Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word;
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
which thou hast prepared before the face of all people,
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles,
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
The world has a long history of favoring those that come first. First born sons, in particular, have held positions of great power in the world. If you are a first born son you stand to inherit not only your father’s name, but also your father’s estate and title. A first born son was also a prized possession, because it gave father’s stability and a legacy. We only need to look to King Henry the 8th to see the lengths to which a man will go in order to have a first born son. If you were a first born son you were the heir apparent to whatever worldly power your ancestors had attained. I say worldly power, because a brief skim through the characters of the Bible should remind us that God’s favor is not always on those who come in first. Cain was the first born son of Adam and Eve and we know that he didn’t fair very well. Abraham was asked to sacrifice Sarah’s first son Issac (we can save what happened to his first actual son Ishmael till another time). Esau sold his birthright to his younger brother Jacob and then was even cheated out of his father’s blessing, and of Jacob’s sons, it was the youngest, Joseph, who was favored of God. Further along in history we will remember that it was David, the youngest son of Jesse, that God had anointed to be king over Israel. When Samuel was looking over the son’s of Jesse and saw Eliah, the eldest, he thought “surely this must be the Lord’s anointed.” But the Lord said to him “No. I do not see the way you do. You look for the oldest, the tallest and the strongest or the most beautiful. I am not looking on the outward appearance; I am looking on the heart.” God knows our tendency to judge things. God knows that we have a habit of putting our faith and our resources into what we can see and judge, rather than on what he has revealed to us. God tested Abraham’s resolve to put God first, before his love for anything worldly, including his first born son. When God sought to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, his last and greatest plague struck the Egyptians where it would hurt the most: the first born. God slaughtered the first born of all Egypt, and instructed the Israelites that they were to remember perpetually how they had been spared by God. This, of course, is the beginning of the Passover tradition, but an additional part of the tradition was God’s claim that even though Israel’s first born had been spared, they still belonged to God. Not just those that survived the exodus, but all future first borns too. So there develops this tradition, of not only sacrificing the first born livestock to God, but also ritually or ceremonially sacrificing the first born male children to God. All of those that are first born are consecrated to God as a solemn reminder that God always comes first. It is partially in the context of this ceremonial sacrifice that Jesus is brought to the temple in a passage from the gospel of Luke. He is a first born son and therefore Mary and Joseph had to acknowledge that he belonged first and foremost to God, not to them. Joseph offered to the priest Simeon the prescribed sacrificial animals to be offered to God in exchange for the life of this baby boy. This was the law of Moses and we are told that Joseph and Mary did everything in accordance with the law.
According to tradition Simeon was an old priest. He had been doing this very same service of claiming first born sons as belonging to God for years, perhaps hundreds of times. Simeon had been told by the Holy Spirit that this work he was doing would not be in vain, but that it eventually would lead him to see the messiah, the child that would actually be God’s very own. The first born, not just of one man and woman, but of all creation. And here at last he was in his arms. The beacon of light that he had waited his entire life to see and the one child that would give all of that waiting and working meaning. When Simeon utters the Nunc Dimittis, which is the prayer that begins: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…” he does it for all of us who spend our lives working and waiting for God’s glory to be realized and seen. It is fitting that this prayer is traditionally said at the end of the day, because it is often only those brief glimpses of God’s kingdom that give us the strength and courage and peace that we need to go forward into another day.
Mary and Joseph were astounded at what Simeon and Anna said, not because they didn’t believe it, but because it confirmed what they already knew and could see. What a joy it is to have your faith confirmed by others; to have an experience that you thought only you had, be shared by someone else. How important it is to have that confirmation that other people see the light of God where you see the light of God. That is the beauty of fellowship: to be able to stand together with others and say hat we have seen God here. Part of the reason people of faith gather in communities, I hope, is that it is a way that we can claim those places and those ways in which we believe we can encounter God. For Christians, the Feast of Candlemas, which celebrates Christ’s presentation in the temple, can be a hard sell to get people to come to church sometimes. It doesn’t have any of the penitential lament of Ash Wednesday or Good Friday; it doesn’t have any of the joy or frivolity of Christmas Day or Epiphany. Its popular customs are largely forgotten and have mostly to do with this being the end of the Christmas and Epiphany season. It doesn’t stir us up and excite us, and maybe for that very reason it might have the most to say to us about our daily lives as people of faith. The Purification of the Blessed Virgin and the Presentation of our Lord were done not out of desperation or delight, but out of devotion. They were done because God asked for them to be done and the people that did them had the will and the patience and the faith to keep listening to God, to keep observing his commands, and to keep working for his kingdom until by God’s light and grace they were allowed to see it. May we too be so lucky to serve God, to see his salvation, and to depart in peace.
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