Today is Candlemas, one of my favorite days in the church year. As the name suggests, it’s the day on which we bless all the church candles that will be used in the coming year - a tradition that goes back centuries, and sometimes took more elaborate forms, involving candlelit processions before the service, or people bringing their own candles from home to be blessed, and so on.  You can imagine that in darker, more northern regions, this was probably an important day in the church year, and, in fact, some of those more elaborate services come from churches in Ireland and Northern England.

Candlemas is also a day on which we celebrate several final events in the infancy of Christ, which is why some churches wait until Candlemas Day to put away all the church Christmas decorations like the creche and the mistletoe. The most famous event in Jesus’ infancy that we celebrate today is his Presentation in the Temple.  According to Luke’s Gospel, it was the custom of the day to present your first child to the priest in the Jerusalem Temple forty days after his or her birth, and you would bring with you a sacrifice - a lamb and a dove, or, if you couldn’t afford that, like Jesus’ family, just two pigeons.  

I read this week in my Jewish Commentary on the Christian Gospels that presenting your child after forty days like this was not actually a requirement of the Jewish Law in Jesus’ day.  But in the life of any new parent, bringing your new baby to church to show off to your priest and fellow parishioners might as well be a religious rite, it’s so exciting and momentous.  I kind of wonder if Mary, when she was recalling these infancy stories to the Gospel writer Luke (because remember that the tradition says that Luke’s infancy stories are Mary’s memoirs – the stories she told him in her old age that he then wrote down in his Gospel), I wonder if the event was just so inflated in Mary’s memory that she mistook her first trip out with her baby for an important religious ceremony.  Who knows?

Candlemas is also sometimes celebrated as the Feast of the Purification of Mary, emphasizing Mary’s ritual reentry into society after a forty-day period of seclusion following her baby’s birth.  That was Jewish law at the time, where women were presented in the Temple for a purification ceremony before going back out into the world.  In parts of the church where devotion to Mary was strong, this is the event people would have associated with Candlemas more than the Presentation of Christ.  It would also have brought to people’s minds a once familiar custom called the Churching of Women, where a woman is welcomed back into her congregation following the birth of her child.  In the Anglican or Episcopal tradition, we still have a prayer for the Churching of Women, rooted in this story and in those ancient laws.    

A final event in Jesus’ infancy that we mark on Candlemas is what is called The Meeting, or the encounter between the old man Simeon and the infant Jesus.  It’s a poignant scene: Mary brings her newborn to the Temple, and this old man, probably all but blind physically, somehow has the spiritual sight to see something - some scrap of hope for the future - in this forty-day-old child.  The song that he sings after that encounter is called the Song of Simeon or, in Latin, the Nunc Dimittis after the first few words: “Lord Now You Have Set [your servant free],” and it’s been sung for centuries the world over at evening prayer services.

So, those are the three Biblical events that inspire Candlemas: the Presentation, the Purification, and the Meeting.  If you’re wondering what links these events and the blessing of the candles, it’s Simeon’s reference to Jesus being the light of the Gentiles.  There is also a tradition that says that Mary carried a candle as she processed to the Temple – you see that in the painting on your bulletins and in a lot of the art of this scene.

The celebration of candles and light probably also comes from an event in the natural world on Candlemas Day: this is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the point at which spring – just barely – begins to stir.  Which is appropriate, because it’s sort of what happens with the people in these stories.  Mary comes out of her postpartum seclusion.  Simeon awakens to new hope.  For both, life begins to stir and the end of a spiritual or emotional winter is in sight.

And that is God’s promise to us on Candlemas Day: that whatever we’re going through, light and hope will win out in the end. Winter isn’t over, and we still have the long season of Lent ahead before we reach the spring and then Easter, but for now we have this service and these candles to remind us of God’s promise to see us through the darkness and lead us into light.