Malachi 3:1-4 | Hebrews 2:14-18 | Luke 2:22-40 or 2:22-32

Almighty, everliving God, we humbly implore your majesty that, just as your Only Begotten Son, who presented on this day in the temple, in the substance of our flesh, so by your grace we may be presented to you with minds made pure through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s unusual that we have the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple on a Sunday, but whenever this date, February 2nd, falls on a Sunday, we celebrate this feast.  It’s an interesting feast, because it has a long, long tradition in the church, one of the earliest feasts that was established.  It marked the end of a period called Epiphany, the showing of God to the world in the form of Jesus.  The thing that’s so interesting about this feast is that it’s on this day that there’s usually a long procession with people with candles in their hands, and all the candles that are normally used for that community that year are blessed on this day.  So the focus is pretty clear: everyone holding a blessed, burning light. 

Fire, it purifies.  It cleanses.  It burns out everything that’s not true and not real.  I love the image in the scriptures that this purification that is promised by God, when he comes into the world as a human being, understanding human nature, so much knows that we must be understanding what it means to be purified.  I for some reason thought purification came out of my will, my desire.  I was told as a child, over and over again, whenever I sinned, God’s favor left me.  What a horrible thing to say to someone, that their weaknesses remove the favor of God.  I know the intention of the church is always something good, but sometimes it overstates certain things, and one of the things that was certainly overstated for me as a child was, whenever you sin, no matter how small or big — I couldn’t distinguish, as a seven-year-old, between mortal and venial.  I just knew, when I did something I wasn’t supposed to, I sinned, and God then became angry at me.  And the thing wasn’t just that he was angry, but I was even told, as a young boy, that this was going to be a rejection of me, so much so that, if I happened to die in an accident or something, I would then be punished the rest of my life.  So not only did I lose the favor of God, in the sense that he wasn’t pleased, he was furious, and the thought of a child being punished with being burned for the rest of your life just — years of therapy I’ve tried to get past that, but it’s still my default.  Whenever I fail, I think, “Oh, there I go.  I’ve lost the favor of the person I’ve offended.  I’ve lost God.  I’ve lost self-esteem.  I’ve caught shame.”  But nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, if somebody says to God, “I don’t want anything from you” — we can separate ourselves, at least limit God’s ability to save us by saying, “No, I don’t want anything to do with you.  I choose to do everything against what you stand for.”  That’s called mortal sin, but I’ve yet to meet anybody that’s like that. I’m sure they exist, I suppose, but what I always find in sinners are people who are struggling to do something that they think is going to help them or think it’s going to be good for them, and they find out it’s not.  And it hurts other people, and it hurts them, and then they repent.  And that gift of going through that process demands God’s favor.  If we think that, when we’re in trouble and when we sin and we’re confused, and it’s blindness that causes 90 percent of our sins, I’m convinced — we think it’s a good thing at the moment, or it’s such a drive inside of us we can’t say no to it.  That’s so human, so natural to a human being, to be caught up in passion, whether it’s a sexual drive or a furious, angry intention to hurt someone, and you add all kinds of other things to it, alcohol.  You add drugs.  You add all kinds of damage that’s been done to us, limiting our ability to love.  So how can God look at that kind of human condition and say, “The minute you do this, I want to throw up”?  That’s what I thought as a child.  What is it that he does when we sin?  He forgives.  We stand forgiven.  What does it mean that we’re forgiven?  

The interesting thing about forgiveness, whenever I give a talk on the importance of forgiveness, somebody in the audience will stand up and say, “You’re telling me I have to forgive the man if they come into my life and kill my entire family, and I’m supposed to say it’s okay?”  What a caricature of forgiveness.  No, forgiveness is receiving something, receiving something from someone who you’ve offended, but let’s just focus on God, all right?  So if you do disappoint God, well, certainly he’s not pleased.  He’s sad that you’re doing something that destroys you or someone else, yes, not angry but sad, not disgusted but sad.  And what’s his response out of that compassionate understanding and sadness?  “I want to help you.”  And what is it that forgiveness offers?  Well, think of it as a gateway, an openness from God to you of a thing called enlightenment, the theme of this particular feast, light.  If you let enlightenment in, it’s promised, in the first reading, that it will purify you.  It will take out all the stuff that isn’t really authentically you.  It’ll take all the things out of you that are results of your — things that have happened to you, your default of going to a negative response, because that’s what you were trained as a child to do, or the trauma you’ve had in your life have kept you from being opened to grace from another person to be loved.  So it’s allowing this mysterious favor.  I want you to get a feeling that the favor of God is enlightenment.  We call it forgiveness.  That enlightenment enters into us.  Who can stand when this is happening?  Who can stand something coming into you that attacks very — not attacks — works clearly on the wound that has been damaged by someone in your past or in your life?  And that damage, it’s a sensitive, tender place.  Do you want to go into what really makes you feel ashamed?  Do you really want to go deep down into why you’re so angry at the world?  Do you want to really understand why you’re so critical of everyone, why you’re so afraid to be yourself?  Those aren’t easy places to let someone into, and that’s what God is trying to say.  It is like fire.  It’s like bleach, heavy bleach that purifies and cleanses, but what’s so beautiful about that image is what it’s getting to is the gold, the silver, the preciousness.  And what is that?  The preciousness that is in us, that is hidden from us, that needs to be cleansed by the purification of enlightenment is the very thing that God looks at every day, and he is so in love with it that he can hardly stand it.  It’s the you he created.  It’s the me he created, and he longs, longs, longs for that to come to full fruition, to full birth.  That’s what that image of Jesus presented in the temple, what happens to him when he’s presented — he’s going to show us the way.  And the three things he has been given at this temple ceremony, he’s been given God’s favor, God’s enlightenment, growth, wisdom.  That’s our inheritance.  The response of God to your sins and mine is always that kind of desire in him to bring these things to you so that there’s a process that we’re all engaged in.  It’s the reason we’re here, and that’s to change, to evolve, to have our eyes opened, that which imprisons us and enslaves us be freed, to not be under constant stress.  That’s what he’s here for, not to condemn, not to separate himself from us.  

I use this all the time, but it seems so strange to me that — if sin is like a disease, something is out of whack.  Something is not functioning, because human beings are made for goodness.  I remember — sidebar, but I remember when I was asking my mother once if she was at my baptism, and she said no.  Or I asked her what it was like, and she said, “I wasn’t there.”  I said, “You weren’t there?”  And she said, “Well, no.  We always — the mother is usually still in the hospital, and two days after they were born, they were raced to the baptismal font for fear that, if they weren’t baptized, they would be punished.”  What?  Years ago, I mean, centuries ago, it was they would go to hell, and if it — they changed that to limbo, which is really not a real place, and we dropped that just in the last couple of years.  No, a child that is born, that has no capacity for any kind of rejection of God, which is what sin really is in its deepest, most horrible sense — a child cannot come into the world corrupt.  That would mean God creates corrupt human beings.  He creates evil creatures, and then the institution, religion, saves it by giving it a ritual, which is the power of God, to purify this person.  But if baptism worked completely, if we were totally purified, then what?  There’d be no more work to do.  No, the work in this life is to go through the experience that Jesus went through of living our life as it is written — as it is written.  That was his challenge in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Will you do this as it is written?  And then the shocker: God says to him, “I want you to give in to sin.”  What?  “I want you to give in to the thing that sin does to people and endure it.”  Sin humiliates.  Sin crucifies.  Sin shames.  Sin whips.  Sin destroys another person.  He said, “Endure that and show people that nothing can destroy them — nothing, and rise, and you will change the world.  You’ll change it.”  Giving in to sin is giving in to the reality of what you’re doing and facing it without shame and without fear that you’ve lost God, but just simply the process of being honest and asking God to come into you with grace, fire, light, love, forgiveness, and you’re able to deal with the cause of that sin.  The wound, the brokenness, it can be healed, not by you but by God.  All he asks is the transparency to name that thing that’s in you and let him touch it.

Imagine a doctor who sets up a clinic, a hospital, and it represents the church.  And everyone comes that’s sick, and they say, “Oh, I’m sorry.  We don’t allow sick people in here.  No, these are the saved people.  These are the good people.  You can’t be in here.  If you start sinning or doing something wrong, we kick you out, and you go figure out how to get your act together.  But we’re not interested in sinners.  We’re interested in saved, beautiful people who are doing the right thing, and we all sing the right songs, and we wear the right clothes, and we all love each other.  But we hate sinners.”  It’s the shadow of all religion, an exclusive club of saved when it’s just the opposite.  It’s a beautiful group of struggling human beings longing for forgiveness and lightness, favor and transformation, and once we see that, once we’re drawn to a community like that where there’s no hidden thing going on and everyone trying desperately to live the authentic life, it is so beautiful and so life-giving.  It’s called the kingdom.

Father there’s darkness in all of us.  We didn’t put it there.  We came into the world.  It was placed there by those around us.  It also was inherited from all our ancestors, but we know that this is not something that you would give to us unless it has a purpose, unless it will bring us something greater.  So open our eyes to your power of forgiveness and love and acceptance and your transforming gift of grace that opens us to who we really are and who we can be to the world.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.