In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Evolution is an elegant process, one that cements a bond between all living things. Trees grow taller so that herbivores will leave their leaves alone. And, giraffes develop longer necks to vex those same trees. Maybe sometime in the very distant future, we’ll have skyscraper trees and very very tall giraffes.
But sometimes one side of the arms race (or neck race) jumps ahead, leaving its counterpart in the lurch. Over tens of thousands of years, human hunters preyed upon deer and elk and moose and caribou and other large beasts with four hooves and they responded by becoming faster, and the ones with better hearing escaped, breeding offspring with better hearing, and so forth. And so, humans and deer were in a Cold war for generations.
But, we jumped ahead. And so when a deer no longer hears us coming in our car, but sees us rapidly approaching, sees two tiny, strange dots of white light suddenly grow bigger, brighter and louder. The deer, as I’m sure everyone in Williamsville has experienced, is riveted, and is fixed on our headlights. Let’s not go into what happens next.
And tonight is all about light. We use the same word light to describe so many and such very different experiences we have. Light can stop you in your tracks and fixate you like the deer, light can be a quiet humble flame of a single candle, light from the refrigerator wraps me about when I’m eating chocolate cake right off the plate with a fork at 1am, light beams down unemotionally in the grocery store, on the sidewalk, in the operating room. Light leads the lost to safety, exposes the hidden to the seeker, unveils secret things we’d prefer remain cloaked. Light heals, light burns, light warms, light refines.
St Luke’s Gospel records that Simeon, the Temple priest, witnessed a shimmer of light from an infant he saw in a young girl’s arms, while her husband carried a basket of two turtledoves as an offering. That infant, a firstborn son, was to be consecrated to his LORD; Simeon felt a shimmer of brightness around that child, took him in his arms, and saw the wrinkled and sleeping face of his deliverer. With joy, he whispered to the infant and to his parents that this child would be a light to enlighten the gentiles, that this child was light from light.
This child would shine into the world’s dark recesses, exposing to all the corners of darkness, left unattended from neglect, or from fear, or from pain, or from intent to conceal. This child would be the light that would cause the rising and the falling of many in Israel. This child was a light who would comfort the afflicted and who would afflict the comfortable.
We hold this solemn feast of Light, celebrating the witness of Christ’s light in the Temple during a time of darkness in our year. We are 40 days from Christmas, and Candlemas falls in the bleak midwinter, at the halfway point between winter and spring. In the midst of darkness, cold, blight, to us is given a deliverer, a light to cheer us, to embolden us, and to strengthen us. But remember, with that comfort comes a promise of difficulty, of suffering. During that moment in which Simeon shuffled across the Temple floor over to the Holy Family and confessed that the Messiah had been given to Israel and to all humanity, in that moment of joy and wonder, of light and of glory, Simeon lowered his eyes and whispered to Mary, the child’s mother: And a sword will pierce your own soul, too. Amidst joy we must also welcome sorrow. Never can we separate Bethlehem from Calvary, manger from Cross.
And we find that it true in our own lives: rarely are our triumphs and successes not tempered by sadness in the lives of others which reminds us that our victories are passing; and rarely are our pains, our mournings, our crushing defeats not softened by the presence and love of family, of friends and community. And recognizing that we cannot set up walls between our emotions, between our pain and our joy, the Church always points to the interconnectedness of the hope of new birth in a swaddled baby, and the pain of loss through nail and wood and thorn and spear.
Just as our lives are mixed with happiness and travail, in Christ is the human mixed with the divine. There are no longer discreet lines between an incomprehensible God and a trembling lost humanity. In Christ, the two are messily mixed, forever changing both God and mankind.
And this evening, we celebrate the sharing of divinity with our humanity, and we humbly worship the messy mixing of our creaturehood with the Godhead. We confess that Christ has made this world different, made this a world of light, a world where the creator who strode the Milky Way in the moments of the deafening boom of the Universe’s birth chose also to walk a dusty path that took him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, to Jerusalem and to His Cross on Calvary.
No longer will our everyday lives have no meaning beyond a blur of grocery lists, oil changes, and meeting after meeting after meeting at work. By becoming flesh, the Christ sanctified all human life and work. In Christ, God made sacred all that we do. Tonight we gather to show in a concrete way that the mundane and the sacred cannot be teased apart.
On this day of Candlemas, it is the Church’s ancient tradition to bless the candles to be used in the liturgy for the year. We take the opportunity of a sacred event, Christ coming suddenly unto His Temple as light and Messiah and combine it with a more mundane thing: we have to be able to see in Church. We use the sacred event of Simeon’s confession of Christ as the world’s light and tie it to a needful thing: candles for church. Before the advent of electricity, candlelight was the only means of seeing in church, and by connecting that necessity with Christ’s epiphany in the Temple, the shape of the current Candlemas liturgy emerged. To put it into perspective, how real and everyday candle blessing really is, the equivalent today would be for Fr. Ethan instead to bless the church’s lightbulbs every February 2, and to remind us that Christ is the lightbulb of the world. Maybe one day, when we have skyscraper trees and crane-necked giraffes, on February 2 we’ll all gather to celebrate Lightbulbmas.
The light that warms cannot be removed from the light that purges and refines; Christ’s birth cannot be separated from His Passion; Mary’s joy in the stable cannot be undone from the sword that pierced her heart at Golgotha; our everyday lives that bore and wear us down cannot be separated from the divine life we’re given in Christ. Candlemas teaches that impossible things happen alongside unremarkable things. We bless candles for our use, for practical and needful reasons, and moments later, we celebrate the very heavens rupturing open and Christ manifesting Himself anew on the altar. Though seemingly commonplace bread and wine is offered, it is truly the very flesh and the very blood of the God who cried out from cradle and from Cross. In the Eucharist, Christ veils his glory in simple bread, simple wine.
Remember the story of Candlemas and treasure it in your heart the whole year round: for you, light was given, light to strengthen, and light to challenge. For you, the sacred came down to earth and for you the earthly was made sacred. Out of love, for you, Christ gave Himself in Sacrament, so that never would your everyday be separated from the eternal.
Amen.
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