Sermon Sunday 5 February 2017
Candlemas
LessonsMalachi 3: 1 – 4 Hebrews 2: 14 – 18St Luke 2: 22 – 40
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
Holy God, bless our meditations. May we be alive to Your Spirit between us, deep within and in Your written Word. Amen.
Forty days after His birth, Jesus is brought from Bethlehem in Judea, the city of David, to the holy city of Jerusalem. According to tradition, Joseph and Mary travel to the temple to present their newborn son to the Lord. The Jewish temple was the House of God, the dwelling-place of Yahweh, the site of the Shekinah, the home of the divine presence on earth. It was in accordance with the Law of Moses that Joseph and Mary made their journey. According to the Gospel of Luke, it is written in the law that ‘every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord.’
In the church calendar, the 2nd of February marks the Feast of thePresentation of the Lord at the temple. On their arrival at the temple, Joseph and Mary offer a sacrifice of either a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons. They meet with Simeon and Anna. It is aged Simeon who utters the words we know as the Nunc Dimittis. In Latin, Simeon’s song begins, ‘Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine: Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, Lord.’ Alongside Simeon is the prophet Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher, the eighty-four year old widow who lived in the temple precincts. Anna praised God for all that she saw and heard and went on to tell many people of the child. What are we to make of this ancient narrative?
The story of Simeon and Anna is set within the first two chapters of the third Gospel. Those first two chapters contain a wealth of imaginative stories; faith narratives told to stimulate the soul. The stories, full of movement and colour, include the annunciation or visitation of Gabriel to the Virgin Mary; the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary during which the unborn Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb; and, of course, the birth of Jesus in the cave, the angelic chorus over the hillside declaring ‘Glory to God in the highest’ and the reverential visitation of the shepherds to the manger. The two chapters close with Jesus, now twelve years old, losing Himself in the temple; only after three days (a good biblical number) is He found sitting among the teachers discussing the Torah. What are we to make of the story of Simeon and Anna? What does this ancient faith narrative mean for us today?
Each of these early stories in Luke’s Gospel is a myth, a faith narrative with layers of spiritual depth; they are not history in the usual sense. Let me begin with the eighty-four year old widow Anna. We are told that Anna never left the temple but was truly devoted to God through fasting and prayer. As far as we know, she is childless. Historically, the Church has pointed to Anna as a model of what it means to devote oneself to God; it is a life of prayer and self-denial.
The name Anna appears only once in the Bible; in Hebrew the name is Hannah. We know that the writers of the Gospels drew upon Old Testament stories to inflect meaning into their own storytelling. The name Anna suggests to us a story of a woman named Hannah in the Old Testament. We meet Hannah in the First Book of Samuel. For many years, Hannah was childless but, in the end, she bears a son, whose name is Samuel. Samuel or Shemu’el means ‘son of God.’ From this allusion in the Anna story, there is another.
The prophet Anna is the daughter of Phanuel. The name Phanuel takes us back to the Book of Genesis, to the encounter of Jacob wrestling with God. It is at the river Jabbok that Jacob endures a night of struggle with the Divine. The place of encounter with God is called Peniel or Phanuel; it was there in the darkness that Jacob saw God face to face. Anna is Hannah, a name which leads us to Samuel, the son of God. Phanuel leads us to Peniel, the place of encounter with the Divine, where in the darkness Jacob saw God face to face. These carefully crafted faith narratives possess enormous depth. If we take ourselves into the Anna story, are we able to stand before the Christ Child, see in Him the essence of the Divine and, in a moment of private meditation, realise that we are face to face with the Holy, one with the Ultimate Reality of the universe? Scripture has to penetrate the soul: we have to enter it and it has to enter us. Standing where Anna stood, we are filled to overflowing with the presence, love and tenderness of God. Stand there.
What of the old man Simeon? It may be that the name hints at the Old Testament story of Joseph. It is Simeon who is imprisoned by his brother Joseph while the others return to their father Jacob in order to bring Benjamin to Egypt. Once they finally return to Egypt along with Benjamin, it is then that Joseph reveals his true identity and the twelve brothers, the twelve patriarchs stand together as one. Simeon is released from his imprisonment, from his long wait. There is a sense of completion in the Simeon narratives. That sense of completion is there in the story of Anna. Aged 84 and using gematria, 84 is 12 x 7. 12 represents the totality of the Hebrew people while 7 is the divine number of completion. It was on the seventh day that God rested. At the temple, the Holy Spirit rested on Simeon. Encounter with the Sacred brings wholeness and completion.
For me, what is most beautiful in the Simeon narrative is that the old man takes the Child in his arms. It is in his arms that Simeon praises God and sings to God. It is in the context of an intimate embrace that Simeon sings to the Eternal. What is our praise if not to raise our voices while enveloped, embraced by the Divine? The salvation of which Simeon sings amounts to much more than life beyond this life; it means wholeness; oneness and union with God in this life. The name Simeon means that ‘he has heard my suffering’. This is foundational in our faith: God hears our suffering. God suffers with the suffering of creation; God suffers eternally. One writer has said, ‘There was a cross in the heart of God long before the cross of Calvary.’
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a Holocaust Memorial Day event in Drummond Community High School. One of the speakers was Umutesi Stewart, the wife of Iain Stewart, General Secretary of the Edinburgh InterFaith Association. From Rwanda, Umutesi is a genocide survivor. During her talk, Umutesi spoke of the beauty of her country, its history, the violence her people endured and, in faith, she spoke of forgiveness. Simeon’s name means ‘he heard my suffering’; that is Umutesi’s story.
Speaking to an audience of over 200 people, many of whom were teenagers, Umutesi explained that Rwanda had for many centuries been a peaceful country in which people of different tribes lived happily alongside each other. She said that it had been the Belgian colonialists who had differentiated between the Tutsi and the Hutu; categorising people helped the Belgians govern the country. Umutesi said:
The Hutu were chosen to cultivate the land while the
Tutsi were charged with looking after the cows, a very
important animal in Rwandan society. [Over decades] resentment eventually grew between these groups which culminated in the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The genocide began 3 days before my 13thbirthday and life was never to be the same again. Up until then I was
a happy child enjoying my family life and looking forward to returning to school to see my friends.
Within a few days of the genocide beginning, Umutesi had been assaulted, her mother had been murdered and, in order to escape the violence, she embarked on a long and difficult journey through the jungles of Congo. Umutesi sought safety for her baby sister whom she carried on her back and her two other sisters.
Umutesi told the teenagers at Drummond Community High School that genocide does not just overnight but is made possible by the dehumanising of one ethnic group by another. She said thatseparating Hutu children from Tutsi children lead to name calling and worse: the Hutu called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches and snakes’. Over time, one tribe believed itself to be superior to the other.
During her ordeal, Umutesi lost her younger brother, who was seven years old; hesuffered from malnutrition but was beaten to death. Every day she said that she feared for her life and that of her two little sisters. Eventually, she was able to return to Rwanda. She met Iain in 2014 when he was in Rwanda recording an album to promote peace and reconciliation. Umutesi says:
For me God was with me and guided me through the darkest
times in my life and he has guided me here to the beautiful and
cold country of Scotland that I now call my home. ‘We cannot
be slaves to our past.’ We must learn the lessons of our past and try to build a better future. One thing we can be certain of is that our future is uncertain: who would have known I would be happily living in Scotland a country I confess I knew little about before meeting my husband. In order not to be slaves to our past we must learn to forgive. Only with forgiveness can we truly learn to put our past behind us and begin to move on with our lives. This process has begun but it is never an easy path and is often a long and difficult one. However there is no alternative if we are not to repeat the mistakes of our past and if we wish to build a better world for our children and generations to come.
Umutesi spoke of God with her, guiding her, and she spoke also of forgiveness. When a genocide survivor talks of forgiveness, we are moved to silence. When a genocide survivor talks of the progressive path of categorisation, differentiation, dehumanization and violence, we need to pay attention.
The story of Anna and Simeon is more than a quaint myth. It is about encountering God in our life, allowing oneself to stand in the presence of the Sacred, and it is a story that God hears us in our suffering and that, through the darkest, deepest suffering, God can bring wholeness, healing and salvation. Like Umutesi, we are invited to gaze into the face of Jesus, into the face of God. I did when I listened to Umutesi.
Amen.
1