When I arrived in my previous parish, I was telephoned by a lady who had just given birth to a baby and she needed to be 'churched'.  Until that happened she wasn’t allowed to leave her home because it was felt that the act of giving birth made her somehow unclean and she needed to be ‘purified’.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Book of Common Prayer, there is a short service called the Churching of Women which is really a Thanksgiving after child-birth.

Though this was the first time I had been asked to do it, I remember occasions before I was ordained when, after a Wednesday morning service, women would lurk at the back of church and then be led by the Vicar, somewhat furtively, into his vestry.  When I enquired what was going on, I was told in hushed tones that they had come to be ‘churched’.  Though the service itself is simply a thanksgiving for safe-deliverance in child-birth it has associations with  ‘ritual cleansing’,  – hence the stricture that, until it was performed, the woman had to remain indoors. 

The ritual cleansing element has its roots in the book of Leviticus where in Chapter 12 , we are told that women giving birth are  ceremonially unclean and there are rules to be observed leading to purification.  In the case of the lady who phoned me, I told her that I didn’t do medieval services nor did I believe that giving birth was anything but a joyful act of creation. So I visited her at home and together with her husband we made a thanksgiving for the birth and gift of a child.

Mary, of course, being thoroughly Jewish (and not having an enlightened Vicar) had no choice but to go through the ritual of being purified which is why she, with Joseph and the baby Jesus came to the Temple 40 days after our Lord’s birth on the day we now call the Presentation of Christ in the Temple – though the BCP still calls it the Feast of the Purification.  For St. Luke, it provided the occasion when he could record a deeply human moment and introduce us to two of the loveliest people in the Bible – Simeon and Anna.

Simeon and Anna belong to that body of ordinary people to whom God revealed His glory in Jesus Christ.  They join the simple shepherds and foreign travellers; the fisherman and the sinners; the sad and the unwell; the prostitutes and adulterers; the embezzlers and the cheated – that rag-bag of humanity whose lives Jesus touched – and transformed – reminding us that there is indeed hope for us all!  Dear old Simeon had served in the Temple all his life and Anna had devoted her long widowhood to prayer and worship of Almighty God.  To both of these the infant Jesus came as a blessing and they were led to make prophetic utterances about the Son of God.

Simeon’s prophecy turns our thoughts at the end of this Christmas season towards the Passion and Death of Christ which would indeed pierce Mary’s Soul but which is the world’s salvation.  Anna recognised Jesus as the bringer of that Salvation and, in fact, became the first Christian Evangelist because she rushed around telling g everyone the Good News of the Kingdom which  is Jesus himself.  Both of them expected the Messiah and in the child Jesus their expectation was fulfilled as the light of Christ burst upon their holy lives.

Common to both of them was a life of prayer and devotion which shaped their expectation and because of which God made sure that they were in the right place at the right time.  In the lives of all who wait for Him expectantly, Jesus will always be revealed but the conditions must be right for Him to burst into our lives and the prime conditions are those of prayer and worship.  There is always the danger that if we do not pay attention to this, then we might just miss out.

We might, in fact, become like the Whisky Priest, in Graham Greene’s powerful novel, The Power and the Glory.   He was a priest in a time and a place where the Church is being persecuted – though he is not a particularly good priest and he has the nickname ‘The Whisky Priest’ because he has a great devotion to the Scottish Water of life!  He is a strange and lonely man who is struggling with his own demons whilst, at the same time, trying to be a representative of the Catholic Church in a place where it is being driven out. In the end the priest is arrested by a nameless Lieutenant who has stalked him throughout the book and he is sentenced to death.  On the night before the sentence is carried out, the whisky priest sits in his cell and mourns the waste that he has made of his life. It seemed to him, then, that, somewhere in the past, he missed happiness by seconds at the appointed place.  How easy it is for that to happen.

As a contrast to Simeon and Anna, the Whisky Priest had stopped expecting God to show himself – had stopped expecting to have any experience of God and like many for whom religion has become an outward practice with little going on inside, he just shrivelled up.  Just as the body without nourishment dies so the soul  can become spiritual starved and a despair sets in which blots out  promise of eternal life and the love and purpose that brings to human life.  How easy it would have been for Simeon and Anna to give up. Their long cherished hope of seeing the Messiah was a while in coming. Both were elderly people and no doubt their hanging around the Temple would be seen by others as religious eccentricity of two people with nothing better to do than waiting to die.  And, in a sense, both of them were waiting to die but only after they had seen and touched the salvation their faith told them was coming. Death after Candlemass was a death into a living life of eternal love.

What Simeon and Anna give us is a picture of persistent faith which sees the meaning in the waiting.  They couldn’t force God’s hand and they certainly couldn’t manufacture religious feelings.   Every day they were faithful in their prayers and were eager in their expectation that one day, one day, that expectation would be fulfilled.  So they waited.  What kept them going was a longing which is the ingredient of a thirst for God.

The late Cardinal Basil Hume, had a lot of experience in guiding souls, especially those who were young in the faith and who needed his wisdom if they were to develop that steadfastness which is so necessary after an experience of what might be called religious ‘highs’ - those moments when there is an absolute clarity of vision about God which sadly do not last and maybe do not come as frequently as we might wish. 

A lot about faith is concerned with simply plodding on even when it seems that our relationship with God seems cool and distant  Basil Hume saw that this cooling of faith has a lot to do with the pressures we face in daily life. We are caught up in all sorts of things that distract and keep us busy – even keep us from having time for ourselves which are so necessary if we are to touch base with God.

So Basil Hume’s advice is that when we are busy in the Market Place we should have a nostalgia for the Desert.  What he means is that though we are caught up in lots of activity our hearts should continually long to be with God.  It all comes back to that word ‘longing’ which is related both to hope and to expectation. All three words together describe the situation of  Simeon and Anna and whilst they clearly had the leisure to hang around the Temple – something we haven’t always got – it is the activity of the soul which matters.

Once when I was leading a retreat, I stood on the banks of a nearby river.  There had been a lot of rain and the river was flowing swiftly, carrying lots of debris with it, and its surface was churning violently.  Not being an expert about fishing, I wondered how they managed to survive this torrent of activity which surely must sweep them downstream.  As I watched the water I noticed that though the surface was bubbling away, further down the flow seemed much calmer and there the fish were quietly waiting for things to slow down.

That’s what I think Basil Hume meant. We live too much on the surface of life – we don’t often have much choice about this – but there is a need to go deeper .  There things are much calmer and there, deep within is God and like Simeon and  Anna, He too is waiting.  This is the appointed place where happiness won’t be missed because it is a happiness that comes from God himself. This happiness is about knowing that whatever is happening on the surface of our life, deep down God holds us in love.  There is a wonderful paradox about today’s festival of the Presentation and it comes at that beautiful moment when Simeon took him into his arms and blessed God.

In the Jewish rite of Presentation this was the moment when Jesus was offered for consecration to God but in the topsy/turvy way of the Gospel, it was actually Simeon who was being offered – his lifetime of  service and prayer was presented to God and because he was given the precious gift of Jesus to hold in his arms, he was himself blessed.  And we too can be blessed.

This Lent we are having a Sabbatical – a break from the meetings which claim so much of our attention and this is symbolic of what we need to do if we are to discover God’s holding love on our lives.  Even in the seemingly impossible rush of life there is the need to be still – if only for a while – and it will take some effort and determination on our part – and we might well need the stimulus which comes from reading quietly the Gospel and maybe other spiritual works – which is part of the Lenten programme we are offering.  What is really on offer is a chance to wait – to wait for God to claim our hearts anew and to bless us – to hold us as Simeon held Jesus – and be held by that same Jesus who wants to present us to his Father.  For it is we who are cherished and offered because Jesus has chosen us to be lights of faith in this darkened world and Jesus wants to give us strength that our flame of faith continues to burn.

It would be a pity if we don’t take this opportunity to discover anew our Lord’s love for us during this coming Lent.  It would be very sad if we missed happiness by seconds at the appointed place.