This sermon was preached for the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord (Candlemas), Sunday, February 2, 2025 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Malachi 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40, and Psalm 84.
Sometimes a song will come to me as a background refrain to my days. This week, I found myself singing a particular song to my two-year-old at bedtime; a praise and worship song I learned a decade ago in the Episcopal Service Corps. It’s called Beautiful Things by Michael Gungor. The lyrics are simple enough for my toddler to begin picking up on the words. But what I really love about this song is that it begins with questions. Just as with so many psalms, these questions meet us in our very human wondering and doubt, in our grief and despair.
The songwriter, Michael Gungor, wrote Beautiful Things with his wife, Lisa, in 2011, when he was 30 years old. “All this pain,” the song begins. Looking around at the poverty, violence and desperation of the world, Michael wondered where God was, wondered, as the lyrics question, “Could all that is lost ever be found/Could a garden come up from this ground/at all?” But the pain was closer to home, too. Yearning for a child, they had watched friends suffer miscarriages, and wondered.
“You make beautiful things out of the dust,” the refrain answers. “You make beautiful things out of us.” And then comes the verse that kept rising up for me all this week, amid the chaos, amid anxieties keeping me up at night and heavy pastoral conversations with parishioners and friends: “all around/hope is springing up from this old ground/out of chaos life is being found/in you.”
This weekend, we come to a mystical point in the cycles of seasons in the natural world, as well as in our own church year. We arrive again to the question: will winter last forever? February 2 is Groundhog Day for Americans, but for Episcopalians, it’s also the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord, also called Candlemas in the Anglican tradition. It is absolutely not a coincidence that Candlemas, which marks forty days since Christmas and the traditional end of the Christmas and Epiphany season, falls on the day when Americans gather for a silly ritual that supposedly determines the weather for the next six weeks. In fact, the reason we pay attention to Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow each year comes from the old English Candlemas folk song, “If Candlemas be fair and bright, Come, Winter, have another flight; If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, Go Winter and not come again.”
Various Christian European cultures have different traditions involving the lighting of candles on this feast day, although it’s German immigrants who are to blame for roping in a hibernating rodent. This question, though, of weather and the coming of seasons, used to be a matter of life or death for agricultural communities. Guess wrong, plant too soon, and you lose the crop that year.
But the mysticism of this moment goes even further back to pre-Christian times. Just as All Saints Day falls on the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, Samhain in Celtic tradition, we stand today at the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, Imbolc. It’s when bears end their hibernation, when the ewes are milked for the first time, and the seeds begin to stir. When we look for the first signs of spring to come into the world, and long to believe again that the cold and dark will not be forever. Could a garden come up from this old ground?
The story of Simeon meets us in that question, too. Simeon has waited his whole life in hope and in devotion. He trusted that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. At the very end, God comes through. On this day, the Feast of the Presentation, Simeon sings his song of celebration that the promised reconciliation between humanity and God is coming. He won’t live to see the salvation of the world. But the infant before him is his glimpse of God’s will on earth to come. “For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
On Groundhog Day, Candlemas, St. Brigid’s Day, spring is still a question mark. Hope feels fragile. As we wait for the groundhog to emerge, we are asking in all our weariness: this thing that has happened every year for my entire life, will it really happen again? Will the light and warmth really return?
The thing is, sometimes it doesn’t.
In 1816, following the eruption of Mount Tambora, the largest volcanic eruption in 20,000 years, weather and climate went wrong all over the world, especially in Europe and North America. An aerosol cloud blocked the sun and snow fell in summer, rivers froze in Pennsylvania in July, and there was crop failure and famine, food riots and typhoid. 1816 became known as the Year Without Summer. The ripple effects of the chaos of that year extended out; historians have even made a case for tracing the creation of the Mormon Church, the writing of Frankenstein and Dracula, and revivals of the Second Great Awakening, back to that summer.
The thing is, sometimes that stable piece of your life you depended on: your health, your marriage, your livelihood - sometimes it becomes uncertain. Sometimes the funding for your job is suddenly halted, your neighborhood burns down, planes fall from the sky. Sometimes the ground shifts underneath you and the weather is all wrong. And in that chaos and in that fear and confusion and grief, a spiritual crisis emerges. Will spring ever return? Will the cold and dark rule the day forever?
Insulated as we are now from the agricultural cycles that shaped the faith of our ancestors, so many of us forget the fragility of life, our dependence on the careful balance of the natural world, until suddenly some cataclysmic event - an ecological disaster, a constitutional crisis, a personal tragedy that is earth-shattering only to you - makes our mortal frailty impossible to forget.
It is then in our questioning that we can turn to Simeon. Simeon waited in hope for the coming of the Messiah, and in the meantime he prayed and lived a righteous life, and the Holy Spirit dwelt in him. Until one day, in his old age, Simeon let himself be guided by the Holy Spirit to the temple to meet the baby Jesus. Simeon knows joy the minute he lays eyes on Jesus, and he knows peace as soon as he takes the baby into his arms. That joy and peace isn't about Simeon getting to see salvation happen in his lifetime or the kingdom arrive on earth, or even that he'll live to see the resurrection, now just thirty-three years away. Simeon’s unbridled joy comes because he has seen just enough to know salvation for his people is coming and God's promises for humanity are true. He feels baby Jesus’ tiny infant fingers grasp his own and he is overwhelmed with gratitude.
Maybe that’s all we get - a glimpse. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that's all our role is in all that God's up to - taking the precious child in front of us into our arms, singing out our gratitude to God, and making sure the new young mom beside us knows: this feels hard because it is hard, not because she's doing it wrong. She’ll carry that wisdom in her heart and lean on it when it matters most. He’ll grow up to save the world. And we sing on - lifting our voices and hearts in those canticles of hope, echoing Simeon and Michael Gungor and Psalm 84: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” Maybe that's enough.
In 1952, Reinhold Niebhur wrote in The Irony of American History, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
This, to me, is a far more powerful expression than the old Stoic adage about society growing great when old men plant trees in whose shade they'll never sit. Because sometimes old men rip up trees by the roots. And sometimes great oaks are felled by hurricanes and sequoias are consumed by wildfire. Sometimes there are years without summer.
The trees we plant and the institutions we build will not save us. But we tend to them anyway, we protect them, anyway, we live the most virtuous and righteous lives we know how to live because that is how we carry forward hope, that is how we teach faith, and that is how we know love and grace and mercy. We look, always, for the signs of the eternal spring that is still coming. Not in our lifetime, surely, probably. But in another life to come.
God makes beautiful things out of the dust, out of the ash, out the charred bits of the pieces of paper we imagined would save us.
God is making beautiful things out of us. Amen.
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