Saturday 29th January
The psalm and readings this evening are those set for the eve of the feast of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, a feast which we celebrate on Wednesday. That feast is also known as Candlemas because of the tradition of bringing candles to church on that day to be blessed. It is one of the oldest feasts of the Church and traditionally marked the end of the Christmas season. I think it is lovely that in the last couple of years which have been so bleak, many people have decided to keep their Christmas decorations up until Candlemas. We long to keep the light shining in the darkness. But the time has now come to turn the lights off, pack away the decorations, and close the lid on the tenth tin of Quality Street. The Church begins slowly to turn itself towards Lent and the confrontation of darkness within ourselves and between ourselves. The Christian year moves between light and darkness because until God’s kingdom comes to full bloom and the white heat of his love finally dissolves all darkness, we have to live with both light and darkness within us and between us. The Church gives us seasons to bask in the light and seasons to look darkness right in the eye.
One of my favourite Christmas presents this year was a book by the theologian Lauren Winner* who argues that we need to recognise that our Christian practices, including our worship, even exquisite worship like this, are deformed by sin and they go wrong often at the same time as going beautifully right. I was reminded of Winner’s thesis when listening to our first lesson.
Hannah longs for a child. She prays to God and vows that if he hears her prayer, she will consecrate her son to God’s service for his life. So, when she bears a child and weans him, she takes him to Temple at Shiloh, sacrifices a bull, makes other offerings and ‘she left him there for the Lord’. For life. This is an extraordinary, to me unimaginable, act of generosity and grace, to give back to the giver that which has been longed for and loved so fiercely. What faithfulness, what determination, what love of God and depths of gratitude it
must have taken that mother to turn and walk away from Shiloh that day. These are the gifts that Hannah gives us. Winner, however, challenges us to think what is deformed in this act of dedication. Is it the belief that God is a God who bargains, ‘if you give me a son, I will give him back to you’? Is it the belief that God the creator of life somehow requires the shedding of blood through ritual sacrifice? Is it the face of a bewildered child who knows just how much he is loved and wanted, watching his mother walking away from him, for life? Sin clouds our ability to notice deformations straight away or clearly. But when we begin to focus (and we need each other to do that), we can see that light and darkness exist side by side in this and so many stories, in so many practices, in everything we do. Winner argues that this realisation requires us always to hold together a sense of gift and gratitude for it, with a habit of lament for the twisting and damaging of the gift by sin.
Tonight, our bishop, Bishop Tim, lays down his pastoral staff on the altar and begins his retirement. We cannot avoid the fact that darkness surrounds this moment, and we must face that darkness square on and hear and attend to the sound of lament. But it would be wrong to close our eyes to the light that has also shone through a long and varied ministry, and which has been received as a gift by many. Bishop Tim lays down his episcopal ministry in the Diocese of Winchester tonight in all its darkness and all its light and leaves it before the Lord, ‘before [whom] no creature is hidden’ but ‘laid bare’ ‘to whom we must render account’, the one who is also perfect grace and mercy. Evensong where light and darkness meet seems the perfect liturgical context to do it.
Living in this time when the kingdom of God is seeded but not yet in full bloom, when the light shines but in the darkness within us and between us, is exhausting and can be demoralising. How we long for rest from it. How easy it is to convince ourselves that we are all light and others are all darkness. We receive the gifts of God but somehow manage to twist and deform them. Gratitude and lament are the authentic rhythm of all our discipleship. Both lift our eyes away from ourselves and above ourselves to the only source of our hope. The message of Christmas is that God has rendered the darkness of sin unsubstantial, in Julian of Norwich’s terms, not in the sense of rendering it unable to cause harm or pain but in the sense of it not having ultimate power over the light. We come here tonight each one of us simultaneously damaged by sin and enlightened by Christ, each one of us capable of damaging and enlightening. But because of God’s gift of himself to us in Christ, the darkness will not have the last word over anything, over any of us, only the Light will have the last word and the Light’s word is love.
