Claiming the Blessing that is Ours
The Presentation of our Lord (transferred), 2021
Malachi 3:1-4 • Hebrews 2:14-18 • Luke 2:22-40
On Wednesday evenings during Epiphany, our 7pm group has been enjoying Bishop Steven Charleston’s new book “Ladder to the Light: an indigenous elder’s meditation on hope and courage”. I know many of you are familiar with his writings, but for those of you who are not, I encourage you to look him up. He is an elder of the Choctaw Nation and the retired Episcopal bishop of Alaska. His writings are spiritually powerful, and I find them both moving and inspiring.
The controlling image for this book is of the Kiva, the underground sacred chamber of indigenous tradition, accessed by a ladder, reaching up to the light. Bishop Charleston sees each of the eights rungs of the ladder as offering a particular spiritual vision for us to embrace on our journey.
Last Wednesday, we were considering the rung of blessing. How within each of us is a holy space where the Spirit meets and blesses us. Our challenge, Charleston, writes, is to accept and own that gift of blessing, that intimacy with the divine.
The Feast of the Presentation is when Mary and Joseph make the journey to the temple in Jerusalem with the baby Jesus, forty days after his birth, as is required by Jewish law. They present the child to Simeon and Anna, and they and the baby are blessed: they claim the blessing that is theirs, has always been theirs, and will always be theirs. One of many opportunities in their and our lives: opportunities that can be required as this one is, or less formally, during our day to day lives.
There was a FaceBook meme circulating a while back that some of you will have seen. It was, “the worst idea we ever had was to put God in the sky”. While I believe that there is nowhere that God is not, an important corrective to the ‘God in the sky’ idea is that God is within each one of us. And I find Steven Charleston’s articulation of this place of blessing very provoking. He writes:
(The Spirit's blessing) is within you. It always has been because we are all blessed with what we need to be the light in darkness. The energy and confidence are already there in our hearts. it is in our love. I believe the Spirit returns to this same point over and over because she is blessing each one of us with as much love as we can handle. She knows our love is the fuel for the light we will generate. The more we believe in ourselves as agents of love, the brighter our light will be....
We do have a choice: we can encounter this holy blessing, this generous gift of love from God almost accidentally, and move on to our next life experience. Or, we can make the choice to focus our attention on that still holy place inside us, to breathe in that love and that blessing that is ours alone. Allowing that love to ‘fuel us for the light that we will generate’ in this challenged world.
After our service today, we will gather for our Annual Meeting: an opportunity to claim and celebrate the blessing of our engagement and commitment, our belonging in this precious, life-giving community of faith. I will be resharing the glorious music video that Bill Keck and some of the choir made to showcase the photos that many of you submitted last year: both a celebration and a reminder of who we are, together.
This Feast of the Presentation, we will be presenting and celebrating in our meeting all that the congregation of Holy Innocents has accomplished together through the last year. It is a narrative where again and again we have met, engaged, and accepted the loving intimacy of the blessing of God, nourishing us to be lights in this world.
To conclude with the words of Steven Charleston:
Burn bright. The flame of life burns brighter when touched by the breath of the Spirit.
The more we are open to the presence of the sacred in our lives,
the more we find energy to do those things we only now imagine.
Inspiration is not just an idea, but a movement, a tipping point toward creativity.
It is what we believe opens our hearts and minds
to discover new ways to share our lives with others.
Spirituality is an exchange.
Through it we receive the strength of the Spirit
so that we may give our love more deeply.
Burn bright in faith today,
for with the Spirit all things are possible.