My eyes have seen salvation

Sermon on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple

St Michael’s Church, Camden Town

Malachi 3:1–5; Psalm 24:7–10; Hebrews 2:14–18: St Luke 2:22–40

+ In nomine…

“Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘My eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation and for glory.’”

One of those who did most during the 1960s to enable the U.K. to join the European Economic Community, as the E.U. was then known, was George Brown. Though out of office by the time that we finally joined in the 1970s, George Brown had served as Harold Wilson’s Foreign Secretary, and had handled some of the initial, sensitive discussions with other European governments about the U.K.’s possible accession.

Brown was clearly a brilliant but flawed politician. He was a man of vision and purpose; but he also, rather fatally, liked a glass of wine or four for lunch, and didn’t really slow down for the rest of the day. The phrase “tired and emotional” was, I think, invented as a polite way of describing his demeanour in the House of Commons at the end of a long day.

And it was his drinking that produced one of the greatest stories about his term as Foreign Secretary. Brown is on a tour of South American nations. There has been a dinner at the ambassador’s residence for the visiting entourage and guests from the host nation, a dinner heavy with wine, preceded by champagne and followed by port, and now the diners have moved to the ballroom, and there is to be dancing. The band strikes up; and Brown spots his ideal partner for the first dance — a beautiful vision in scarlet on the other side of the room. Detaching himself from the arm of the rather dreary ambassador’s wife he strides, best he can, towards the mass of scarlet silk. “Madam,” he begs, “may I have the pleasure of this first dance.” A beat, and the vision speaks: “No sir, you may not; and for three reasons. First, you are drunk. Secondly, this is the Peruvian national anthem. And, thirdly, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.”

“Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation and for glory.’”

The importance of seeing; of seeing clearly, in focus; of seeing beyond the surface of things; of seeing into the depths; the importance of truly perceiving, is at the heart of our faith. Like the shepherds who came to the stable and saw not a baby but their Saviour, like the wise men who came and saw not a child but a king; like Simeon, who sees in forty-day old infant his own salvation; our faith calls us to see, and truly to perceive.

Our faith calls us to look at the altar table and there to see not bread and wine alone but the body and blood of Jesus, to perceive there “more than this world can ever contain” [Elizabeth Jennings]; our faith calls us to look at one another and to see not neighbours and enemies, not Jew and Gentile, not clean and unclean, but brothers and sisters, reconciled in Christ to one another; our faith calls us to look at ourselves and to see, beyond our anxiety and our sinfulness and our broken-ness, nothing less than the very image of God, to perceive within ourselves the power and promise and reality of the resurrected Christ.

“Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘My eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation and for glory.’”

When we see, we are also often seen. Seeing is rarely a one-way action. The poet, Edwin Muir, writes in his Autobiography of waiting one evening by the doctor’s door during his wife’s illness. A lamp is shining on a tree a few steps away, lighting it up it, says Muir, like a Christmas tree; and on one of the twigs a songbird sits, “looking at me, quite without fear.” Muir stares at it “out of my own [agony], which was a world of its own;” and, in return, it seems “to be pouring light into the darkness without[,] and the darkness within myself. It astonished and [comforted] me.”

Bishop John Taylor writes of the work of the Holy Ghost in the act of seeing: the “in-between-ness” of the Spirit, he calls it; the Holy Ghost as “the power which opens eyes that are closed… and minds that shrink from too much reality.” The Holy Ghost, in between gazes, opening eyes in the Temple as the child in presented, in the hay at a lowly manger, at the supper table in an upper room, in a garden in Gethsemane as the light of a third day dawns. The Holy Ghost, here, in between gazes today, allowing us to see; and allowing us, ourselves, to be seen.

“Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘My eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation and for glory.’”

For our forebears, today, the Feast of Candlemas, the second day of February, forty days since Christmas, marked the beginning of a new season. They believed that today was the day on which hibernating animals woke from their winter’s sleep. If you’d been a medieval farmer, today was the day on which you’d move your cattle from the hay meadows to other pasture, for you knew that the new growth of spring was upon us.

Now, I’m not wanting to argue that moving your cows from one field to another is the same as leaving the European Union, but I guess that the second day of February this year finds us as a nation at the beginning of a new season. Some of us will be enthused by the prospect of spring light, and some of us would just like to hibernate for a bit longer. But we can be sure that the divisions and dissections of these last three or four years have shown us the dangers of not seeing one another properly, of forgetting that the Holy Ghost is always there, in between gazes. When we don’t see one another properly; when we don’t acknowledge other people’s hopes and stories; when we don’t treat one another, all of us, as bearers of the light of Christ; when we become defensive and don’t want to be seen ourselves; then the light soon dims, and the evening comes for our communities, for our common life as a nation.

The Feast of Candlemas, the second day of February, forty days since Christmas, was also the traditional day when our forebears would bless the candles they had produced over the winter months — the candles that would light the dark times of the year to come. We will bless and light candles at the end of this Mass, and, as we do so, we will promise never to forsake the light of Christ, in which we see God; the light of Christ that illuminates the Holy Ghost in between our gazes; the light of Christ, by which only we truly see ourselves and one another; the light of Christ, in which we see salvation.