Candlemas: God’s Return to His People and Why that Matters to You

Sermon delivered on Candlemas, Sunday, February 2, 2014 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Malachi 3.1-5; Psalm 24.1-10; Hebrews 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Presentation of Christ at the Temple. This is the day when Mary and Joseph came to the temple to complete Mary’s purification process (cf. Leviticus 12.1-8) and to perform the redemption of the firstborn, where they offered Jesus as holy (set apart for service) to the Lord (cf. Numbers 3.40-51). Both were prescribed by the Law of Moses and neither ritual was unique to Jesus. This feast day also came to be known as Candlemas, or the Festival Day of Candles, in which the priest would bless candles for use in the local church for the coming year and in some cases would send some of the candles home with his parish-ioners for them to use. It is one of the earliest known feasts to be celebrated by the Church.

Candlemas falls 40 days from the birth of Jesus because that is the day Mary would have completed her purification process as prescribed by the Law, which means that Candlemas always falls on February 2. It is also the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox and before there ever was a Groundhog Day (also observed on February 2), tradition held that when Candlemas fell on a sunny day, there was more winter to come. But when it fell on a cloudy, wet, or stormy day, it meant that the worst of winter was over. For you Christmas fanatics out there, tradition also holds that any Christmas decorations not taken down by Twelfth Night (January 5) should be left up until Candlemas and then taken down. Candlemas also officially marks the end of the Epiphany season, a season in which the Church celebrates Christ as being the light to the world, and so it is particularly appropriate for us to celebrate today with the blessing and lighting of candles. Now that you’ve had your history lesson on Candlemas, I want us to look briefly at what this feast might mean for us as Christians living in the 21st century.

In our OT lesson, we see the Lord promising his people through his prophet that he would at long last return to the Temple in Jerusalem. God had brought freedom to the remnant of his people living in captivity in Babylon and had returned them to the promised land. The Temple had been rebuilt (Ezra 3.8-13) but God’s glorious presence had not returned to fill the Temple as it did when Solomon dedicated the first Temple (1 Kings 8.10-11) and as God had promised his people through the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 43.1-7a). Given that Jews living in this so-called Second Temple period (the period of Jewish history that spans ca. the late 6th century BC-early 1st century AD) believed that the Temple was God’s dwelling place with his people Israel, the place where heaven and earth intersected, and given that we have no indication from the literature of that period that God’s presence and glory had returned to dwell in the rebuilt Temple, we can appreciate how upsetting this would have been for God’s people and the anxiety it produced. Why had God not returned? Was God not good to his word? Had he changed his mind after all about his covenant with Israel and abandoned his people?

Now in today’s lesson, we hear the Lord promising that he would indeed keep his promise to return to dwell with his people but that his return would not be such a wonderful thing as some had expected. God would return suddenly to his Temple and when he did, there would be judgment on his people because they had continued in the same sins that had caused God to deliver them into exile in the first place. God’s people still strayed from him to chase after worthless idols and their idol worship had caused all kinds of perversions of social and economic justice. So how could they possibly be a light for the gentiles? We see the prophet warning his people, “Careful what you wish for you. You may just get it!”

And we can relate to Malachi’s audience. We don’t long for God to return to his Temple because we believe Jesus is the new Temple, the place where God and humans intersect. But we long for God’s glory and presence to return to his broken and hurting world to right all the wrongs. Like God’s ancient people, we know what it is like to look around and be afraid. Just look at the additions to our intercessions list this past week! We have friends and loved ones who have been hurt or who have to face all kinds of devastating illness and surgery. We read about mass shootings that seem to occur at an increasingly alarming rate and the threat of terrorism never seems to be far away. All these things, and much, much more, make us want to fall into despair and cry out to God or even curse him. We wonder when God will return to dwell with his people because the sad fact is that many folks in our culture, Christians included, don’t really believe God is very near to them in the first place. And for those of us who do believe God still is in charge of things, like God’s ancient people, when we cry out for God to return to rescue us from all the evil in his world, we typically have in mind an all-powerful God, the Lord of hosts, coming like a mighty general to strike down all our enemies and the evil that exists in the world.

And if we are really honest with ourselves, many of us have mixed feelings about the Lord’s promise to return and dwell with his people because warnings like Malachi’s make us stop and wonder if we are going to be the recipients of that judgment so that we will be swept away when God returns to clean house. We may not think of it exactly in those terms, but many of us think about it because as the writer of Hebrews tells us, many of us fear death. We wonder how it will go for us on the day we meet God face-to-face. If you are one of those folks who have ambivalent feelings about the Lord’s return or fear death, listen carefully to the rest of this sermon because there is wonderfully Good News in it for you (it’s OK if the rest of you want to listen too).

Why? Because in our gospel lesson we see the Lord fulfilling his promise to his people to return to his Temple. But it wasn’t what people expected or even wanted. Instead of returning to his people as an all-powerful God bent on destroying Israel’s enemies, God returned to them as a baby to be dedicated as holy to the Lord! But why did God choose to return in this manner, as a fully human being instead of in great power and glory? While none of us can know God’s ways and purposes completely, our epistle lesson sheds some light on this question.

You see, God had bigger fish to fry than just dealing with Israel’s enemies. Those enemies (both inside and outside of Israel) were merely symptoms of the larger problem of human sin and the evil it produced that God had to deal with and we need to go back to the beginning to understand this. As Genesis tells us, God created humans to be his image-bearing stewards to run his good creation wisely, to reflect God’s glory out to the rest of creation and to offer creation’s praise and glory back to its Creator. This obviously meant that God had created humans to have a real and ongoing relationship with God. But that didn’t happen. Humans rebelled against God and our rebellion allowed evil to gain a beachhead in God’s good creation, corrupting both creation and all living creatures, humans included. Our sin had the effect of separating us from our Life Source and alienating us from God, resulting, among other things, in our death. This obviously prevented us from being the fully human creatures God created us to be and our rebellion allowed the dark powers to increasingly corrupt God’s world and his creatures (cf. the heartbreaking litany reported in Genesis 4.1-6.8, 11.1-9). This increasingly sinister corruption of God’s good world is why God called Israel to be his people and why Israel had enemies in the first place. And so God had to deal not with the symptoms of the problem but the problem itself—human sin and the evil and corruption it helped unleash. Fix that problem and there is a real hope that good order will be restored to God’s world and its peoples.

But how to do this? One solution would be for God to destroy humans completely and start over again from scratch. But as the flood narratives and other stories of the OT attest, God chose not to do that. Instead, he ultimately chose to become human to bear the terrible judgment of his own just wrath on human sin and evil on our behalf and to destroy the power of evil itself. This is exactly what the writer of Hebrews tells us when he says that through Jesus’ death on the cross, the one who has the power of death, i.e., the devil, was destroyed.

Like the other biblical writers, the author of Hebrews does not tell us exactly how Jesus’ death on the cross destroyed the devil and his power over us, only that it did. This can drive us crazy at times and we want to ask God the hard “why” questions. But what if God gave us an answer to our questions about suffering and the evil that caused it? Would that knowledge alleviate our suffering or cause the evil to disappear? Hardly. Think it through. Does the person with lung cancer find respite and comfort in knowing that smoking three packs of cigarettes a day over the years was the likely cause of his cancer?

No, given the human condition and the fact that we live in a fallen world, a more satisfactory solution for us is to examine the biblical evidence about who Jesus is and then by faith accept promises like the one we read today because it offers real hope in the face of our darkest fears. And as is the case with anything that requires our faith (and much of our daily experience requires faith), the more time we spend knowing God through Jesus and working on our relationship with him in the power of the Spirit, the stronger our faith becomes. After all, it’s virtually impossible for us to put this kind of faith in a complete or relatively unknown stranger!

And here I want to say two things about how we look at the devil. First, Satan is terribly real and we must not get hung up by ridiculous caricatures of him (e.g., pitch forks, tails, horns, etc.). They serve only to distract us from taking him seriously and that’s exactly what the Evil One wants. Rather, regardless of appearance, take the devil seriously as the writers of the NT did (but not too seriously because he is always under God’s control). After all, Jesus himself called Satan a murderer and the Father of Lies (John 8.44), and Peter, James, and Paul warn us to resist the Evil One in the power of the Spirit (1 Peter 5.7-9; James 4.7; Ephesians 6.10-12). If we do not take their warnings seriously, we run the risk of letting Satan deceive us and lead us astray.

Second, as it pertains to our discussion about our fear of death, and if my experience is indicative of how he works, the Evil One will try to plant thoughts in our minds from a variety of sources that promises like the ones the writer of Hebrews make really aren’t true, or that they might be true for others but not for us, that evil and death are not really destroyed. Of course we look around and see that evil and death still exist and this causes us to doubt. But don’t believe the lies of the Liar-in-Chief! That is why it is critical for us as Christians to examine the evidence, both in the Bible and in the experience of the Church, so that we are convinced that Jesus is who he said he is and that because God really did raise Jesus from the dead we can believe that in Jesus’ death, God really did destroy the power of the Evil One. And if that’s true, those of us who put our hope and trust in him have no reason to fear death because our future is resurrection and new creation, not death and destruction.

So on a personal level, if you are one who fears death, you must understand you are being robbed of real power and joy of living that transcends any and all circumstances, death included. You need not fear death because Jesus has died for you so that you might have life and be free from the slavery of fear! Therefore I encourage you to reexamine your faith carefully in light of the available evidence (like today’s epistle lesson) and ask yourself if you have let the Evil One deceive you. Study the narratives of Scripture carefully with other Christians, especially the NT, and think through these issues together. Take to heart passages like today’s with its promise that Jesus serves as our great High Priest who has atoned for his people’s sins and who has great compassion for us because he knows in every way what it is like to suffer and deal with evil. Remember that this Jesus is available to us today in the power and person of the Holy Spirit and respond accordingly by acting like you really believe it. There is no better time to do this than when we come to the Table each week to feed on our Lord’s body and blood!

Talk with other Christians who do not fear death and ask them why they don’t. A good person to start with is Alice. I have rarely seen a more joyous faith in a person than I see in her (and her husband Tom when he was living). Or come talk to me because I have been in the presence of the living Jesus. I didn’t see his face but I experienced his presence and I can tell you that there is nothing to fear. I experienced the peace of God that passes all understanding because I experienced first-hand Jesus’ healing love for me when he took away the guilt that afflicted me, never to return. But sadly I’ve forgotten this peace many times because I get too distracted by this world, my fears, and the circumstances of life. This is how the Evil One works and that’s why we need each other and must be on our guard all the time in the power of the Spirit. When we put our whole hope and trust in the One who has the power to destroy death itself, we discover that we have nothing to fear because we have the power of God living in us.

But this is Candlemas and we dare not seek this power just for ourselves, important as that is. We learn to live joyfully and fearlessly in the power of the Spirit so that we can spread the Good News of God’s arrival among his people in Jesus with the rest of the world. If we really do not believe the promises of God (and our actions always reflect our beliefs), there is no way we can share the wealth and be God’s light to the nations—and I am convinced that this is exactly what has happened to many of our churches today. But if we really believe God’s promises, we will not have to worry about how to share Jesus with others (creating doubt is a favorite tactic of the Evil One) because Jesus will naturally shine through us and we will be eager to share the basis of our hope. That is the challenge of Candlemas (and the rest of the year) and our call as God’s people here at St. Augustine’s—to be God’s light to the nations in our speech and actions.

It’s a challenge because we live in a world that grows increasingly skeptical of the Christian faith. But we must not become discouraged. Like the writer of Hebrews did with his audience, so too must we be prepared to get under people’s skin and talk honestly with them about the human condition and the only real hope and cure for it. We don’t do this by beating people over the head with the gospel or becoming self-righteous around them (I’ve got something you don’t have! Nah nah nah, boo boo!). We do so by becoming like our Lord Jesus who chose the ways of humility, service, and suffering as the path to glory and who dared to love even his enemies enough to speak the truth in love to them. That, of course, got him crucified and we must be prepared to suffer likewise when we imitate him in this task. But we have the power of God living in us and can therefore embrace our suffering because we know that in it, we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.