Candlemas... and Holocaust Memorial

Sermon. 28 January 2018. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas) [transferred]. 

Sunday nearest Holocaust Memorial Day

• Hebrews 2.14-18
• Luke 2.22-40  

From the Letter to the Hebrews: “Since the children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death”. 

And yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. 

Either yesterday or a day or so before, we as a nation, in hundreds of different ways, marked - what? - the 

• industrial-scale, 
• technologically innovative, 
• bureaucratically managed 

genocide (mass murder) of six million Jewish human beings, and 5 million other human beings, by the Nazi regime, in the Second World War;

and…

we also marked later genocides in 

• Cambodia, 
• Rwanda, 
• Bosnia 
• and Darfur -

because the slogan “never again” has been just that - a slogan. 

And this list is far from exhaustive; many of us may want to stand with Armenians, who mark their own genocide, still not acknowledged, let alone marked, by the descendants of the perpetrators. 

But this is just a list, albeit a painful one. We cannot truly imagine the deaths - the murder - of millions. So here instead is an image. A true one; it’s on film. It’s 1938. The Kindertransport programme is going ahead. Some Jewish children from Germany and neighbouring countries are allowed to travel to Britain unhindered. It is not a blanket right; the UK government waives some but not all immigration requirements; then, as now, they didn’t want “too many refugees” (even if that means that others die).  

A family scene. Father and mother help their children onto the train with their small suitcases. The parents step away from the train… from their children. They fear - and they know the fear is rational - that if they stay, they they will be killed. The youngest child is just a toddler. The mother hands that one over to an older child. Then, no, she cannot do it. She must care for her tiny one - a mother’s instinct. She takes that one back. But that brings her no comfort, because now the infant is once again at the mercy of the killing regime. So… ... at the last minute, she hands even that one over to the children, abandons even her tiniest, that they might live.

“Since the children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death”. 

And Holocaust Memorial is in the air. 

Clearly, one response to this is to abandon faith. To say that the one who has the power of death is as strong as ever, and robust, energetic, and using that power, time and time and time again. I’m serious: this has to be a real, lively option for us. You know, people seldom lose their faith through abstract arguments about “the existence of Gd” (or “the divinity of Christ” for that matter). Usually people lose their faith because there is a “disconnect” (as we now say) - just no point of contact between what they know to be true about the world in all its mess and violence, and what they hear in their places of worship. 

“Since the children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death”. Can we connect? 

It might take a little work. Today is after all the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas). It marks the time when according to Luke, Mary and Joseph and Jesus do what they do in the Temple. (It is not at all clear what is going on, truth to tell, but that is another sermon.) It is the 40th day since his birth. So, indeed, we have a delightful chance to revisit Christmas and the joy of the Christ-child. A time of rejoicing. Not an easy time to think about whether faith makes any sense at all… or whether the world is not thoroughly Gd-forsaken. 

But still we can so think. Simeon blesses the child and mother. And as he is an Israelite, like Jacob/Israel himself, the blessing is not one of unalloyed happiness, but tells it as it is. Most poignantly, of Mary: “a sword will pierce your own soul too”. This is the “promise” of danger and opposition and even death (untimely death) ahead. 

And so too, in the Letter to the Hebrews. What counts is that Jesus shares “our flesh and blood”. And to be flesh and blood is to be mortal, is to be vulnerable.  Again, what counts is that it is through Jesus’ death, that he destroys the one who has the power of death. It is not that death - or the human ability to kill - are taken away. That idea has never had any plausibility in the world. People die; people kill. But death is not what it was before. 

The difference Jesus brings is to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death”. Death is no longer something that need provoke an all-encompassing, all-inhibiting fear. 

Is that the reassurance we need, or just so much religious jargon, from the preacher? 

It’s a not by job to tell you. You must decide for yourself. My task is to invite you to consider it. 
Just please don’t misunderstand: 

what it does not mean is that death has become trivial, because after this life, you get a second one, which is better. No, anything but that. 

It means this: 
that we have - if we make use of it - all that we need to live courageously, in this life, 
whatever life - whatever death - throws at us. 
Because (so the claim goes) we have, in Jesus, 
one sent by Gd 
to live with us, 
teach and heal us, 
pray for us, 
die with us, 
be raised for us, 
to pray again in heaven for us. 
So we have all the solidarity from Gd we might need. 

So live courageously, even in this - Holocaust-embracing — world. 

It is hard. It may be excruciating. But the message here is it can be done.

We can do it

• with the love and wonder of the Christ child,
• with the patience and confidence and prayerfulness of Simeon and Anna, 
• with the courage of Mary. 

I wish us all a blessed Feast. Amen.