I was once a student in Africa, in Kenya.
One day I traveled across the country for a research project on the border of Uganda.
I traveled by bus.
It was a new experience for me, because the buses there are literally packed with multiple layers of people upon people.
We drove across the rift valley, and the equator, but mostly what I saw were the backs of the people who were sitting on me.
It was stifling, crushing, constraining and claustrophobic on roads that were heavily rutted and it lasted about twelve hours.
It was like being buried in a mass grave of living bodies, patiently waiting.
Never before or since have I ever felt so helpless and pressed upon.
I became delirious, and faint. When we finally arrived, I stumbled out of the bus. It took me several hours to come to my senses.
It was a normal day for the Kenyans. They were very patient, and dignified with the anonymous intimacy of piling up.
But, for me, that twelve hours lost all sense of time, it was an eternity that I waited and waited to end. It was hell.
Waiting for release.
Waiting for deliverance.
Looking for redemption, for being set free from bondage.
That sense of waiting, of ancient endless waiting.
Graveyards have that sense of waiting, with the gravestones lined up, row after row.
Waiting for resurrection.
Row after row.
Prison. Addiction.
Being used. A long sickness.
Mental illness. Pain. Loneliness.
Row after row.
Looking and waiting until time becomes blurred by delirium.
Have you ever had to endure?
Have you witnessed long suffering in others?
Today is the feast of the Presentation. Forty days after Christmas the infant Jesus was presented at the Temple. It is the official ending of the Christmas and Epiphany festival. So, if your trees and decorations are still up, it is officially time to take them down tonight.
We end the festival season like we began it, with candles and light, the Candlemas procession.
The light that arrives after a long darkness.
The Gospel story is from Luke, and as usual for Luke it involves someone suddenly breaking into song.
This time it is the old man Simeon and the prophetess Anna who was of great age.
They had watched and waited a long time. Waiting for redemption.
Finally, the new born arrives, carried into the temple.
Now Simeon can die.
His hopes are fulfilled, “Lord you have set your servant free.”
The long darkness is ending, the captives are being set free, the grave gives up its dead.
To encounter God is to experience redemption, being set free.
The ending of captivity, that is what the grace of God brings.
First and last this is what the presence of the Holy One brings.
First and last that is what the life of being Church is about, redemption from all that enslaves.
That is the good news of this feast day. That is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Prison is interrupted by songs of freedom.