Never Mind the Bishops!: Sermon Preached on Candlemas (Sunday 2nd February 2025)

Preached at St Mary’s Potterne and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Hebrews 2. 14-18; Luke 2. 22-40

“he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might … free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

“It’s rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

Perhaps I am the first preacher ever to quote, in a sermon, this famous line from Sir Geoffrey Howe’s 1990 resignation speech as Deputy Prime Minister. Yet they were words that popped unbidden to mind as I returned from a fairly long and very pleasant leave, raring to get back into the fray, to find myself confronted with disastrous stories in the media about the Church of England, generated by our bishops: these are the people who are supposed to be our shepherds, our pastors. For it is rather like arriving at the crease, hoping to start a long and productive spell, only to find that my bat has indeed been broken.

What does that have to do with this morning’s Bible readings? Well, quite a lot as it turns out. One is the famous story of Jesus being presented by Mary and Joseph in the Temple, in fulfilment of Jewish religious law, as we would expect as today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation. The other reading is a passage from Hebrews which reflects on the implications of Jesus sharing our human nature in all its fullness. Both identify Jesus directly as the Christ, the Messiah, sent by God to deliver His people.

So it makes sense to have this pair of readings together on the same day, but they are to some extent in tension with one another. Our Gospel shows even Christ, God made human, binding Himself to the Law of Moses, and the religious system of the Temple at Jerusalem, in which sacrifices of animals played a major role. But the Letter to the Hebrews is all about making the case that the system of animal sacrifices has been ended by Christ, whose sacrifice of Himself on the Cross is enough for everyone, for all time. The Bible doesn’t give us simple answers. To read the Bible faithfully, we need to listen carefully when we find different parts of it in tension. It is always tempting to mine Scripture for simple answers; the trouble with that is that we then tend to find the answers we already wanted. If we honestly seek to puzzle our way to finding God’s will for us and for the world, it will be a job that we can barely make a start on in a lifetime.

Here’s an interesting detail in the short passage from Hebrews, a lovely passage, which reminds us that in Jesus Christ, the Godhead became like us so we could become like the Godhead; and the Godhead is eternal life. In dying Christ not only destroyed the power of death over us, but also freed us “who were held in slavery by the fear of death”. What an interesting choice of phrase. The fear of death holds us in slavery in many ways. Most of us are afraid of death; I certainly am. It’s natural to be a little disturbed by the reality that the time will come when we no longer exist in this world, and that that time will not be all that long coming for any of us. But the Christian faith literally tells us we have nothing to fear from death; that if we trust Christ and His promises, our mortal death is the gateway to immortality in the world to come.

The fear of death is at the root of many of the problems of the Church of England, and the church in Western countries more generally.[1] Our bishops spend their working weeks talking about decline, dealing with the consequences of decline, desperately trying to come up with clever ideas to reverse decline, and as a result constantly being surrounded by the fear of institutional collapse and the sense that they would be responsible for any such collapse. The very people whose job is to remind the world that Christ has freed us from “the slavery of the fear of death” are instead consumed by it, and consumed by the sense that their failings might be responsible for it.

Yet a central truth of the Christian Faith is that our faith is not about what we do, or what we achieve, which could never be enough to reach divine standards, but instead about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for us on the Cross. It’s about what this tiny child was already destined for when His mother presented Him at the Temple. God sacrificed Himself for us, not because we are good but because God is love. Christianity is not about making us good but dealing with the consequences of us all being, at least sometimes, very bad. Yet we communicate this central truth of Christianity badly to others and often to ourselves, instead misrepresenting ourselves as a community of nice people trying to be better.

Do our bishops make grave mistakes sometimes? Of course they do. We do too. Being Christians does not make us better than anyone else; Jesus Christ never said it would. And Christianity certainly is not about the idea that if only we all truly followed Jesus then everybody would live happily ever after. Listen to what Simeon’s tells Mary in today’s Gospel—her Son would be opposed, and a sword would pierce her soul. If you wonder why the Church can leave you bewildered and upset sometimes, remember that for all of us loving Jesus Christ will lead to be our hearts being pierced, just as it did to His mother.

In the Church, we are sometimes hurt, and we sometimes hurt others, and all of us sometimes fail. Of course our bishops sometimes fail, because they are like us flesh and blood people whose sins Christ died on the Cross to forgive. Christ’s sacrifice atoned for the sins of the whole world—even the sins of bishops.

In any case, they aren’t the whole story of the Church. Did the high priests at the Temple notice when Christ was brought in? Of course not. It’s Simeon and Anna who do. Anna is described as a “prophet” here, but as a woman, couldn’t have been in any formal religious leadership role. Simeon was just a very devout man. Both were, as we might put it, people from the grassroots. Both were very elderly, not usually people expected to play critical roles in the future of the world. But both recognise Jesus as the God-sent deliverer while He is just a tiny baby.

Renewal is unlikely to come from the top of the Church. Good leaders will almost certainly emerge as a result of renewal at the grassroots, not the other way round. Renewal will come through people nobody expects, in ways that nobody expects. It always does, and that is precisely what the Bible should lead us to expect.

Most of all, remember what Christianity is really about. Christ didn’t come to make us perfect, or give us easy answers—but to open the way to eternal life for us. If we truly seek to follow Jesus Christ, then we should not fear our deaths in this world, or that of the Church, or of the other things we treasure. For all that is truly of value will be gathered up by God for eternity, already redeemed on the Cross by Christ who is God, God made human like us, so that in the fullness of time we may be made like Him.

And now let glory and honour, dominion and power, be ascribed to God the Father who holds dominion over all; God the infant child in the Temple; and God the Holy Spirit who led Simeon to Jesus; as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] Driving this is our desperate need to be relevant and therefore our neglect of speaking of the eternal and transcendent, instead obsessing about making a difference in ‘the real world’—but that’s another sermon for another day.