The Feast of the Presentation-Candlemas 'A Blessing that can be carried'

 

The Feast of the Presentation (Candlemas)
A Blessing That Can Be Carried

February 1, 2026

Rex McKee

 

This is the God you’ve been waiting for.

When the light enters the temple, it does more than glow, it reveals.

The light asks whom among us can endure the truth of love made visible.

 

On this feast day, the Church gathers in winter light and places a baby at the center of our theology.

Not a teacher.
Not a miracle worker.
Not a martyr.

A child—carried into the Temple by parents doing what ordinary, faithful Jewish families had done for generations.

 

 

Candlemas is a feast of light, but it does not begin with brightness. It begins with custom, with vulnerability, with bodies moving through ritual in a world shadowed by empire and uncertainty. Mary and Joseph are not staging a holy moment; they are keeping Torah.

They bring Jesus to Jerusalem following the law given in Exodus and Leviticus: every firstborn belongs to God, and purification rites are acts of gratitude and restoration.

They offer the sacrifice of the poor, two common birds, not a lamb, placing Jesus with and among those who live close to the edge of survival.

Jesus is presented in the Temple before he teaches, before he heals, before he resists empire, before he is opposed. Which means that whatever we say about Jesus whatever we say about God begins here:

Blessing comes before achievement.

Matthew Fox, in his book Original Blessing, argues that Christianity made a tragic turn when it taught people they were born fundamentally broken rather than fundamentally blessed.

Before we are sinners, we are creatures.

Before we are moral agents, we are recipients of grace.

Creation itself is God’s first act of love.

“Original sin is not the core of who we are; Original blessing is.”

Simeon does not take the child in his arms and say, “Let us wait and see what you become.”
Anna does not praise God because the child has a successful track record.

They recognize salvation while Jesus is helpless, dependent, unable to speak or choose or perform. If blessing had to be earned, this scene would make no sense.

Simeon sings a song of peace and gives us warning…
“This child is destined for the falling and rising of many… and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

Blessing, it turns out, is not the same as safety.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once imagined what would happen if Jesus returned to the world quietly, without warning.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Christ appears during the Spanish Inquisition. He does not preach a sermon. He heals the sick. He restores the broken. The people recognize him immediately—and that is precisely the problem. By nightfall, he is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, the highest religious authority in the city.

The Inquisitor does not accuse Jesus of falsehood. He accuses him of asking too much.

“You gave people freedom,” “And they cannot bear it.”

Human beings, the Inquisitor insists, want bread more than blessing, certainty more than love, authority more than responsibility.

And walls and cages more than bridges…

 

He speaks on behalf of the Church that corrected Christ’s mistake. It offered order instead of freedom, control instead of trust, security instead of love.

Jesus remains silent.

He listens through the night as the Inquisitor explains that faith must be managed, fear must be harnessed, and mercy must be limited for the sake of peace.

Jesus steps forward and kisses the old man.

The Inquisitor trembles but not change is mind…. He releases Jesus and commands him never to return.

Imagine for a moment after hours of being detained, lectured on the evils of immigrants, questioned over and over to show birthright papers, Jesus stepping up and kissing the ICE agent on the cheek.

Simeon was waiting for the “consolation of Israel”—language drawn directly from the prophet Isaiah.

“Comfort, O comfort my people,” Isaiah proclaims to a people who know exile, displacement, and the trauma of lost land. Simeon’s hope is not abstract spirituality; it is communal survival.

Simeon does not rush to soften his words.
He does not protect us or Mary or Joesph from the truth.
He does not explain away the cost of this blessing.

Simeon blesses the child and is explicit about what blessing will do.

Simeon’s blessing matters, because there is another religious instinct, just as old, just as tempting, that tries to save people from the cost of freedom. It is the instinct to manage faith through fear, trading love for control, protecting the world from the disruption God brings.

Simeon does not believe people must be rescued from freedom.
He does not believe blessing must be made safe to survive.
He trusts that God’s light, even when resisted, is worth carrying.

Simeon understands salvation entrusted to human hands—hands that will tremble, fail, love, grieve, and still carry light forward.

Matthew Fox names this divide with clarity. “Original sin is not our deepest truth. Original blessing is.”

Christianity lost its way when it replaced original blessing with original fear.

People are taught they are fundamentally broken, they must be controlled.

When we trust they are fundamentally blessed, they can be invited into responsibility, compassion, and courage.

Which means fear-based religion always misunderstands God.
It confuses control with care.
It confuses obedience with trust.
It confuses safety with salvation.

Simeon does not make that mistake.

He blesses what is fragile.
He names the cost honestly.
And then releases the child back into the world.

That is faith.

Candlemas is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” But Isaiah also knows that light does not flatter darkness—it exposes it.

Original blessing is not undone by suffering—but it is tested by it.

Light and fire belong together in this feast. Candlemas candles do not exist to decorate sanctuaries; they are lit to remind us that light costs something. Flame consumes even as it illuminates.

“This child will cause the falling and rising of many.”

That line is not spiritual poetry. It is social diagnosis.

When a vulnerable child is named salvation, something must fall.

Fear-based religion falls.
Nationalism baptized as faith falls.
The lie that personal safety or purity of race matters more than human dignity falls.

Isaiah dreams of nations streaming toward light, not walls raised in fear. The stranger, the widow, and the orphan are not threats to covenant faithfulness; they are its measure.

 

Her name was Rachel, Rachel Posner, mother of 5 children, wife of Rabbi Akiva Boruch Posner. She lived in a small town in Kiel Germany with a small Jewish population of 500, it was 1931.

Across from her house was the local Nazi headquarters.

Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of lights, celebrating the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the resilience of a people who refused to let their faith and identity be extinguished.  It remembers the miracle of a small flame that burned longer than expected, bearing witness to hope, resistance, and God’s presence amid oppression.

Rachel lit the candles on Shabbot, the last day of celebration. She snapped a photograph.

 

On the back of this photo she wrote, Death to Judah so the flag says. Judah will live forever.

Rachel’s grandson Yehudah has this photo and menorah and shares them with the Holocaust History Museum. His grandfather Rabbi Posner led most of the Jewish Community in Kiel to escape to Israel before the night of the long knives.

And this is where Simeon’s words meet our own moment.

When migrants or the other are portrayed as dangers rather than neighbors, something is falling.

When families seeking safety are detained, deported, or separated in the name of law and order, something is falling.

When fear of the stranger is baptized as Christian wisdom, something is falling.

 

What rises instead is harder and holier:
a God who crosses borders,
a faith community that remembers its own history of exile,
a love that refuses to sacrifice the vulnerable for the illusion of control.

Anna stands beside Simeon as another elder witness. She is a widow, shaped by loss, sustained by prayer, formed by decades of attention.

She never leaves the Temple—not because she is sheltered from the world, but because she knows how to prayerfully watch.

She recognizes redemption not through power but through presence.

Anna speaks “to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” Her hope is public. Her faith is communal. She understands that light is meant to be shared, not hoarded.

Together, Simeon and Anna teach us commitments rather than rules:

We wait without surrendering hope.
We watch without demanding control.
We speak truth without contempt.
We bless what is fragile.
We refuse despair.

This is how blessing is carried across generations.

Simeon knows the cost. “A sword will pierce your own soul too.”

None of us are protected from grief. Love does not arrive without risk. But Simeon blesses the child anyway.

Blessing is not optimism.
Blessing is commitment.

We bless this child and consent to transformation.

To carry this light is to accept that there will be resistance.
To receive original blessing is to be refined by love rather than insulated from pain.
We carry our blessing through fear, opposition, and refinement.
We carry our blessing in communities willing to remember their own stories of migration, vulnerability, and grace.

Candlemas sends us back into these dark days not with certainty, but with light small enough to carry and strong enough to endure.

Simeon departs in peace not because the world is fixed, but because blessing has entered and will not leave.

May we be among those who recognize blessing in those dark corners when it arrives unprotected a light shining in darkness, with the courage to carry it.

Amen.

10am Service