February 2, 2025 Sermon
/St. Anne’s Episcopal Church - Damascus, MD
February 2, 2025
Fr. Jon Musser, Rector
The Feast of the Presentation, Year C
Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 84
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40
In the name of Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I invite us all this morning to start by taking just a moment to breathe deeply. This moment may we feel the spirit of God in this place. The spirit that Hebrew רוח means literally not only spirit, but wind, breath, the very breath of God. The very breath we now breathe together. The dwelling of the spirit in this place. I want us to start here this morning because this has been an extremely tragic and chaotic week, and at a very basic level we need to remember to breathe and to be reminded that each breath is a moment of connection to our creator.
I love transportation. I have a photo of my dad and me on a plane to west Texas when I was something like two years old, and I remember at about Anna‘s age being mesmerized by the towering 4-4-0 Katy #311 locomotive that’s at the National Transportation Museum in Keyes Summit, Missouri. My grandfather as a young boy himself had watched that exact engine steam across those same high Texas plains that I would fly over decades later. Transportation just has a magic for me whether a train, a plane, a humble car… in my mind transportation is inherently linked to the idea of being on a journey, pregnant with the possibility of adventure with hopes, dreams, and trust in a transformed life. And then in the blink of an eye it can horrifically literally come crashing down. It’s been so hard this week to witness the tragedy unfolding down in Washington. My heart was wrenched watching the fallout from the plane crash and thinking about how many times I’ve flown that exact path in and out of National Airport, coming up the river, swinging out at that last moment to land. How many times I’ve thoughtlessly sat there with the whole world, my whole life, in front of me on that plane.
Aspirations, what this life could be with its hopes and dreams, are at the very heart of what we hear today in this Feast of the Presentation. Hopes and dreams that are not shattered but brought to fruition And I wonder what it means to have such dreams when things seem so hopeless. There’s another question that was brought to my mind in reading our reading from Malachi. If we pay attention, the prophet asks who can abide and who can stand in the day of the Lord, and if we remember that the experience of our faith is the experience of the “already but not yet-ness of Christ”, having already come among us as God incarnate in Jesus, we have one sense of an answer. There were those who stood and abided in the moment of God’s first coming among us. Today we have the examples of Simeon, Anna, and the Holy Family of Mary and Joseph standing and abiding in the day of the Lord. And when I think about that I wonder what their witness says about what it means to abide and to stand. What does their witness say about hope in times of hopelessness? Then, on Wednesday, I was driving back from a lunch conversation with a colleague and the answer came to me as I was listening to a radio commentator talking about the chaos of this present moment and the complexities and challenges that we face as a society, a world, and as a community here within the United States. They said that so much of what we have before us is reflective of the fact that we are at the “apogee of distrust.” And I realized that this is the answer to the question. Simeon, Anna, Mary, and Joseph showed a sense of trustfulness in a similar time of district. That they reclaimed and proclaimed trust in God even though there seemed to be so very little to trust.
Apogee was an interesting word to use there because in some sense, we often use it in the expression of something being at its height: that we are the height of distrust. However, it also has a celestial or cosmic sense in that it is the point in an orbit at which an object is at the furthest distance from the the the center it is orbiting around. So there is both the sense of a static concept: being at the height; and a dynamic concept: a temporary sense of distance from which we can circle back around to trustfulness, to hopefulness, to a sense of dreaming for a better world and a better time.
So I want to invite us this morning, as we celebrate the Presentation to be captured by the sense of trust that is displayed in the narrative. The first reference to the Messiah in the Bible is a sense of the Messiah as a prophetic coming presence of God, who will put the world to right. This first reference is by Moses in some of his departing messages to the people of Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy. And if we think about it, this was over a millennia before Christ actually came, before God became manifest in Christ. Centuries and generations of faithful hoped and dreamed for the Messiah, and that hoping and dreaming was often in contexts that were very dark, uncertain, and fraught. There’s also a very ancient tradition of the church that suggests Simeon himself was of a supernatural old age. That he had been one of the 70 who translated the Septuigent (the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek in the fifth century BC), and that he was a bridge or a link between the end of the prophets, and the age of the prophets, and the arrival of the Messiah. The tradition is that, as the scriptures say, he would not see death until this moment in which he could witness the presence of God in the personhood of Christ. This is the sense in which trust and hope are the central themes of the Presentation. It is the central message for us today, in a moment in time that seems so very fraught and hopeless. It goes beyond just an ethereal sense, or cognitive intellectual sense, of reclaiming hope today. After our service concludes we will move into the parish hall for our annual meeting. There’s a lot before us: a lot of challenges, a lot of uncertainty - but in the midst of that may we seek to proclaim and reclaim trust and seek the brighter future of God before us. Because, friends, even in the darkest hour Christ shows forth the light of the world into this darkness. May we feel the light of that presence today. May we trust in the light of that presence. And, may we let it guide us into all hopefulness, into all believing, and may we see and experience the greater love and light of God ahead.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.