Autocorrect with Angels

The Feast of the Presentation of our Lord
February 2, 2020
St. Michael’s Episcopal Church
The Reverend Canon Michael J. Horvath
Gospel: Luke 2:22-40


Last Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  The day pays tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and reaffirms an unwavering commitment to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of intolerance that may lead to group-targeted violence. The date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945.

For prisoners and Allied troops alike, liberation of the death camps of the Holocaust was a shock to the senses – at once a dream come true and a nightmare come to life. Soldiers streaming through the gates of the camps often were confronted not by German soldiers but by the sight and smell of abundant death, which the Nazis had left behind in their retreat. Just as disturbing were the signs of life – skeletal people clinging to life, often too far gone to notice their sudden change in fortune. In some tragic cases, well-meaning infantrymen handed food to survivors, only to make them deathly ill due to the dangers of eating too much while in a starvation state.

The prisoners had been abused and brutalized for so long it could take a while to register that a large unit of uniformed men with guns could be a welcome sight.  For all who experienced it, the memory of liberation is vivid. The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation has been gathering video testimonies of Holocaust survivors, and their experience of liberation.

Auschwitz survivor Paula Lebovics remembers her 11-year-old self being hugged by a Russian soldier with tears flowing down his face. “You mean somebody out there cares about me?” she wondered, as he tried to offer her food.

Isaac Levy, who served with the British military, was sprayed with the toxic chemical DDT to protect against lice when he entered into the Bergen-Belsen camp.  “I was entering Dante’s Inferno,” he said. “They were lying around in their huts. And you couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead.  Until you saw a little bit of movement and you realized that person was alive.”

What today’s few remaining survivors have in common is a sense that liberation from genocide, from scapegoating specific groups, from rising nationalism and antisemitism, is a constant struggle that we still must engage in.  Lest we forget, we must never forget.

Today is known as The Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, which occurs 40 days after his birth.  This seemingly mundane event in Jesus’s life is, in fact, quite significant and needs some background if we’re to understand how we get to this point in his life.  The Law of Moses stated that a woman who had given birth to a male child was unclean for seven days and 33 additional days were required for the process of the new mother’s purification – this is how we get the 40 days.

As stated in Leviticus 12:4, “She shall not touch anything sacred nor enter the sanctuary till the days of her purification are fulfilled.” After the days of purification, a woman was required to bring to the priest a yearling lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering. The priest would offer these sacrifices to God as atonement for her and then she would be clean again. If she could not afford a lamb, she was to offer turtledoves or pigeons for both sacrifices.

Mary offered two turtledoves or two pigeons, the text is not specific, presumably because she and Joseph could not afford the lamb. Mary provided one bird for the burnt offering in thanksgiving for the birth of her son Jesus. The other bird was Mary’s sin offering. Although we understand Mary to be without sin, Mary was obedient to the Law and made the offering.

In Exodus it is written that the first-born male was to be consecrated to the Lord. While parents were not required to take their child to the Temple in Jerusalem for this consecration, Mary and Joseph did so anyway. The Temple becomes the backdrop for two encounters that reveal the identity and mission of Jesus.

The prophets Simeon and Anna are figures who only make a brief appearance in the Gospel of Luke, but tradition and legends grew up around them. Anna was said to have been Mary’s teacher in the Temple area when she was young.

As for Simeon, according to tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.) wanted to include texts of Holy Scripture in the famous Library at Alexandria. He invited scholars from Jerusalem and Simeon was one of the seventy scholars who came to Alexandria to translate the Holy Scriptures into Greek. The completed work was called “The Septuagint,” and is the version of the Old Testament still used by the Orthodox Church.

According to tradition, Simeon was translating a book of the Prophet Isaiah, and read the words: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a Son” (Is 7:14). He thought that “virgin” was inaccurate, and he wanted to correct the text to read “woman.” At that moment an angel appeared to him and held back his hand saying, “You shall see these words fulfilled. You shall not die until you behold Christ the Lord born of a pure and spotless Virgin.” If you do the math, according to tradition Simeon was well over 250 years old when Jesus was presented to him at the Temple.

And this background gives us an idea of why Simeon and Anna are so important.  On initially reading the Gospel passage it sounds like the Holy Spirit guided a random man to meet Jesus at the Temple.  That’s not so.  Instead, here was a man who had been waiting for over 200 years to see the Christ Child.  And here was a woman who faithfully served at the Temple, who fasted and prayed without ceasing.  Both of them clinging to life and full of hope that they would live to see the day of their liberation, never forgetting what their ultimate purpose was.  Perhaps, like the concentration camp survivors, they were on the verge of being too far gone to notice a change in their fortune.  But they did notice the change in their lives in the form of the Christ Child.  And we mark this change whenever we sing or say the Nunc Dimittis – The Song of Simeon – in which Simeon essentially says “Lord, now I can die happily.” And that is what today is all about.  How do you count the ways your life has changed, or continues to change when presented with the Christ Child?

Do we live our lives in dedication to seeing Christ’s return?  Do we live in a way that ushers in God’s Kingdom into our lives?  Far too often, I think, we live as though we are already closed down, mired in a life that has no room for anyone but ourselves.  On Friday, the Trump administration added six additional countries to the restricted entry list, effectively closing the door to the US for thousands of the most vulnerable and politically marginalized asylum seekers.  It is likely that many of these people, including Syrian refugees and Rohingyan Muslims, will find themselves summarily killed or imprisoned by the totalitarian governments they are forced to return to.  We need to ask how are we complicit in this?

But even as our own country seems to be tempted by a new kind of authoritarianism, we cannot forget what it feels like to walk in darkness, any more than we can forget about the 11 million Jews and other minorities who were murdered in the Holocaust.  Now that we have been liberated from death to eternal life by the coming of Jesus, how dedicated are we to ensuring liberation for ourselves and others against the forces of evil that still seek to snuff out the light of Christ?  In the words of Simeon, “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.” Amen.