Feast of the Presentation 2025; 2 Feb.
Luke 2:22-40; Jack Hardaway
HURRY UP AND WAIT
I once read a short story about a writer who wanted more time to write but he spent too much time waiting for things, waiting in traffic, waiting in line, waiting on the phone.
Somehow he made a wish that came true and he never had to wait anymore, the lights were always green, the traffic never backed up, the lines were all empty.
He finally had time, he sat down to write and he realized that he didn’t have anything to say. He realized that all that time he was forced to wait was when the ideas and the words started to bubble up. I don’t know where or when I found that story. Sounds like something Rod Sterling would write.
But the memory of it has stuck with me.
I don’t know much about waiting.
I’m as impatient and preoccupied as most people, maybe even more so.
But there have been times.
Different kinds of times.
Some times time slows and there is a deep calm and this attentive awareness awakens.
Other times there is an agony of pain or fear that never seems to end.
Waiting.
Holy waiting.
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.
Waiting for the dead to rise, for the grief to turn into dancing.
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.
Our chains can define us, and to lose them is to wonder who we are now.
Freedom can be a harsh judgement.
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.