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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
As we would count the Sundays, today would be the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, but February 2nd is—no, not Groundhog’s Day, but—the Feast of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord, what Lutheran Service Book calls a “principal feast of Christ” and says is “normally observed” when it occurs on a Sunday. (At Pilgrim we generally try to observe the principal feasts of Christ even when they do not occur on a Sunday.) Instead of green paraments and such for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, today we have white paraments and such for the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord. Through the centuries, the Feast has had a diverse history: in some cases being observed simply as the Purification of Mary, and in other cases being observed simply as the Presentation of Our Lord. Even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s later preaching could be taken as reflecting the Feast as either one or the other. But, Lutheran Service Book appoints the Feast as both the Purification and the Presentation, and so we observe it as both.
Arguably both the Purification and the Presentation are uniquely narrated by the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke in the appointed Gospel Reading for today. We heard the same Gospel Reading on the First Sunday after Christmas this year, but the other parts of the liturgy “proper” to today put the Gospel Reading, as it were, in a different light. For example, today’s Introit (Psalm 48:1-3, 8; antiphon: v.9), Collect, and Gradual (Psalm 48:1, 8a, 9) all have an emphasis on God’s presence with His people in His temple in Jerusalem. Today’s Old Testament Reading (1 Samuel 1:21-28) might be said to narrate Samuel’s presentation to the Lord at the house of the Lord at Shiloh, and today’s Epistle Reading (Hebrews 2:14-28) describes how Jesus shared in human flesh and blood so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God. Similarly, the Collect and the appointed Proper Preface refer to Jesus’s being presented in the substance of our human flesh.
Today’s Gospel Reading itself refers to two different Old Testament passages: one about the purification of women after childbirth (Leviticus 12:1-8), and the other about consecrating, or setting apart, or calling holy, most firstborn sons. Although the sacrifices that Samuel’s parents are reported as making in today’s Old Testament Reading are apparently not related to that purifying or consecrating but to their own individual vows, Samuel’s parents arguably did present Samuel to the Lord—that is, they placed Samuel at the Lord’s disposal, or made Samuel available for the Lord’s service, and not only from ages 25 to 50 like other Levites, but all the days of his life, as Samuel’s mother had vowed to do even before Samuel was conceived (1 Samuel 1:11). Today’s Gospel Reading explicitly says that, when the time came for Mary’s purification, Joseph and Mary brought Jesus up to Jerusalem both in order to present Him to the Lord and in order to offer a sacrifice for her purification. What sacrifice, if any, they made for Jesus’s presentation is not explicitly stated, though St. Luke does say twice essentially that they had done everything for Jesus according to the custom of the law.
The same can hardly be said about us: we do not do everything according to God’s law—not God’s civil law, or God’s ceremonial law, or even God’s moral law, expressed, for example, by His Ten Commandments. We are sinful by nature and so we sin: we fail to think, say, and do the things that we should, and we think say and do the things that we should not. Ultimately, we fail both to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love God with our whole being (for example, Luke 10:27). On account of our sinful nature and all of our sin, we deserve both death here and now and eternal torment in hell. But, out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, He calls and so enables us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us. God forgives us for Jesus’s sake.
In His presentation, Jesus was put at God’s disposal in order to save us. In the Gospel Reading, Simeon recognized even the 40‑day‑old Jesus as the Lord’s salvation. Truly, as today’s Epistle Reading said, Jesus became a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for—that is, to satisfy God’s righteous wrath over—the sins of the people, including your sins and my sins. Through Jesus’s death on the cross, He destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and then Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus lived and died in our place; and Jesus has done everything that needs to be done for our salvation: there is no law that Jesus has not kept for us; and there is no other sacrifice that needs to be made for our sins. When we repent, then we receive Jesus’s righteousness: both the righteousness of His keeping the law for us, and the righteousness of His dying for us. We receive that righteousness through God’s Word and Sacraments as we are presented to Him.
Writing to the Ephesians, the Divinely‑inspired St. Paul describes how Christ loved the Church, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word—Holy Baptism—so that He might present the Church to Himself (Ephesians 5:25-27). Similarly, writing to the Corinthians, St. Paul confesses that believers will be raised with Jesus and presented in God’s presence (2 Corinthians 4:14 NASB95). And, St. Paul referred to his own role ministering to the Corinthians as presenting them pure, or holy, or sacred, to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:2). God is surpassingly rich in His grace (Smalcald Articles III:iv), creating faith and forgiving sin in more than one way: not only through Holy Baptism, but also through the reading and preaching of His Word, through that Word with a pastor’s touch in individual Holy Absolution, and through that Word with bread and wine in the Holy Supper that are the Body of Christ given for us and the Blood of Christ shed for us. As Samuel’s parents and Samuel himself would have eaten of their sacrifices in order to receive the blessings associated with those sacrifices, so we eat of Him Who sacrificed Himself for us, and thereby we receive the forgiveness of sins and so also life and salvation.
So transformed by God’s Word and Sacraments, and with Him active in us, as St. Paul writes to the Romans, we present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship (Romans 12:1). As those brought from the death that our sins deserved to the gift of new life in Christ, we do not present the parts of our individual bodies to sin as instruments of un‑righteousness, but we put them at the disposal of God as instruments for righteousness (Romans 6:13; confer vv.16, 19). Some people may choose to be further set apart for full‑time church work, such as by being a pastor. We can and should encourage those we know whom we think might be suitable at least to prayerfully consider being set apart to serve in such a way. But, whether or not we are full‑time church workers, in our various callings in life, we each support the work of the Church with our proportionate offerings, and we otherwise love and serve God as we love and serve our neighbors—living, with daily repentance over our failures to do so, in His forgiveness of sins.
This morning as we have considered the purification of Mary and the presentation of our Lord, we have also considered “Our purification and presentation”. Whatever debate there might be about what to call the Feast, or what exactly Joseph and Mary did on the occasion that is commemorated, we can be sure of what our Lord has done and is doing for us: He died on the cross for our sins, and He freely forgives us through His Word and Sacraments. The Feast may be named for Mary and our Lord, but ultimately we can say that the Feast is about us. As we prayed in the Hymn of the Day, so we pray again, that our Lord would present us in His glory to His Father, cleansed and pure (LSB 519:3).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +