Sermons

The Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple

Preached by Susan Parsons on (Wednesday, February 4, 2004)

In a literal sense we’re remembering the day Jesus was taken by his parents to the Temple, 40 days after his birth, but in a deeper more metaphorical sense it is a reminder to us of God, incarnate in Jesus, coming into the church to initiate a new covenant with His people, to bring renewal to the church. The light coming into the dark. And so we carried candles into the church tonight, for a Candle Mass.

We come into the church too, just like Jesus, but we come to church for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes we come to be edified or we come out of habit or because we should or we ought to, or we come to see friends, and some days because we have to, but at that deep, metaphorical level I think we continue to come into church for the same reason people have been coming into churches for centuries, why Mary and Joseph carried their six week old baby to temple because we have hope, hope that God will bring some light to our darkness, to light a candle in us that we can hold on to against the gloom.

I’ve been in a lot of different churches lately, but in the last three months I’ve spent the most time in the church at St. Stephens House in Oxford. I went to St. Stephens to study but I also wanted to spend time in a worshipping community – something I wasn’t able to do at the seminary here – to have the opportunity to experience what it is like to have a set schedule of worship and study. Like most seminaries in England everyone, students and professors alike eat all their meals together, live within a few hundred yards of each other and are required to be at worship together three times a day – beginning at 7:20 in the morning.

The church at St. Stephens is a cold, gloomy place; it has five altars and 100 foot ceilings, a rood screen crowned with a big pipe organ and a chancel lined with the requisite dark, wooden choir stalls. Tiny chapels, mostly unused, line the edges of the church and the main door is hidden out of sight to one side of the church. There are beautiful stained glass windows to let in light, and radiators, struggling to dispel the cold of the ancient stone, but the cold dark inside seems to absorb light and warmth.At the daily masses, we all huddled together in the center; surrounded with the gray stone of walls and floors and ceilings. The relative warmth of the choir stalls and the grander, more beautiful main altar – not the one we used everyday for communion – were just in front of us, but mostly out of sight and seemingly out of reach and behind that ornate, wooden rood screen.

I went into this church, for the first time, alone. It was a marked contrast from the bright warm late summer day outside; the inside is gloomy, chilly, empty and my steps echoed off the walls as I explored the cavernous building. When I knelt down to pray, I was startled to realized that praying was difficult, God didn’t seem to be very near. Of course, my head rushed to reassure me God is always with us, that it was me that had pulled away from God, but it just didn’t feel right.

Other students and professors began to arrive over the next few days, but their presence did little to dispel the gray that had settled into me. They were great people, eager to get to know this crazy American woman from California, but they were also not shy about letting me know that women’s ordination was still provisional in England and they were full of hope that it would soon be rescinded. Not so much because they felt it was bad theology or anything but because women hadn’t been ordained before… the church had always had an all male clergy and they could see no reason to change it now. They certainly weren’t surprised or bothered that some clergy might be gay, but they were very disturbed that suddenly people were making a fuss about it. They couldn’t understand why it needed to be talked about or acknowledged. It’s always worked fine the way it was, why does it have to change? This is the way we’ve always done it.

‘Because this is the way we’ve always done it’ was an answer I heard a lot. When I asked why we couldn’t have Mass in the relative warmth of the chancel, I was told it was because they’d always celebrated Mass in the chancel. When I asked why we used the Roman Rite instead of the Book of Common Prayer for services, it was because they had always used the Roman Rite, and they had always used the Roman rite because the service in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was hard to use. And they haven’t revised the prayer book since 1662 because – and this was a little different – they couldn’t quite agree on how to update it. We could not leave the dinner table at night until we were excused by the principal because …. We could not talk from 11 o clock at night until after mass in the morning because….

I knew when I went to St. Stephens that, most likely, I would be among people who have much different ideas about how churches ought to be, that there might even be some hostility to my presence. But I didn’t go to shake things up – I went to experience community and to try to understand why they believed as they did. And so, for the most part, I just listened; occasionally offered an opinion, and sometimes looked startled at some of the outrageous comments.

By the end of October, however, I was beginning to feel irritable and argumentative and to let off steam
and I found myself calling the people I disagreed with Pharisees or Donatists. Not out loud of course, just to myself or to people I was emailing in the US. But as the weather became decidedly wintery, I allowed my self-righteousness to keep me warm.

At the end of October, we also began to prepare for the celebration of All Soul’s Day which St. Stephens celebrated by having a bonfire in the evening. The celebration was eagerly anticipated for days in advance – indeed our chore for the previous week had been to go out and cut back all the plants on the grounds so we would have the cuttings to use on the bonfire. As we are hacking away at the roses in the cloister I ask them why a bonfire on All Souls’, what is the significance of the bonfire? Because we’ve always had a bonfire for All Soul’s they said, and so, on the evening of All Soul’s after a festive sung mass we all went out to the parking lot to light the bonfire, but the bonfire won’t light.

The green wood of the cloister won’t burn and neither will the cardboard boxes we toss in or the paper that’s been pulled from the recycling bin. We try dousing it with lighter fluid and still it only smolders. Then someone remembers some old furniture shoved off into one of the covered cloister walks and they go to get that stuff. They return with pews and part of a broken rood screen. I’m mortified and immediately try to convinced them not to burn them - “they’re old” I say “and valuable”, think what we could get for them on EBay. Oh, they’re not old they said, they’re just Victorian and they toss them onto the fire. The pews were apparently just what was needed because it became quite a blaze after that they were tossed in the rood screen. As I stood there in the cold starless night, getting as close as I dared to the now raging fire, I wanted to be irritated, shocked at the foolishness, but it was so much fun; laughing roasting marshmallows drinking warm beer joking about burning people at the stake.
Later that night, I realized suddenly that the bonfire had done more than literally bring warmth and sparkle to an English winter night, it had, metaphorically, thrown light onto the gloom inside me. Why was my way of celebrating any feast day better than any one else’s way? And for that matter what made me so sure I was right? Maybe I’m wrong, I thought.

The day before I left I went to Mass in that cold gloomy church for the last time. I was, literally, swathed in fluffy warm woolens, metaphorically, I kept warm because the people who were huddled there with me had in spite of our differences opened my eyes to the way God was working through them, how they brought light into the church.

The Feast of the Presentation is about Jesus coming into the church, to challenge self-righteousness and complacency and lifeless ritual, a challenge that is as much ours as it is to those who we believe are the Pharisees. But He also comes to us bringing hope, mercy and love. Which is why we really came to church, what we really came to find. And we can find it, because it’s in the light of the people who are searching with us.

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