Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe preached the sermon during a Feb. 2 Eucharist at Washington National Cathedral celebrating the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. The service also included Bishop Rowe’s ceremonial seating, a liturgy in the Book of Occasional Services. A lightly edited transcript of the sermon—based on Luke 2:22-40—is below.
Watch the entire service on Washington National Cathedral’s YouTube channel. The seating liturgy begins at around 19 minutes. The sermon starts at around 54 minutes.
This child is destined for the falling and rising of many. Amen.
So here we are on this feast day of the presentation. You might imagine this scene with me, a first-century temple which was chaotic, a marketplace with vendors and livestock and money changers—remember the money changers?—and all sorts and conditions of people hanging out in that place worshiping God.
Enter Mary and Joseph, devout Jews from Nazareth. They’ve come for the purification rite and for the presentation of their child. The purification of Mary—that’s a whole other story. That’s another sermon for another day. One worthy of being preached. But in this case, we are reminded today that Jesus is born into the people of Israel, to whom Simeon’s prophecy is addressed this morning.
It’s a noisy, unpredictable scene. They’re bringing a child into church like many who do and many of us who have experienced that. We know what that can be like. This child was coming to this place and at this time, and he was like a child like any other and like none other. Also, there were birds to be managed, and that can’t have made the situation easier, at least from my perspective.
So into this scene, Simeon and Anna appear. We all know Simeon and Anna because Simeon and Anna are part of our lives, probably in the congregations that we attend or the places that are important to us. They’re always there. These are the people that have given their lives faithfully to the church or whatever it is. These are the people that have been around. They’re always around, they’re always there, and they’ve been old your whole life. On this day, they come to tell the stories because these are the people that tell the stories even when no one wants to hear them.
But on this day, Simeon and Anna turned Mary and Joseph’s world upside down, and they give us a glimpse of a world very different from the one that we have been living in or the one that we are expecting. Simeon tells these two peasants from Galilee, these two faithful Jews who have come to their obligations of faith, that he can die now because he has seen the Messiah. He has seen the Savior. These words that he gives us, “Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised. These eyes of mine have seen the Savior”—these are words we take and will carry us to our graves and to heaven.
Simeon proclaims that this child is the savior of all peoples, a revelation to the world and that the division between Gentiles and Jews so powerful in the politics, in the economy of the day, have fallen away in an instant. Simeon gives them a vision of another way.
The Scripture tells us that this mother and father were amazed at his words. Now I’m always perplexed by that. I mean, I’m sure it’s a big thing to be told your child is the savior of the world, but you think they would’ve been catching on by now, after the magi and Egypt.
But then Simeon doesn’t stop there. He doubles down. You can’t really blame him. He’s just told God he’s ready to return to greater glory, so what does he have to lose? He says this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel—and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed. I don’t know about you, the whole inner thoughts being revealed thing is not comforting. But this child is destined for the falling, and the rising—not the rising and the falling; the falling and the rising—of many.
And then just in case we didn’t believe Simeon, Anna turns up, a foretaste of the women at the tomb who will be the first to proclaim that Christ has risen. She is the only woman in the New Testament to be named as a prophet, and everyone she can find in the temple that day, she’s telling that this child is the redemption of Israel.
These two elders laid out the whole story. This child is destined for the falling and rising. Luke is writing this Gospel after the fall of the temple, this place about which is being spoken, which has been destroyed. They are under a tyranny, in conflict. Imperial rule has deepened the oppression and the inequality of the time. And even people in the new church that has been formed aren’t getting along with each other. Surprise.
The Messiah has not returned, the liberation and justice, it might’ve seemed a long way off. Luke is writing to people who have already experienced the falling, and he tells them that this child, this one who has come and making the offering of the poor—two turtledoves—this one, this poor child born in a backwater to peasant parents, this one will be the redemption.
Jesus reverses everything that the readers of the Gospel of Luke have known. From now on, the cross comes before resurrection. Dying comes before the rising. The last will be first. This tiny child presented in the temple causes the falling and the rising of many.
Today, God is still calling us to live in this upside-down world order; and like the sometimes clueless disciples who we’ll get to travel with later in the Gospels, we struggle with how to make sense of what that all means because we are beset by the powers and principalities of the world that don’t see it the way that Jesus does.
We’re told by the kings and the rulers of the day that the rich shall be first. That somehow compassion is weakness. That fealty to political parties—and here I mean either one, or all of them—is somehow paramount. That differences of race, class, gender identity, human sexuality are all divisions that must somehow separate us, and that we should regard migrants and strangers and those among us whom we don’t understand, with fear and contempt.
But those divisions are not of God. Those are not the divisions of a kingdom about which Jesus speaks, of a kind of reversal, the one that Simeon and Anna foretell. In that kingdom of God, the meek shall inherit the earth. The last will be first. The merciful shall receive mercy, and the captives go free.
In this world order, falling comes before rising. In God’s kingdom, immigrants and refugees, transgender people, the poor and the marginalized are not at the edges fearful and alone. They are at the center of the Gospel story. So the boundaries are not just extended, the story just isn’t extended to include all people. Those who have been considered at the margins are at the center. They are the bearers of the salvation of the world. Their struggles reveal to us the kingdom of God.
This kingdom about which Jesus speaks is upside down. It’s reverse. It’s inverted. It’s countercultural. It’s another way of being and living in a world.
In this new kingdom, the power of God is manifest in parents making a modest offering for their tiny child. In the woman at the well. In the leper who comes to be healed. In the women at the tomb. These are the very people Jesus points to as icons of the holy.
Friends, we live in a world in which the enemy is bound and determined to sow division among us, to make us forget who we are and to what kingdom we belong. God did not come among us as a strongman. God came among us first as a child.
We too easily turn on one another, succumbing to our need to regard people as other. We’re seduced by a world that tells us our worth and our value has to come at the expense of someone else. We forget that we were once strangers in a foreign land, and we fail to love our siblings who were created by God.
But because of this tendency to forget, we need the place to which we gather to be remembered and to remember. We need our Christian community, week in and week out. To remember whose we are, we need to hear the story of the elders like Simeon and Anna. We need to greet with a sign of peace those who voted for the candidate we couldn’t stand. And to be in the communion line alongside people who don’t live like us or look like us or even love like us. We find the face of Christ in the most vulnerable in our communities.
The point of this institution—this magnificent cathedral of ours; our modest country churches back home; the famous Episcopal Church A-frame with the blond furniture; our office in midtown Manhattan, which I call mid-century mediocre architecture—we need these places to remind us that we are first citizens of the kingdom of God. The point of the community, particularly in these fractious times, is to turn away from the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf. And back toward the one Jesus brought from the margins to the center, back to one another, back to the risen Christ.
This is the kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaims. This is the one that is reversed. This is the one where the people on the edge are at the center and where we find Christ in all people.
There’s an old preaching parable about a monastery, a very famous place, very far, remote, a place that many people used to come to for miracles and signs and wonders and healing, and most of all, for the peace of God, which passes all understanding. But it fell on hard times. People began to argue with one another, as we are wont to do, and people stopped coming after a while. They stopped getting new vocations in that place. It was no longer the vibrant place.
And the abbot of the monastery began to worry what would happen, began to despair about the way it would be. And he decided that he had no other choice but to leave that place for a time and to go find a rabbi who used to pray as a solitary, not far from the monastery. And he went out to see the rabbi, and he sat down, and he wept. And he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
And the rabbi just held his hands and said, “We’ll pray.” And the rabbi prayed, and he said, “I’m sorry. I have no advice to give you, but I do have this word from God for you to take back to your people. Take back to your community.” He said, “Tell your people, one of you is the Messiah. Christ is among you.”
The abbott gets up and walks away and thinks, “OK, surely not me. And it’s not Bob.” Part of the problem. He gets back to the monastery, gathers the monks together and says to them, “I have a word from you, from the rabbi.” He said, “I could share this with you once, and we’re then to go on about our business. One of us is the Messiah. Christ is among us.”
And they began to look at each other differently. Their frame of reference changed. What if we saw Christ in each other? What if we understood what it meant for real? That Christ is among us, one of us, all of us together in this kingdom inverted, turned upside down and made for the healing and wholeness of the world.
Amen.
