I suspect that some of you have had this experience. It’s a family reunion, or a staff meeting, or coffee hour after church, and the newest baby arrives and everyone’s attention immediately shifts to the littlest and cutest person in the room, and everyone crowds around and exclaims over how sweet they are, and we say silly things to them and try to get them to smile. We might remember to say hello to their parents.
Just the other day it happened to me. Every month, the Staunton clergy group gathers here in our Foster Room – some combination of Baptist, Lutheran, Unitarian Universalist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Salvation Army and Episcopal – I think I hit most of them – gather with cups of coffee and a snack, and we talk about faith and what our churches are doing, and what we’re up to. And among us last month was a priest who we hadn’t seen regularly for a bit because she’s just recently had a baby, whom she brought with her, and I will admit that I made a beeline for them as soon as I walked in the door and saw them sitting on the couch.
So I thought of that tendency we have when I was reading and pondering today’s Gospel. Mary and Joseph have taken a long journey to be where they are today, in Jerusalem, in God’s house. And they have another long journey ahead of them. But today, as faithful Jewish parents, they are following the traditions of the day, bringing their firstborn son to be presented in the Temple, his life and his self, an offering to God.
And I can just see Simeon and Anna heading straight for Mary and Joseph and Jesus, oohing and ahhing over their infant. Maybe they don’t recognize quite who he is yet. Maybe he is just another new child born in a time when childbirth was dangerous, and the world was dangerous, and here is new life, and the joy of new parents.
This very intimate, personal thing, two parents and their child, and two elderly prophets in the Temple, standing together, holding this baby between them. And at the same time, it is huge, it’s cosmic. Anna and Simeon are meeting the Messiah. Picture it in your mind – four unlikely people, not powerful, not political, not wealthy, two of them very young, two of them old, standing together in the Temple, wondering over an infant – an infant – who will change the world.
Perhaps Simeon and Anna didn’t know until they looked into Jesus’s eyes and saw a lifetime to come. Until they looked in his eyes and saw the greatest love possible, all held in the body of a tiny baby. Until they looked in his eyes and saw who he was, why he was born, that what they had waited for their entire lives, and what all of humanity had yearned for for centuries, had finally come to be – God, born in a baby, come to earth to live with us.
And Simeon says: “This child is destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”
Simeon knows that however miraculous Jesus is, he will bring conflict – he will be opposed because his message will be countercultural, power-upending. He is an offering to God, and he is an offering, a gift, to the world.
In a sense, we are all coming to the Temple, over and over, just like Jesus, Mary and Joseph did, bringing ourselves as offerings, as gifts to God. I know that in this moment in time, when the world feels less safe, less certain, I keep asking, “what can I do?” And as I read this morning’s Gospel, I find that question changing from “what can I do?” to “who must I be?”
Today’s Gospel tells the story of a family coming to God, coming to God’s house, with
those questions. What do we do? Who are we to be? What is this story that is just beginning?
Like Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we come here, to God’s house, to present ourselves, our souls, our work, our joys, our thanksgivings and our grief and our questions, to God.
We are all coming to the temple – we are all coming to this church, to this altar, all of us on our own journeys, whether we come as infants to be baptized with our parents, as young people being confirmed into the church, as seekers and newcomers to the faith, or as longtime believers, as human beings, every Sunday when we gather in this space, when we come up to receive the Eucharist, we are coming to the Temple, we are offering ourselves to God.
And we recognize, like Simeon and Anna and Mary and Joseph, that the call of God is
sometimes a still, small voice, and at other times a loud and uncomfortable one. Living a countercultural faith is not easy, especially in uncertain and changing times.
So we come to God asking, what can we do? Our communities are recovering from fires and floods; families grieving after this week’s airplane collisions and crashes; people are afraid and don’t know what is coming next, and we ask, what can we do? Who are we to be, once we leave this sanctuary, God’s house, and go back out into the world?
Today, in the church, we ask, What does God hope for from our lives and our relationships? What does God vision for this world and the world to come? What does it mean to be followers of Christ? Who must we be? If we, like Jesus, are given to God and to the world, what does that mean?
Jesus showed us. He listened. To women and children. He touched the lepers, he welcomed the strangers, he traveled and taught and preached.
Saints throughout history, such as St. Francis, St. Clare, St. Elizabeth of Hungary – showed us, giving away their wealth to the poor and living simply in the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr. showed us, telling us his dream of a world where children would hold hands together and we would live in peace, no matter the color of our skin, that all of us are created equal and beloved.
The activists of the civil rights era showed us, by standing in peaceful solidarity against
racism and segregation.
Fred Rogers showed us, advocating for children and for education, and reminding us that we are loved, just the way we are.
Michael Curry showed us – if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.
Jimmy Carter showed us. Pauli Murray showed us.
A bishop in Washington showed us.
Saint after saint after saint showed us, and still show us – the loud saints and the quiet saints, the ones who build schools in Haiti and churches in Honduras and wheelchair ramps in Appalachia; the saints who teach our children and bring Eucharist to the sick and cook noonday lunch for those who don’t have enough food.
And if we’re still not sure how to be Christians in this world, we turn to the Gospel. We turn to the Commandments. We turn to the Beatitudes. We turn to our Baptismal Covenant. These all show us.
We gather together in one room as Baptists, Lutherans, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists – and Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, atheists, Republicans, Democrats, all colors and genders and backgrounds.
We love one another. We love God, and we love each other as God loves us, because God loves us. We welcome the stranger. We clothe the poor. We feed the hungry. We take care of the sick. We love our enemies. We listen. We seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself, as individuals and as communities.
We strive for justice and peace among all people.
We respect the dignity of every human being.
We offer our lives, our hands, our feet, our hearts, to God, every day and every moment.
In the name of a small baby brought to the Temple, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Sermon preached by The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett on February 2, 2025, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia.
