St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by The Revd Bruce W. B. Jenneker in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town, at Solemn Evensong on the Feast of the Presentation – Candlemas – 3 February 2008.

My liturgics professor was always eager to point out that there are two agents and two processes in the liturgy. God is the one agent and God's People the other. And the processes are these – in the liturgy the People of God act to glorify God and God acts to sanctify God's People. At one and the same time, when the people gather, as we do tonight on this Feast of the Presentation, we and God come together, God and humanity meet in this holy time and in this holy place. And in our meeting God acts to gather us into God's life, to make us holy, to save us. And we act to give God glory.

Sanctification and glorification, that is what happens in worship. We are made holy and God is given glory. Our action – indeed our identity and vocation as God's creatures and God's People – is to respond to the mystery of God, to surrender to God's enfolding embrace, to await the touch of God's life-giving grace with wonder, love and praise. And as we offer this worship that gives God glory, God continues God's work of redeeming us and restoring us to the pristine image of God that we were made and meant to be.

And you thought that this was just a peaceful and quiet way to end the day, with some pious words, beautiful music and the rhythm of a cherished ritual tranquillity. No, in the quiet of our evening worship, in the silence of our prayers and in the pattern of our versicles and responses there is the dynamism of a vital and vigorous encounter. As we are gathered here, now sitting, now standing, now singing and now praying, something breathtaking and stupendous beyond our imagining is happening. God is breaking into our lives to snatch us away from all that drags us down from the wonder we were created to be, to grab us free from all that pulls us away from the intimacy of God's embrace, to refocus our desire and purpose on the Love that holds the Universe together when we are distracted by of our selfishness and tempted by lust of our desires. Right here and now, God is making us holy.

Holiness is not merely a pious disposition, virtuous discipline or recognisable religious deportment. To be made holy is to be taken up by God, to be consecrated, set aside from all else for one purpose only – intimacy with God. To be made holy is to be lifted up from out of the profane and rendered sacred, set apart to be at God's disposal. To be made holy is to be blessed with the nearness of God, the power of God and the grace of God. Now. Always. Ever.

So we act in response. Ours is the worship of creatures found, lifted up, chosen and loved. That we have been lost, and are even now often losing our way, fills our experience of being found with a joy our songs are incapable of expressing. That we are lifted up, out of the mire and clay of all that binds us to what debases, degrades and corrupts us, makes our prayers urgent with thanksgiving. That we are chosen, from before time, when we were yet in our mothers' wombs, recognised, cherished, elected as the apple of God's eye, is the source of our wonder, love and praise.

Sanctification and glorification, that is what happens in worship. We are made holy and God is given glory.

That double dynamic is what happens in the Feast we solemnly celebrate today. God comes to the temple in human form - a child forty days old, devoutly brought by his parents to fulfil the requirements of tradition, custom and law. God comes to the temple – the pledge of God's faithfulness and the assurance of God's commitment. There, in the temple, God is met by Simeon and Anna, the old man and the holy woman, both of whom have urgently longed to see and know the salvation God has promised to God's people. God condescends to come to the temple. God's people wait in the temple. God comes to save. God's people come to praise.

For a long time this Feast was kept with a different emphasis. The divine impulse and initiative was obscured. The transcendent human response was restricted to the fulfilment of the demands of the law. The taboos of patriarchy defined the meaning of the event. Patriarchy is fundamentally unsettled by the blood-force of women. Menstruation and child-birth are fenced-in, their power hidden, controlled, barricaded, banned. Women were confined in childbirth and thereafter outlawed from society until they are ritually purified, once again rendered safe and acceptable. So for generations this Feast was celebrated as the Purification of the Virgin Mary, with its emphasis on unworthiness, cleansing and the offering animals for sacrifice to appease an offended God.

I don't for one moment doubt that God was there to be found in the rituals of the Feast of the Purification. Nor do I doubt that holy men and women sought and found God in their keeping of that feast. What I affirm is the Church's daring recognition that patterns of worship change as the human spirit grows more and more into its maturity and discovers new and further horizons of truth.

The power of ritual is that is familiar and recognisable, routine and repeated, part and parcel of a committed devotional life. The authenticity of Christian worship is that in it life as we know and live it is brought into the orbit of God's divine self-revelation so that it can be judged and redeemed, searched and consecrated, embraced and restored.

Sanctification and glorification, that is what happens in worship. We are made holy and God is given glory. We receive God's consecrating love and we offer our sacrifice of praise and glory.

Pray, brothers and sisters, that we will be what we are – the children of God, and that by God's grace we will become what we are meant to be, the image and likeness of God, to the praise of God's glory.

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