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SERMON PREACHED BY THE REV’D SAMUEL LEE WOOD AT THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT,
FEBRUARY 7, 2010, THE SOLEMNITY OF THE PRESENTATION (CANDLEMAS)

If this is your first time at the Church of the Advent on this particular Sunday of the church year, it’s understandable if you’re confused. It’s Candlemas. It’s Presentation. It’s Sexagesima. We're doubling up on feasts today. On Candlemas we bless candles and process around the nave with lighted candles as a sign of the light of Christ coming into the world and to the nations. It’s also when we gather up two separate feasts and keep them together, both of them based on Jewish ritual: First is the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple. After he spared Israel’s firstborn during the last plague of the Exodus from Egypt, God claimed all the firstborn of the Jews (children and animals) as his own, so Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple to present him to God. The church also used to keep on this day the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary because, after she gave birth, Mary was considered unclean for forty days until she would go to the temple to offer a lamb as a sacrifice for her purification. The Feasts of Purification and Presentation go together because St. Luke, in his gospel, put them in a single story.

A central character in Luke’s story is Simeon, an old man, devoutly religious, who had been waiting and watching, presumably for years , because an angel had told him he wouldn’t die until he saw with his own eyes the Lord’s Christ, the “Messiah,” the promised king who would bring consolation (comfort) to Israel. When Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple, Simeon takes the child in his arms and begins to praise God in words we now call the Nunc Dimittis, which means “Now dismiss me” or “now let me go” – 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 enlighten the gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people, Israel. (Luke 2:29-32) In this baby boy, Simeon somehow knew he was seeing the consolation of his people and the salvation of the world, so he could die in peace. But that’s not all he said, and it’s the last of Simeon’s words that I want us to think about today. Simeon said the child’s destiny is to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And he turned to Mary and said: A sword will pierce your soul also. (Luke 2:34-35)

A sword. We gloss over that part of the story because it’s so jarringly out of kilter with the rest of what Simeon said. With one breath he is singing about peace and consolation; then he’s warning Mary about a sword with the next. How can peace and the sword go together? Well, let me try and answer that through thinking about three different swords: A sword for Mary, a sword for us, and then what we’ll call the “final” sword.

First, a sword for Mary. We read the bible through the lens of history, so now we know what Mary didn’t. An angel told her she would bear the son of God, but how could she know exactly what that meant? Luke says Mary “marveled” at what Simeon said. That’s a word Luke uses to describe the crowds when they saw Jesus perform a miracle: They marveled; they were astonished at what they saw. Mary was astonished at what Simeon said about her son, but she couldn’t have comprehended what was coming. Look, if you’re a parent, how can you read this story without a lump in your throat because you know this mother is going to see her son betrayed, convicted in a court of law, publicly ridiculed and finally tortured to death? At the end there will be few who remain standing alongside Jesus -- but one will be Mary. Lucy Shaw wrote a poem called “Mary’s Song” about the thoughts she imagined must’ve gone through this mother’s mind as she held her newborn son. The end of the poem reads:

Older than eternity, now he
Is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

Somehow Simeon knew that for Jesus to bring the comfort he had been waiting all those years for, Mary would have to see her boy torn. Jesus was bringing a sword into Mary’s life.

Mary’s is the obvious sword, but Jesus brings a sword into our lives, as well. Simeon sings about peace, but in Matthew’s gospel Jesus says: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matt. 10:34) Years ago, Tim Keller said this in a sermon he preached on today’s gospel:

The Bible tells us . . . that Jesus Christ came . . . to stake out a claim, an enormous claim: He has staked out every inch of the physical universe, every inch of the spiritual universe, every inch of the mental universe, every inch of your and my lives and hearts, and he has claimed it as his. He stakes it out and he says “mine!” Every inch. And therefore it’s very clear that he comes to divide. He comes to cause conflicts. He comes to pick a fight.

Put it another way: Swords cut; they divide, and Jesus’ claims divide us on the basis of what we believe about him. To use Simeon’s words, Jesus’ destiny is to cause us to “fall” or “rise.” We either believe his claims and follow him, in which case he causes our rising; or we resist, and that causes us to fall. He cuts between people, but he also cuts through people. He says: “For you to follow me, I have to cut down the center of your heart and pare away parts of you that are focused on self; the parts that aren’t beautiful, that don’t look like me.” So Jesus lays bare our hearts and shows us our thoughts to bring us to repentance. In addition to all the other things today is, it’s “sexagesima” Sunday, which reminds us that Lent is just right around the corner -- a time for repentance and to make a disciplined effort to let God show us the thoughts of our hearts and to cut away the parts of us he doesn’t want.

The question is: How can we trust a God who comes with a sword? Who’s to say he isn’t just some cosmic despot who likes to mess with for some kind of perverse pleasure? But don’t you see? That can’t be true, and the reason we know it can’t be true is because of what I call the final sword. The “final” sword is actually the first sword that is mentioned anywhere in the bible. It’s in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden. The last verse of chapter 3 says: “After [God] drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Gen. 3:24) Because of their sin, Adam and Eve put themselves outside the garden, outside of paradise, outside of life with God, which is what they’d been created for. The gospel tells us that after the Fall it became the work of God to get us, all the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, back into that garden, and yet the cherubim with the sword was in the way.

The way back into that garden was through another one. We know that when he was in Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to his Father to let what he saw coming in his future pass him by. Jesus was in turmoil and terrified of what he saw before him. What did he see? Here’s the answer from one theologian:

When Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai so terrifying was the sight that he trembled with fear. But that was God in covenant: God in grace. What Christ saw in Gethsemane was God with the sword raised (Zc. 13:7; Mt 26:31) . . . .

You see, for us to get back to Eden, the final sword blocking our way had to come down. At the cross, the sword of God’s justice came down on Jesus because our peace could only come through the sword. That’s how peace and the sword go together, and it’s how we can trust God when swords come into our lives and convict us of sin, when we have to do the hard work of repentance and self-denial that it takes to grow into the image of Jesus. Because Jesus died under the blade of the final sword, we can trust it’s no angry God that cuts at our hearts, but a “wounded surgeon” who loves us and is cutting away parts of us that keep us from consolation and joy. The sword in Simeon’s story seems out of place, but it reminds us of the source of our peace, our hope of paradise and the way back to the Tree of Life.

Amen.

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