February 2, 2020
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The Feast of the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ
Malachi 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
All of us who are baptized are called to be evangelists. In our baptismal covenant we promise to share the good news of Jesus Christ through word and deed. This is a tough order. The image of an evangelist that comes to mind may be folks who go door to door asking if we’ve ‘found Jesus,’ or perhaps we envision people on street corners passing out pamphlets and tracts, maybe we think of austere ministers loudly announcing who is going to hell and who is going to heaven. Evangelism produces all sorts of images in our mind, but I’m willing to bet the negatives outweigh the positives. As a result, I think many of us grow wary of sharing our faith with others out of a fear that we may appear like these evangelists we imagine. We worry how we’ll come off, how we’ll be received, we worry that we’ll appear like those Christians. These worries are real and they are fair – sadly, they don’t let us off the hook. Christians are called to share the Good News – Christ tells his followers to go out and make disciples – that generally involves talking to people. So what do we do?
Anna, I think, can help us. Anna doesn’t speak today, but she shows us quite a lot. She sees Christ in the temple with Mary and Joseph, and immediately she praises God and goes out telling others about the child she has found. Anna may very well be the first evangelist, and I think she’s a model for evangelism that we should pay attention to.
Anna enters into the Temple, she enters into the place where God is most powerfully present with the people. It is there that she meets God’s son. Finding Christ, encountering this baby, produces something in Anna that can only be called joy, a joy that can’t be contained, a joy that flows out of her as praise to God! This praise gives way to action. She goes and tells those who will listen about this child, she goes and shares the good news she has discovered with others. Anna’s evangelism is not dour, it doesn’t arise out of a need to damn others, it comes from her own encounter with Jesus, it comes from her own joy at finding Jesus.
This is the key to Anna and to her witness: she has found joy, and in finding joy she can do nothing else but share that joy. And we all do this! We all have joys and share those joys. A friend of mine, Isaac, works for the Sarah Duke Gardens in Durham, which is a huge garden that surrounds Duke University, it’s absolutely beautiful. He loves it. He loves the flowers and the trees. Since he started working there three years ago he’s become quite the gardener. He’ll often share about what’s been planted recently, or what’s blooming. He’ll share little tidbits about flowers or trees, and he’s got an amazing gift to just see something and identify it. Here’s the thing, I don’t really like plants, or the outside. There are bugs out there and generally it’s not air-conditioned, so I personally don’t think a lot about flora and fauna. But it’s wonderful to hear him talk about them. It’s wonderful to see how the joy that flowers and trees and shrubs and mulch give him bubbles over. He doesn’t hide it. Isaac loves gardening, gardening brings him incredibly joy, so he shares that joy with others.
I’ve got another friend who is a wood worker. He actually built me a kneeler for praying that sits in my bedroom. He loves projects and crafts, and while we were at school he would spend hours in his shop working on spoons and coasters and all sorts of thing. He just finished building two barstools for his kitchen, that are beautiful. He knows about types of wood and how you have to work with oak verses maple verses pine. My friend loves woodworking, woodworking brings him joy, so he shares that joy with others.
I have joys like that - generally they revolve around TV shows or musicals or food. Things that make me so excited that I can’t wait to share them with another. Recently, it’s been the show Cheer on Netflix, which is about as uplifting a show as you could imagine! It’ll make you want to quit your job and join a cheer team. You also have joys like too, joys that fill you so much that your cup runneth over! Maybe it’s your children, maybe your work, maybe a hobby or film or restaurant. Evangelism, true evangelism, evangelism that works, that invites people into relationship with God starts here. It starts from joy. The question this Gospel poses to me and to all of us is this: Have we discovered the joy of Christ for ourselves? Does Christ bring us the same kind of joy as gardening or birding or woodworking or watching Cheer on Netflix?
Honestly, I don’t know how to answer that. I’m as nervous about talking about Christ with those outside those doors as anyone else – I’m worried about coming off as a fundamentalist or as pushy or as a weirdo. But I’ve known people for whom Jesus is a source of overflowing joy. Brother Mac, from the church I was baptized in, had that kind of joy. He knew Jesus. And he loved Jesus, and it just radiated from him. He was a joyful man, the kind of person you were just drawn to as though he were a magnate. You wanted the kind of joy Brother Mac had, the joy that comes from knowing Jesus.
Ms. Cathy, who worked at my seminary, had that kind of joy. She was funny and caring and loving and when she talked with you, it felt like a beam of love focused in on you. She had what I can only call a grounded lightness about her. She knew who she was and whose she was and that empowered her to walk through this world like she was walking on air. And when she prayed, you would have thought she was sitting and talking with her oldest friend. Ms. Cathy loved God, Jesus was her joy, and it was infectious. In a place where so much of life is about what you think about God, she was a reminder that thinking about God and knowing God are not the same thing.
These folks knew Jesus deeply and their joy invited others in. They didn’t have to stand on street corners or go knocking door to door to talk about Jesus, they just had to be honest, they just had to be themselves, they just had to talk about the thing they loved most in the world – it was all downhill from there.
This joy arises from encountering Christ. Unfortunately, there’s no telling when this encounter will happen! It wasn’t until she was in her twilight years that Anna had the encounter with Christ that led her to go out and share the good news! But I think more of us have had encounters with Jesus than we would admit, I think we often fail to recognize this though.
Few would have expected the salvation of Israel to come in the form of a small baby, but Anna recognized it. Years of praying, fasting, dwelling in the presence of God attuned her eyes and heart to recognize Christ when he showed up in the temple. We have to train our eyes and our hearts through prayer, worship, and scripture reading to recognize Christ in our lives because Christ can be tricky – he’ll show up in the most unexpected ways. But when Jesus shows up unexpectedly, he comes bringing great joy – the joy of peace, the joy of love, the joy of forgiveness. Joy that swells up and runs over, joy that sends us out in the world sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, not as abstract dogmas or doctrines, but as a personal encounter with the source of life and love itself. Amen.