[A sermon preached at St Luke's West Holloway]
Thank you for the invitation.
Great to see some familiar faces
I was vicar of your neighbour, Mary Mags for 10 years from 1995-2005: rather daunted to have Dave Tomlinson on one side and Stephen Coles on the other and to be this nobody in the middle.
I became vicar in Bury St Edmunds for 12 years and then, from 2017-2023 I was the Anglican chaplain in Moscow. Alison and myself returned to the UK last summer. Our final weekend in Moscow was the weekend that Prigozhin, rather like the grand old Duke of York, marched his troops to the edge of Moscow and then – fatally for him – turned them around and marched them back.
We did not have to leave. We were on three month visas which was a bit of a pain, and travel took about 20 hours, and we sort of safe: we were sufficiently protected by the Moscow Patriarchate (they were our ‘roof’). The most likely scenario, if I had stepped over the line, is that we would have had our visas cancelled and been put on a plane. We made the decision to return to the UK for family reasons.
While I think that some of Moscow’s complaints against the West have some justification, there is nothing that can justify what Putin did on 24 February 2022. It was probably a result of a catastrophic failure of intelligence and it has led to up to 500000 deaths from both Ukraine and Russian; millions of people – some of you may be here – having to flee their homes, terrible things being done: the problem with atrocities actual, or faked, is that they legitimize other atrocities; and there is the infestation and fostering and festering of hatreds that will take decades to heal. We also saw first hand the devastation that it caused to so many in Russia. Most western foreigners left in the first three months, and then many of our Russians left in September after the beginning of mobilisation. And we saw how the authorities clamped down on any criticism of the ‘special military operations’.
It is awful. Leaving aside the possibility of a miscalculation by either Russia or the West with apocalyptic consequences, I fear that many more people (Russians and Ukrainians) are going to have to die; I wonder how many miles of territory are going to be conquered or liberated, and how much land one person’s life is worth? I suspect that vested interests are taking advantage of this. And I worry that this is more an ideological conflict between Russia and the West, played out with Ukrainian lives on the territory of the people of the Donbas who – in all honesty – did not want to be part of Ukraine nor, particularly, part of Russia.
And looking beyond Russia and Ukraine, we see the war between Israel and Hamas which has already claimed over 30000 lives; not to mention wars in Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the many forgotten conflicts.
And we continue to live with the consequences of COVID. The latest statistic is that 234203 people died as a result of COVID and that number continues to increase. That is the statistic, but every one of those 234203 is a person with their unique story – and so much pain. I suspect we have all lost someone we knew – and many of you will have lost people who were very close to you.
It is very easy to give in to despair.
To be overwhelmed by our sense of powerlessness.
We were talking with our integrative members at the Community of St Anselm last week (they work in London and are part time with the community) and they were telling us that many of their peers were facing increased stress, isolation, financial pressures and mental health issues. And that is happening with the background mood music of ongoing wars and out of control climate change.
And as followers of the Lord Jesus, what do we say? Not only for others, but for ourselves.
For a few moments I’d like us to look at the story of the presentation.
And I would like to use this old picture, from the early 1400s, an icon from Novgorod in Russia, which depicts the events that we heard in our bible reading (Luke 2.22-38)
It shows Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna.
First of all, on the left, is Joseph.
The Old Testament law stated that a woman needed purification 40 days after the birth of a child. She needed to come to the temple, make a sacrifice and be declared ritually clean.
It is not that giving birth was seen as sinful, but to do with blood. There is a lot of blood involved in child birth: and they had a thing about blood being the life source of a person, and therefore spilt blood as contaminating and disrupting.
What I note, and it is significant, is that Luke writes, ‘When the time came for their purification’. Technically, it should have just been ‘her’ purification. But Joseph fully shares in this. He also needs purification. He carries two birds (turtle doves or pigeons) – which is what poorer families were required to bring for sacrifice.
And that is right, because as we approach God, we each need purification.
Not because of spilt blood – things have changed after the death of Jesus – but because of the way that we have contaminated other lives and allowed our life to be contaminated. It is that contamination which leads to the sort of things we are seeing in the Donbas and Gaza. It is that which leads to our own conflicts.
We need washing clean.
And the rite of purification was a gift of God. God offers to make us clean.
It is why Jesus told his disciples to baptise all peoples. The only thing required of someone to become a member of his people is that you receive the gift of baptism – that you allow someone else to throw water at you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And so the journey in this icon begins with purification
Then there is Mary.
She is bringing her first born child to be presented at the temple. As the first fruits of the womb, that child belonged to God. And a sacrifice would be made to God to redeem them, to buy them back.
What is significant here is that no sacrifice is made for Jesus.
He is presented but not redeemed.
There are echoes of the Old Testament story of Hannah who brings her first born, Samuel, to the temple and leaves him there.
And it is interesting that the next time we hear of Jesus, when he is 12 years old, he is in the temple. And he says to his parents, ‘Did you not know that I must be here, in my Father’s house?’
So Mary comes and presents Jesus.
She offers to God that which God had given her, and that which as a new mother was the most precious thing that she could give: her only Son.
And that is costly. It is the first moment of separation. I remember watching our oldest son walk from the car to get on the bus to go on his first overnight school trip. Something really got me. And that is nothing to what others have gone through.
I think of parents whose children, or lovers whose partners, leave them to go to the front line.
And there is Mary when she sees Jesus rejected and hanging on the cross. A sword pierces her soul.
And then we have Simeon.
He takes the child in his arms and looks straight into the face of the child.
In Russian or Ukrainian, the church festival today is not called Purification or Presentation, but ‘Sreteniya’, meeting.
It is the meeting of God and humanity.
Simeon sees the promised one, the one who is the Messiah – the one who has come to bring in the Kingdom of God.
And Simeon looks in the face of Jesus and he praises God: ‘My eyes have seen your salvation’.
In the face of death
and suffering and pain
In the face of the
global and national crises: war, climate change, the challenges and
opportunities presented by AI, disease, mental health issues,
God has come to us.
And as we receive this gift of God, and look in the face of Jesus
a) We see the love of God.
Jesus is God’s gift of love to us. ‘For God so loved the world, he sent his one and only Son …’
He comes to us, he lives among us, in this world of death. He knows us: our fear, our failure, our powerlessness, our stress, our confusion. And he has come as one of us to live among us, and to die with us – but for us.
In the icon, love responds to love. Simeon responds by receiving the baby, receiving the love and praising God.
b) We see the way that God works.
When God intervened into the world he does not send a tank, an F1 fighter or a cruise missile or kinzhal - but a baby.
We live in a culture which is completely focussed on surface things: power and wealth and comfort and appearance and status and respect. It is about things like language and who writes history and who draws the borders.
It gets things done by being bigger and stronger and standing over the other
But the Kingdom of God is about something much deeper. It is about the heart.
So Jesus comes among us as one who has nothing that the world values, no power -status – or wealth. He is dependent on miraculous fish to pay his taxes. He lives among us as a servant. He is despised and rejected and he ends up on a cross.
And he calls his followers to deny themselves, not to live for the things of this world, to give what they have to the poor, to become the rejects of society – to become hungry and thirsty and naked and a stranger - and to take up their cross for him.
I don’t know how that makes you feel! Jesus has come ‘to reveal our inner thoughts’.
He has come to humble those of us who think we have everything, and to raise those who have nothing.
He has come so that we begin to see the world in a different way – so that we begin to realize that the things we thought mattered, do not really matter at all.
He has come so that we might begin to discover how to love
c) We are given hope.
This is the child who died on the cross.
He went to hell.
But this is also the child who rose from the dead, who God used to defeat death, who gives the Holy Spirit, who reigns in heaven, who is bringing in the Kingdom of God and who is one day coming again.
And finally, there is Anna
There is a movement from left to right, a movement that is upwards to the top right corner.
Anna is the preacher.
She points people to the future.
“She began to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem”.
Sometimes, in icons of the presentation, her fingers are pointing upwards, asking us to look up. But here, she is pointing people to the altar, to the fact that Jesus will be the sacrificial offering for us. But the altar, and we see this in classic church architecture, and reflected in Russian/Ukrainian church language – the altar is also a throne. The one who is crucified is also the one who reigns. He is establishing his kingdom and he will establish his kingdom.
So what is one of our answers in a world which, in the words of the UN General Secretary, appears to be coming off its hinges?
Purification: get yourself right with God, receive his gift of forgiveness
Presentation: offer yourself to God - and then see what God can do through you
Meeting/Encounter: Welcome the Lord Jesus and be with him
Proclamation: Speak, at the right time and in the right way (Anna had waited 64 years to preach this sermon), of the hope that we have of the resurrection and of the coming Kingdom of God.