Sermon for 1st February 2026

Sermon for the Presentation of Christ in the Temple 2026

Luke 2:22-38

Since the beginning, The Bible has always been read on multiple levels. For example, there is the historic level, the level of what happens and where, the level of speech and action. We may call this the surface level of interpretation. But there is also what can be called the symbolic, allegorical, or mystical level. This is where we dig down below the literal to what a story might be telling us about the soul, or the Sprit, or God’s action in us. Today we have the story of Jesus’ presentation in the temple. It has a full cast of characters; Jesus himself; his parents, particularly Mary; the ‘righteous and devout’ Simeon and the prophet Anna. It can be easy to get lost in the sheer proliferation of detail in the story but I’d like to look at it spiritually and symbolically. What is this story saying to our own hearts and souls today? How does it sound our depths of mind and heart?

Let us take the temple then as us, the temple of hearts or souls, and see each character as a vitally important aspect of our inner lives in relation to God. The central character here is the young Christ. He is being presented ‘to the Lord.’ Now one way of understanding the incarnation is of God taking on human form, thousands of years ago, in a particular and special person called Jesus and we are to follow and emulate Jesus as an example of embodied holiness. This is OK as far as it goes but it also seems to render the incarnation a past event which we have to look back at and rather strenuously and anxiously attempt to comprehend and decipher. But we might also understand the incarnation as God taking on our human nature; that God in Christ made the soul a home for the divine to dwell in. Which means the incarnation is not only a distant event of the past, but also an event which is occurring for each of us now. The Christ aspect of us is what is deepest in our inner temple, its ground: the divine reality which lives in the soul, a spaceless space for the richness and glory of God to manifest and boil over, out into the world. At the secret centre of who we are is the Christ, the spark in the soul, the void of God where God is born in us.

Simeon enters the picture, another part of our spiritual natures. Simeon has a particular relationship to the Holy Spirit, ‘and the Holy Spirit rested on him.’ ‘Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple.’ The Spirit is that dynamic, relational part of God. It inspires us and draws us on. The Spirit gives Simeon a capacity for vision, for seeing the secret form of God within what is least like God, in this case a young, poor child. Simeon says, ‘for my eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.’ One of the most precious aspects of who we are is our ability to see beyond and below the surface. This is difficult to do, particularly in a culture which is obsessed with surfaces and not pausing to look. But if God is at our centre, we can look on the world through Christ’s eyes, discerning the divinity in the natural world, in the faces of our friends, in the faces of the poor and reviled. Vision, open to us all, has to be nurtured by the living sense of the divine within. Landscapes speak but only if we are open to the vison and insight which Simeon displays. ‘My eyes have seen your salvation.’ We have to see and sense salvation, salvation cannot be theoretical or academic, it is the beauty buried in the form of the everyday. It is something we personally apprehend and experience. Simeon also displays the ability to be receptive to souls, to read people not superficially but with soul-searching sight. He tells Mary that Jesus will be the catalyst which will reveal ‘the inner thoughts of many.’ So, at the moment, we have two aspects of the inner temple. Christ, the centre, the space which is open to God; and Simeon, the visionary, who can look and discern God at work in the world.

Then we have Mary. Simeon speaks prophetic words to Mary about Jesus, and I want to focus on one haunting verse which he shares with her, ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’ What is this soul-piercing sword which he is speaking about? Mary is the element of piercing compassion within the temple of the soul. If Christ, if God, dwells in the soul, and if Simeon is the soul’s visionary aspect, Mary is the element that is pierced by love, wounded by love. When we look at the world, we have to have the capacity to feel deeply, the sword of the Spirit must pierce our own hearts and souls, else we are nothing, machines rather than feeling creatures. The temple. The soul, with Christ at its centre, is the sacred space of vulnerable love or it is nothing. People, the world, must wound us, must pierce us, because that is what happens to Christ. He receives the wounds of love. God does not make us safe; God makes us open and receptive to the world in a renewed capacity for love.

And finally, we have Anna, ‘a prophet… the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.’ The tribe of Asher was one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. In other words, she is somebody from deep in the primordial, or archetypal, past. Anna ‘never left the temple but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day.’ Anna is the spirit of prayer in the inner temple. Prayer is the name for our holistic receptivity to God. If we don’t pray, we are not open to the vison, or the love, of the divine. If a temple does not have prayer happening in it, it is a closed temple, a dead temple. But Anna never leaves the temple and prays in the temple, ‘night and day.’ In our own lives, if we do not pray, if we do not turn ourselves towards the transcendent, then the different aspects of our spiritual lives will never fully come alive. Prayer then is the foundation of the inner temple, our lives fully open to the glory and wonder of God.

We are spiritual temples. Christ is at the centre. The reality of God at the heart of who we are. Simeon is our creative ability to see beyond the surface of things, to be visionary, to discover the secret God hidden within the world. Mary symbolises the soul’s capacity to be pierced by love, by the sword of the world. And Anna is the representation of primordial prayer, prayer which is what creatively activates all these different aspects of our mystical lives; without prayer the soul cannot experience Christ indwelling it; without prayer we cannot look with deeper sight; without prayer we are unable to have our soul’s pierced by compassion.

If The Bible is read as a distant historical record it is a dead letter, or dead letters. We have to allow the stories it tells to lead us into the space where we are open to the majesty and intimacy of God’s indwelling reality, where what is past speaks to the urgency of our present. Christ brought to the temple, surrounded by his earthly parents, by Simeon and Anna. Yes, this is telling us a story of the past. But it is also a story about our inner present day temples of soul, inner temples of soul made up of various, dynamic and complex aspects, aspects of divinity, vision and compassion which are brought fully alive by the art and persistence of prayer. Only then, with prayer, do our inner temples of soul become living temples; temples broken open to the transcendence and glory of God.

The Reverend Ben Brown February 2026