We don’t often get to celebrate the Feast of the Presentation on a Sunday, just once every six or seven years. That’s a shame, really, because it’s a celebration of God coming out.
Needless to say, that’s not how I grew up reading the wonderful story from Luke’s account of the Gospel (2:22-40). But it’s high time to do so now, and then come out with God. To get there, it helps, I think, to remember that numbers are sometimes of particular significance in the Bible.
Consider the number forty: the ancient Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years on their way to the Promised Land; Noah’s ark was built to survive forty days and forty nights of rain; Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days before beginning his ministry, and his Ascension into God’s own life happened forty days after his resurrection from the dead.
Luke reminds us of another example, when women in ancient Israel underwent a ritual of purification forty days after childbirth; if they did so on the occasion of their firstborn, they also had to redeem that child, basically buy the child back from God—usually with an animal sacrifice or sometimes a payment of money.
Mary and Joseph, devout in their religious faith, observe that ritual with Jesus, a story commemorated on what is now called “The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple.” It used to be more widely called something else, and in some churches, it is still known as “The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
That old-fashioned religious language about “purity” deserves attention, especially since some people of faith think sexual intercourse or even just sexual desire can make someone dirty. Since the 1990s, so-called “purity rings” have been popular in some Evangelical Christian communities; teenagers wear these rings after taking a “virginity pledge,” a promise to keep themselves “unstained” by sex before marriage. Both girls and boys do this, but by far it’s mostly girls—women are always more accountable for purity than men.
Growing up gay before I even knew what “gay” meant,” sex always had a dirty patina. Still today, it’s fairly common to see religious protestors at Gay Pride parades holding big signs that refer to “filthy sinners”—not just “sinners” but filthy ones, as if an LGBT identity is a blemish or blotch, a stain on God’s handiwork in need of purifying.
There’s an even longer history of using notions of “purity” as a religious disguise for ethnic bigotry. Muslims migrating to Medieval Europe were considered dirty criminals; in the 1930s, the German Nazi party promised to preserve the purity of the Aryan race; and in Black History Month, we need to recall how enslaved Africans in this country were sometimes denigrated for their “dirty skin” (and in a culture of white supremacy, that’s still a presumption among many).
Not much to celebrate in that litany of purification. Thankfully, ancient Israel’s purity rites more often marked moments of liminality and profound transition—certainly not anything like “ethnic cleansing.”
Recalling the high rate of infant mortality and the risks for women associated with childbirth in the ancient world, surviving childbirth with a healthy infant was nearly miraculous. It was like returning from the borderlands, that mysterious boundary between life and death—and that’s what you mark in the Temple as you redeem the child back from God.
Take all that and remember the number forty—a number to signal a hopeful journey to the land of Promise; a reminder of safety during a flood; preparation for a ministry of liberation, and returning from death while rising into life.
That’s where Luke places his focus, on the arrival of Jesus in the Temple forty days after his birth—the presentation of the one who is not redeemed by the ritual but is himself the Redeemer; and that insight is made clear in the joyful praises and prophetic utterances of Simeon and Anna.
I truly love these two Lucan figures. These religious elders devoted many years to the spiritual discipline of hope. They embody that very insight, that hope itself demands the discipline of a spiritual practice. And age makes no difference at all in this vital ministry of cultivating hopefulness.
As Luke notes, Simeon had been assured by God that he would not die before seeing God’s promised Messiah—and we need to imagine Simeon in this story shouting and exclaiming ecstatic praise upon seeing Jesus. Anna, herself a prophet, had been praying and fasting daily for decades in anticipation of “the redemption of Jerusalem,” as Luke puts it, and she ensures that the whole community knows that it has arrived in the flesh!
Luke features the Holy Spirit at nearly every turn in his account of the Gospel—and in this brief vignette in the Temple, Luke mentions the Spirit no fewer than three times in these eighteen verses. As Luke proposes when Jesus launches his ministry in Nazareth, we will know the Spirit is present and active when the poor hear good news, and captives are released, and the oppressed go free (4:18-19).
For exactly those reasons, the Spirit of God presents Jesus in the Temple.
This story in Luke took on yet another layer of significance for me last week during a rally in Lansing, Michigan. A few of us from the parish here in Saugatuck joined at least 150 other people in front of the state capitol building to express our solidarity with transgender people. Similar rallies happened in other parts of the country last Thursday, sponsored by the Transgender Unity Coalition, and it mattered to have visible religious support in those gatherings.
We listened as a long line of people waited for their turn at the microphone to tell their stories about coming out, stories about making themselves visible as differently gendered people. Many of them talked about how life-giving and even joyful it was to embrace more openly this vital component of who they are.
That’s the moment, while listening to those compelling stories, that’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Jesus being presented in the Temple is God’s own coming out story. Simeon and Anna’s joy at that moment underscores why this matters—it’s a story of God making God’s presence visible for the sake of abundant life.
Equally important to note were the stories we heard at that rally about the pain attached to this journey. In a society built on a strict binary gender system, it can be risky to come out in ways that do not conform to that system. Many transgender people are rejected by their families, they might experience violence in public places, even lose their jobs.
Hearing some of that anguish, I couldn’t help but think of Simeon in Luke’s story, who says to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “a sword will pierce your own soul also.” Even in that moment of joyful manifestation, Simeon intuited just how risky coming out can be.
In social systems of violence and hate, there is always a price to pay when we live for peace with justice and for love—always.
It seems increasingly clear that the weeks and months to come will present significant moments of decision for people of faith in the United States. We will need to decide how visible we wish to be about racial justice, and for gendered equality, and to protect the integrity of our ecosystems and the vitality of our environments.
It’s also fairly clear that acting on our convictions will come with a cost. Realizing the price we might have to pay for Gospel witness is one of the best reasons to gather every week at the Eucharistic table.
At that Table, God presents God’s own life to us; God strengthens us at the Table with the body and blood of Jesus; gathered around that Table, God inspires us and equips us with the Spirit, emboldened with courage to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable, the frightened, and all those who bravely refuse to conform to systems to domination and oppression.
It’s time, high time, for God’s people to come out, more fully and boldly.
It’s time to declare clearly and bravely exactly who we are: God’s beloved, the ones God is calling to make God’s glory manifest in the world.
We don’t all have to do that in exactly the same way—don’t ever forget the long and vital ministries of Simeon and Anna as they cultivated hopefulness, reminding everyone by the way they lived of the promises of God.
There are many ways to bear witness to the Gospel, and all of them are grounded in the promises of our Baptismal Covenant in the Book of Common Prayer. Chief among those promises as we look at the road before us are these: to strive for justice among all people, and to respect the dignity of every living being.
Doing that makes the very glory of God visibly present in the world. So let’s do it. Let’s come out with God and let’s come out for life.
Good one.
Thanks again, Jay, for another thought-provoking piece. I doubt that I will have another opportunity to preach on this feast day, but I’m sure your insights will stick around in my brain should I be so lucky.