits are still about us.

Let us pray for those with the heavy responsibility of choosing his successor, that the Holy Spirit may guide them to find us a wise and loving Bishop, to lead us to pastures green beside quiet waters.

Baptism of Daphne Jane Eve Clarke, 13th April 2014, Killodiernan

Address given at the baptism of Daphne Jane Eve Clarke at Killodiernan on Sunday 13th April 2014, Easter 6 - Palm Sunday.

Today is a joyful occasion, a day for celebration, a day of baptism!

For many of us it is a family celebration. Particularly so for Peter and Natasha, as with their daughter Hollie they bring their baby daughter Eve to be christened in the presence of so many of their relatives and friends, who share their joy in her.

For Eve’s Godparents, for Janet McCarthy, Brenda O’Laughlin and Adrian Gordon it is a day when they promise to encourage Eve in her life and in her faith. It is a day to celebrate the start of a very special relationship they will have with her as she grows up. My daughter, when she was small, didn’t understand what a Godmother was. She called her Godmother ‘my bed-sitter’, because when she came to stay her Godmother would sit on the end of her bed and have long talks with her. My daughter loved those special talks. May you as Godparents be equally special ‘bed-sitters’ for Eve!

It is surely right for families to celebrate as families. Our Lord Jesus Christ himself was reared in a human family, and he took part in family celebrations such as the wedding in Cana of Galilee.

But today is about much more than just a family celebration.

St Matthew’s Gospel tells us how Jesus after his resurrection commissioned the apostles to make disciples of all nations, and to mark it by baptism. They in turn passed on the commission to others, handing on the gift of faith to new generations. And so we, as that part of Christ’s church gathered here today, as Jesus’s disciples, pass on this gift to a new generation, to Eve.

We are here to welcome Eve as a new member of Christ’s Church.  Baptism marks the beginning of a journey with God, which will last for the rest of her life. Whether we are family or not, we celebrate that today. And as we renew our baptismal vows in a few moments, let us reflect on our own journey, and let us be determined to support Eve’s parents and Godparents as they guide her on her journey.

Eve will be baptised “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.

Matthew tells us that Jesus himself used these words. Those of us who are Anglicans share this baptismal formula with most other Christians, including the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox and most Reformed Churches. It is a symbol of unity within the diversity of our denominations that we all baptise in the same words.

We shouldn’t see the Trinity as a static thing, I think. Rather, God reveals himself in the Trinity as a dynamic cycle of loving relationships. The Father and the Son loving each other; the Son and the Spirit loving each other; and the Spirit and the Father loving each other.

May Eve grow up to recognise God’s dynamic cycle of love reflected in her own relationships!

According to Matthew, the last words Jesus spoke to his disciples are these: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Jesus was speaking to the apostles, but he still speaks these words to his disciples today.

What an amazing thing it is, that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, our friend and brother, is travelling with us on our journey. Even when we are tired or anxious, lonely or frightened, doubting or lost, Jesus is there with us, to encourage and support us, to love us.

The loving Christ journeys with Eve, and with every one of us. Let us give thanks for it, and let us celebrate it!

Passion Sunday - Take this cup from me

Address given at Templederry on Sunday 13th April 2014, Easter 6 - Palm Sunday, after reading Matthew's Passion Gospel

Wow, that was a long reading (Matthew 26:14- 27:66)! It is surely good for us to hear the whole story of Christ’s Passion from beginning to end at least once a year, to better appreciate the enormity of those events. But I also feel sure you’ll be glad to know that I’m not going to preach a long sermon too!

Instead I ask you to reflect with me for a moment on Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:

‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’

Jesus is distressed and agitated. He is certain that what he is doing is the will of God, his loving Father. He knows what is likely to happen next – his execution as a dangerous agitator, perhaps even the agonising death of crucifixion.

And he does not want to die – he is a man in the full strength and vigour of his early 30s, he loves life, he loves his friends, and he loves his ministry to those who need healing and forgiveness. So he prays to his loving Father for himself, that his death may be averted - ‘let this cup pass from me’.

But that is only half his prayer. Even more important for Jesus than his own distress at the prospect of death is that his loving Father’s will should be done. So he finishes his prayer with ‘yet not what I want, but what you want’.

This prayer of Jesus should be a model for our own prayers for our selves, I think. When I desperately wish for something, it is right and proper for me to pray to God for it. If I cannot ask God for it, who can I ask? But I must never forget how much more important it is for God’s will to be done, than for my wish to be granted. So I should always finish a prayer for myself with Jesus’s words, ‘yet not what I want, but what you want’.

In the end, like Jesus, we must trust that our loving Father knows what is best for us.

The Gift of Faith on the 2nd Sunday of Easter

An address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on the 2nd Sunday of Easter, 27th April 2014, year A

There is a common theme running through all 3 of today’s readings.

That theme is belief; belief that God raised Jesus from the dead; belief that his resurrection reveals Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one.

This belief is a hard call, isn’t it? In our common human experience, people who are dead - really dead, not just in a coma - stay dead. They don’t come back to life, walk about and talk to us. But that is what the Gospels tell us Jesus did. It seems impossible. Yet this belief is the very heart and centre of the faith that brings us all together here today.

Can we really believe it? Let’s look a little more closely at the readings to explore the question.

First we turn to the reading from John’s Gospel (John 20:19-31) about the apostle Thomas.

Thomas is nobody’s fool, he doesn’t take anything on somebody else’s say so, he thinks for himself. I like that! He is one of my heroes.

Thomas isn’t there when Jesus appears to the other disciples on the day of his resurrection, so when they tell him their extraordinary news “We have seen the Lord!” he doesn’t believe them. He says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  But a week later Thomas is there when Jesus appears again. Jesus talks directly to him, and invites him to touch his wounds. Thomas responds immediately, saying “My Lord and my God!”  For all his initial scepticism, Thomas is convinced by his own senses that Jesus has risen from the dead.

Yet there is something odd about John’s story - as there is about all the stories of Jesus after the resurrection. The risen Jesus is not the same as he was before. Neither Mary Magdalen nor the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognise him at first. And in today’s reading Jesus seems to appear out of nowhere, even though the doors are locked. It is clear to me that we can’t imagine the risen Jesus as just the re-animated corpse of the man Jesus who died on the cross. There’s more to it than that!

So what are we to make of it all? If there is any truth in the Gospel accounts, the disciples experienced something mysterious but quite extraordinary. They described it as meeting Jesus the risen Christ: “We have seen the Lord” they say. It would be futile to try to explain what they experienced scientifically – there just isn’t enough evidence. But that doesn’t mean that whatever it was contradicts what we have learned through science about the way God’s creation works.

The first point I hope you will take away today is this:

We can believe both in the truth of science and in the disciples’ experience. We can believe both and accept the mystery. And we can choose to call their experience what they called it – meeting Jesus the risen Christ.

Now let’s turn to the reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:14a, 22-32).

The scene is set at 9 am on the day of Pentecost; 6 weeks after Thomas declared his belief, and 7 weeks after the resurrection. The twelve have just received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, and begun to speak in all manner of foreign tongues, attracting a crowd. Peter, acting as spokesman, starts to make a speech.

For the first time in public, Peter boldly declares his belief, and that of the other disciples, that God has raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses” he says. And he quotes Psalm 16 to show his Jewish listeners that King David had prophesied the resurrection of the Messiah:

"He was not abandoned to Hades,
nor did his flesh experience corruption."

These days we can’t argue convincingly from biblical prophecy, because it doesn’t fit in with how our scientific culture understands the way the universe works. But people did then, and his words were very persuasive - we are told he persuaded 3000 new disciples to be baptised that day!

What really impresses me is the change that has come over Peter - he has become a different man. This is the man that only seven weeks ago denied that he knew Jesus three times and ran away, because he was afraid of what might happen to him. Yet now this ordinary fisherman is inspired to stand up in public and preach to a crowd, testifying to his belief that God raised Jesus from the dead. Peter is completely changed. He kick-starts the process that has led to countless people sharing his belief.

And Peter isn’t the only one changed. As we read on in the book of Acts, we see how the disciples pass on their belief to others; how they start to organise themselves into a Church; how they seem to be propelled by some irresistible force to go out and make disciples of all nations, just as Jesus asked them to do.

The 2^nd point I want you to take away is this:

The experience of meeting the risen Christ, and receiving the Spirit he promised, utterly transforms his disciples. What a powerful force for change it is!

Finally we turn to the 1st Letter of Peter (1Peter 1:3-9)

The author gives us a glimpse of how Peter and Thomas and the other apostles passed on their belief to new generations. “Although you have not seen (Jesus), you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him”. Notice how this echoes what Jesus said to Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Those who heard the Apostles testify to their belief accepted it on faith, AS their faith. And that faith has been passed on from generation to generation, until we ourselves received it. And we in turn will pass it on to our own children and grandchildren, by the grace of God.

The 3^rd point to take away is tis

We should see our faith in Jesus the risen Christ, and our capacity to believe it, as like a magnificent gift from God - a gift which will utterly transform us if we let it, just as it did the first disciples. I think it is what allows us to be truly human. We are blessed by it.

Let us thank God for the gift of faith, handed down to us from Thomas and Peter and the first disciples!

Original Sin

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 9th March 2014, the 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Temptation and sin are strong themes running through the readings set for today.

This is no accident, because today is the 1^st Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally a ‘penitential’ season, a time when we are invited to reflect on our sinful natures, and to seek God’s forgiveness for actual sin.

The 1st reading (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7) is that old, familiar story of the Fall: how the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first sin – the original sin.

The 3^rd reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11) tells us how Jesus resisted the temptation of the devil in the wilderness. He did not sin.

In the Epistle reading from his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-19), Paul contrasts the sin of Adam with the righteousness of Jesus. This passage is very important historically for the development of Christian theology, because it’s a scriptural foundation for the theological doctrine that it is by God’s grace through Jesus Christ that original sin is overcome.

It’s this uncomfortable idea of original sin that I want to explore today.

First let’s look at the story of the Fall.

Surely this is just an old myth, with no relevance to sophisticated people like us today? Well, yes it is a myth, and a very ancient one. But like many an old myth I think it captures an essential truth.

We don’t need to believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first man and the first woman, the ancestors of us all - but they are typical men and women, very like you and me. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they did so, and became like God, able to distinguish good from evil. We can all tell good from evil, can’t we? We call that capacity conscience: it is part of what makes us human - we are moral creatures.

Adam and Eve could distinguish good from evil, and like us no doubt in their best moments they would prefer good to evil. But that doesn’t mean to say that they would always choose good over evil, any more than we do. Like us, they had free will. They were tempted by the serpent, and they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, because they desired it - because it was good to eat, because it was beautiful, and because it would make them wise. So many rationalisations for their bad choice! We don’t need to believe in a literal talking serpent, but we’ve all heard that little nagging voice in the head, haven’t we? Prompting us to do something we know in our heart of hearts is wrong, for what we pretend are jolly good reasons.

This is original sin – Adam’s sin, Eve’s sin, and our sin too: to know what is right, but to be tempted by our desires to do what is wrong, and all too often to give in to our desires. We all suffer from it, without exception. It is not so much a mysterious, theological doctrine as a truth about our psychological natures, derived from observation.

Matthew tells us how Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, but resisted his blandishments.

But how did Matthew get the story? Since Jesus was alone in the desert, I think the source must be Jesus himself, who told it to his disciples. They in turn passed it on to Matthew, the Gospel writer, and so to us.

The devil tempted Jesus, we are told, just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. Jesus was human like us - he could hear that nagging little voice in his head too, but he had the strength to resist it. This should be no surprise, since we believe Jesus to be fully God as well as fully human.

Notice how the devil quotes scripture as he tempts Jesus: “He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone” – it is a quotation from Psalm 91. We should be on our guard, I think, when we hear someone use scripture as a weapon against an opponent in argument – it just might be the voice of the devil tempting us.

Notice also how Jesus quotes scripture too to rebuke the devil and to resist temptation. Perhaps we might do the same when we are tempted. Scripture can also be a tool to help us resist temptation. Now that’s a thought that might help us keep our Lenten resolutions!

So we come to Paul, and his contrast between the sin of Adam and the righteousness of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I find his argument convoluted and difficult to understand. But he ends up crystallizing matters in these words:

‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience - Adam’s -  the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience - Christ’s - the many will be made righteous’.

Paul seems to believe that Adam’s original sin causes our own, rather than being a consequence of our common humanity, as I do. But Paul sees the reality of original sin only too clearly: all human beings, like Adam, are inevitably sinners; like Eve too for that matter, though Paul leaves her out.

Later on in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul expresses the human dilemma perfectly:

‘I do not understand my own actions… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

What a mess we are all in! Our sins convict us; they cut us off from God; and we inevitably suffer spiritual death. Or to put it another way, in the language of psychology:

I feel shame for the bad things I do; the shame destroys my self-esteem; and I plunge into deep depression.

But Paul also sees another reality: the reality that God offers us a way out of the mess. The way out is God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. By following Jesus’s path of obedience to God, our sins will be forgiven and we will be made righteous. Again, to put it in the language of psychology:

When I am truly sorry for the bad things I’ve done, I will change for the better, seek to make amends and cease to feel corrosive guilt, coming to accept myself for who I  am whatever my flaws.

So to sum up

Every one of us, without exception, should feel uncomfortable about original sin, because it is a reality: we all share the innate tendency of human beings to sin, which leads every one of us to be a sinner.

But as St Paul saw so clearly, that is not the end of the matter. God offers us the free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. If we follow his way and repent, our sins will be forgiven.

And a final comforting thought for Lent: ‘Remember, I am with you always’, says Jesus. The essence of original sin is the nagging little voice of temptation, which we personify as the serpent or the devil. But if we trust in Jesus and listen for it, we can also hear his confident, comforting voice: he encourages us to resist temptation, and offers us forgiveness when we succumb to it, if we come to him in penitence.

Let’s try to listen for Jesus’s voice, really listen, as we travel with him on the way to Jerusalem this Lent, to Calvary and on to Resurrection!

Presenting Jesus in the Temple - Mary's story

An address given at Templederry & Nenagh on Sunday 2nd February 2014, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called Candlemas

So often at Candlemas the whole focus is on Jesus, ‘the light to lighten the gentiles’.

After all the proper title of the festival in the church calendar is ‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’. We heard about it in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel (Luke 2:22-40).

I think Luke has woven into his account of the Presentation an authentic story from Mary’s own lips, based on her own memories of that day.

·          Luke was not an eyewitness of Jesus’s life, and he probably wrote his Gospel at least 30 years after the resurrection, but he tells us himself that he carefully gathered his material from eyewitnesses.

·          Of the principal characters, Simeon and Anna would have been long dead by the time of Jesus’s death, and Joseph too. The story also contains words probably spoken privately to Mary, so bystanders are unlikely to be Luke’s source.

·          That leaves Mary as Luke’s likely source, whether in person or at one remove through an eyewitness, who heard her tell the story sometime after Jesus’s death and resurrection.

So today I’m going to focus on Mary for a change, not Jesus. I invite you to enter into the story of the Presentation in your imagination, to put yourself in the shoes that day of Mary, the young wife of Joseph, and the new mother of the baby Jesus.

Why did Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple?

Luke gives us two Jewish religious reasons: 1^st for ‘their purification’, and 2^nd to fulfil the Jewish law that ‘Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord’.

Hebrew law was obsessed with purity. It defined in excruciating detail what makes a person clean or unclean. God’s favour depends on your being clean, it was believed, and any contact with someone who was unclean made you unclean, as if un-cleanliness was a contagious disease. Leviticus laid down the law that a woman was unclean for 40 days after the birth of a male child. If the child was a girl, the mother was unclean for twice as long - 80 days! The only way for a mother to become clean again was to make a prescribed sacrifice at a sanctuary – in Mary’s time this was in the Temple.

We have, thank God, long abandoned this and other ancient Hebrew purity taboos. Nowadays we find the idea that birth makes a woman unclean quite repulsive. But did Mary really feel she needed to be purified, or was she simply following ancient tradition? She certainly had important practical reasons to fulfil the requirements of the law - pious Jews would shun Mary and her husband unless she had been purified in this way. And it saved a journey to bring Jesus to the Temple at the same time to present him to God as the law also required.

But perhaps Mary and Joseph also had another reason to bring Jesus to the Temple - to give joyful thanks to God for her safe delivery and for the great gift of her healthy son Jesus. This was an opportunity for Mary to show off her new baby, as women still do when they first come to church after giving birth - such a lovely opportunity for a bit of baby-worship! And perhaps they combined it with a family celebration.

In the Church of Ireland BCP we still have special prayers of thanksgiving for childbirth, which once served this purpose. Originally they were used 40 days or so after birth, in church after MP, in what was commonly called ‘Churching a Woman’. In the new BCP the word ‘Churching’ has been dropped, and the prayers are recommended for use in hospital or at home. I don’t think they are used very much now, perhaps because of some association with the repulsive idea that women need purification. But I think it is a shame not to use the prayers - they carry no implication of impurity, and would fit beautifully at the end of a service before the Blessing.

Simeon was one of the priests on duty in the Temple that day.

He was ‘righteous and devout’, we are told, ‘looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him’. He must have been a well known and popular priest, I think, or his name would not have come down to us – did Mary choose him specially, I wonder?

He certainly had a wonderful gift with words in his priestly role, as he pronounced over Jesus that great prayer of joy we still use as the canticle ‘Nunc Dimittis’ – ‘Lord now letest thou thy servant depart in peace…’ It’s odd, isn’t it, that this cry of joy is now mostly heard amidst the sadness of funerals. Mary and Joseph were amazed by his words, we’re told. But I wonder if it was Simeon’s pastorally sensitive custom to greet every new child in this joyful way.

Notice that the sacrifice Mary and Joseph gave was two pigeons. The standard sacrifice was a lamb and a pigeon, but Leviticus allowed those who could not afford a lamb to offer two pigeons. Mary and Joseph were not wealthy, just ordinary people who had to live on a budget like the rest of us.

At the end of the ceremony, after blessing them, Simeon spoke to Mary, quietly and privately I think, since Joseph’s name is not mentioned. ‘This child is destined’, he said, ‘for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’  What was Mary to make of his cryptic words? We’ll come back to that.

Then the old widow Anna came up to them. Like Simeon she would have been well known to everyone who came to the Temple, because she was always there, and had been for many years. And as she praises God she just gushes over Jesus to everyone in the Temple. Could Mary possibly have felt a bit embarrassed by her gushing, proud as she was of her baby?

Looking back on it later, surely Mary felt the trip to the Temple had gone swimmingly.

The ceremony had gone well; Simeon had conducted it beautifully; even Anna had said nice things about Jesus. She could go out again in public now everyone recognised she was pure again. And she could resume normal relations with her husband without transmitting impurity to him.

No doubt Mary pondered Simeon’s obscure words in her heart for a while, as Luke tells us she did the Shepherds’ words a few weeks before. I imagine her saying to herself, ‘What did that nice Simeon mean? I understand that every child causes pain to a mother, once in a while. Which of us hasn’t? But what about the rest of what he said?’ But quite soon these questions would have been pressed to the back of her mind by her busy duties as wife and mother.

Meanwhile Jesus, oh so quickly, ‘grew, became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him’.

Perhaps it was only after Jesus’s death and resurrection that Simeon’s words came back to Mary.

Only then could she properly understand them. Jesus’s ministry in life confirmed his destiny. His crucifixion pierced her soul like a sword, so much worse than she could possibly have imagined. His resurrection revealed him to be the Messiah, the Saviour over whom Simeon had prayed so joyfully as a baby.

The Spirit moved her to tell her story to Jesus’s disciples. Maybe Luke heard her do so, or perhaps one of the disciples passed it on to him. In any case, Luke collected the story and passed it on in turn to us.

Let us give thanks for Luke’s telling of Mary’s story and particularly for Simeon’s joyful prayer, which I shall finish by praying:

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.