by Griff Martin
On Luke 2:22-40 (Presentation of the Lord)
For the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Now Incarnate and Present God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
You might have missed it Tuesday if you were not paying close attention, Tuesday was 40 days after Christmas which means liturgically Tuesday was the Feast Day of the Presentation of Our Lord, it’s a most important celebration of the presence of Jesus in our midst, one that we should we stop and celebrate. But historically this Feast Day, this holiday has not been one on which we have put too much focus as a church community, only our Eastern siblings have held on here.
What we focus on, how we focus is a funny thing, I was reminded of that this Christmas break. At the ranch right now we have two horses that we are keeping for a family camp over the winter, we were there over break and my bother in law suggested one morning it might be fun to ride the horses. So we went and saddled them up and got on the horses only to have them lead us a few hundred yards straight to the barn where they were ready to be fed. We could not get them to move, to do anything, we were just sitting on top of horses refusing to budge because they were hungry and what we did not know was now was the time they were used to being fed. Their focus was there.
Our focus matters…. We miss a Feast Day like Tuesday because our focus is on other things -- meetings, school, work, a million other things that focus our attention because that is our pattern and rhythm, we are like horses bound to a feeding schedule, stubborn and immovable.
Our focus matters…. For instance, this image, what do you see?
Now if countless psychology studies remain correct, a lot of us just saw a drawing or a sketch of a horse. You saw that not because it’s a sketch of a horse but because I planted that idea by telling you that stretch of an illustration involving a horse just a minute ago, I had you thinking about horses so you saw a horse. If I had told you a different story you might have seen something quite different, if for instance I had been able to somehow work in a story about me going on a trip and all the baby seals that I saw and I had you thinking of a seal, you might have seen something different… look again.
Some of you now see a seal and not a horse, others of us struggle because our mind can only see the horse. Our minds can be quite stubborn like that. If I had started the sermon off without mentioning either horse or seal, we would have likely been divided by about half and half, although at one point this week looking at I also thought I saw a bunny but I am going to just take that as enlightened.
So this whole thing, me telling you a story about a horse and then showing the image thus greatly enhancing the likelihood that you saw a horse, psychologically this is known as motivated perception, which means we come to conclusions we’re predisposed to believe in or more simply we see what we think we are supposed to see, we see what our brain is trained to notice.
And I believe that motivated perception is the theological key to why the Feast Day of the Presentation of the Lord is a celebration we have to reclaim.
Our text this morning begins with Mary and Joseph bringing Jesus to the temple for two reasons, one this is a celebration of Mary’s ritual purity after giving birth and second this is what devout Jewish families did, a son was presented at the temple forty days after his birth with a sacrifice (think less a Child is A Gift From the Lord and more slaughter house). Now the sacrifice should have been a sheep but the Torah provides an exemption for those who can’t afford a sheep, they have the flexibility to use pigeons or dove. Which tells us two things of Mary and Jospeh, they are not in a good financial place and they are devout and faithful in their religion (paradoxically it almost always takes the most faithful and devout followers to break the rules and bring about newness).
So this day that is what they are doing, following what faith commands them. And then the text turns and introduces two new characters, Simeon and Anna, two of my favorite supporting actors in our story.
Simeon has quite the legend. Our Episcopal siblings tell us that tradition is Simeon is one of the 70 Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew text to Greek to create to Septuagint, which is as massive leap forward in biblical literacy as the Gutenberg printing press. Now history does not add up here -- for this to be true, than at this moment of celebration in the life of Jesus, Simeon would be around 290 years old. But I like what they are trying to say in this tradition and myth, that Simeon is one who has dedicated his life to studying the word of God, studying it so deeply that he sees the truth of it in a new way and he sees the truth of it everywhere he looks and in everything he hears, note the beauty in how the text describes him as trusting the word of God as Spirit of God. In the beginning was the Word and Simeon sees the word wherever he looks, he knows it. He sees it even where the religious leaders miss it, like a poor baby being presented in the temple.
And Anna is much the same, although her lessons have come at a much more tragic price. What we know of her is that she was married for seven years and then her husband died leaving her a widow and then her life changed, maybe family refused to take her in, maybe she had no family left or maybe she refused to play by that system anymore and she decided to do it her own way and turned to the only thing she could trust, God. Anna has lived in the temple now for decades, her life has been one of fasting and praying, she is our first nun, Jesus’ original desert mother and mystic, refusing the world and inhabiting the spiritual realm. She, too, sees more than those around her.
Both of them see more because they have been practicing motivated perception, although they would have never called it that. For starters that phrase is very new in our lexicon and second they would have laughed at a concept like this and said, we were just loving God and trying as hard as possible to always train our mind upon God.
I think that when Jesus utters one of his more famous lines, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. I think if we could replay that moment we would notice a pause and a far-off look in his eyes as he reflected on the two who taught him this lesson, Simeon and Anna, two who trained their hearts and eyes upon God so much that they had vision that everyone else just missed.
That day in the temple where others see poor Jewish peasants who can’t even scrape up enough dimes to buy a proper sacrifice, they see the very child of God, they see the Messiah, they see our future, our foundation.
When you train you entire life and thoughts and vision on God, there is no telling what you might get to see.
One of my foundational core beliefs is that God is abundant, that God is everywhere, that God hides in 1,000 places, that divine sparks exist everywhere we look.
Unfortunately, we have been trained to see less, not more.
Our world has trained us to see things through the tyranny of the urgent, we rely on schedules and systems that give us false senses of control, because things are so big and overwhelming 99% of the time we have chosen to see things through the false idols of money, power and time, we think in terms of scarcity and not abundance, we have limited and caged God. God exists where we want God to exist and that is where we see God… Sunday morning worship, a moment of meditation, possibly a conversation with a friend from church, a spiritual reading, we have caged God to those places… although actually that is not the right language, we have caged our perception of God to those places. We only see God where we want to see God and we miss God a million other places.
But my hope is these are new days and perhaps we will join Anna and Simeon at the Feast and we will realize, once present always present, we will devote our souls and eyes to more because we want to see as much God as possible, after all what more do you really want to see?
Are we brave enough to offer a prayer of surrender and ask God to show us all the places God is visible and present? And be careful about praying that because it might mean there are times that in your religious community you will be one of two voices crying out, you are missing God -- it’s right here in front of us, why can’t you see it?
It begins with using the gift of motivated perception, which I believe is maybe just a fancy way of saying prayer and meditation and devotion. If you see what you want to see, what you train your eyes to see, then what are you doing to see God everywhere? Which means maybe starting by examining the preconceived notions you have about God and then looking for something more real and true. There are all sorts of practices you could do here… I think meditation is critical, I work my hardest to read part of the Gospels every day because if I want to live like Jesus then I need to be enmeshed and centered on his story, I have a friend who got a tattoo on her wrist so that when she looks down she is reminded to look for More, I have another friend who has trained himself to pause throughout the day to recenter and refocus his attention on More, I think the Ignatian Daily Examen is one of the most important disciplines we could practice together.
To train our minds to see God, because we will be surprised by all the places we will find God -- actually maybe I could phrase that better -- we will be saved by all the places we will find God.
Make us aware of your presence….
Now, I know that some of you eye roll the prayer I repeat almost weekly, some of you have commented how much you dislike this practice, but I am not changing it because it’s a call that I need in the pulpit and life and I think we all need, a reminder of the only thing that matters.
Now that prayer has changed a bit, if you went back to my early sermons I used to pray, “God be present here, for if you are present…” Now, full disclosure I did not write this prayer, it’s from the Episcopal tradition and hymn and prayer book. But about a year into things, two saints in the congregation came to me and suggested that I did not need to pray for God to be here because God was already here. They go by Renee and David, but for today let’s call them Anna and Simeon. They were right, I was missing it. So my prayer changed to "make us aware of your presence," open our eyes, wake us up.
This is the truth of Jesus… God is present here among us, with us… and if we see that, nothing else matters but until we see that, nothing else matters.
Amen and Amen.
*artwork: La presentación de Cristo by Kelly Latimore
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