Today’s scripture reading, the dedication of the infant Jesus in the Temple, can only occur in the gospel written by Luke the Physician. Neither Mark, the author of the oldest gospel, nor the unknown authors of John, the weirdest, give us an infancy narrative.
The gospel that does offer an alternative infancy narrative, traditionally attributed to Matthew, shares with Luke the miraculous conception and the location of the birth, but Matthew is so busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses that he manufactures a slaughter of the male babies of Bethlehem and packs the Holy Family hurriedly off to Egypt, just in case you had missed the point.
So this story in Luke set in the Temple is unique in the biblical tradition.
The story serves a strategic purpose. Jesus led a Hebrew religious reform movement, and the increasingly Gentile expansion of that movement insisted on the continuity and legitimacy of their faith. Checking the boxes of Hebrew religious observance was important to them, proving to themselves and hopefully to others that they were not some new cult invented by a charlatan from Tarsus, but were in fact an expression of the Creator’s ancient and expanding covenant with all of human kind.
There is much to unpack here: Simeon who has the Holy Spirit decades before Pentecost, the statement that Jesus will be the source of conflict, and the cryptic message about a sword piercing Mary, and on the “feel-good” side of the ledger, a female prophet, Anna, who recognizes in Jesus the redemption of the Hebrew people.
But let’s leave all the metaphysics aside for a moment, and look at the event that drives the narrative. We are told that dedication of the first-born son at the Temple, along with the blood sacrifice of the two pigeons, or as I like to call them, sky rats, is the standard religious practice.
Simeon gets a little weird, and the pigeons have a very very bad day, but mostly it is a lovely little tableau, reminding us of so many infant baptisms back when people did that sort of thing, a mother and father and a priest or pastor. This is ritual and tradition at their best, connecting us to a deep story, helping us find our location within that deep story.
But being who we are in the Congregational and United Church of Christ tradition, people who combine reason with tradition, we also have to pay attention to the “why.” Why was a family expected to schlep to Jerusalem, a journey of four days from Galilee, which really was the sticks? Why were they then expected to purchase a pair of birds to kill from a merchant in the Temple courtyard, when so many could barely afford to eat? This was a time of famine and dispossession.
The answer we are given is that this was God’s commandment as written in the Law of the Lord. Law of the Lord here means the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Testament supposedly written by Moses himself.
I’m not sure if these were written on dozens of stone tablets at Sinai while the people were down doing the thing with the golden calf, a sort of Mel Brooks moment with a wheelbarrow, or if they periodically had to stop at the desert stationary store for a new moleskin during their forty years of wandering, Moses toiling away for hours every night after a full day’s march.
It is pretty remarkable that Moses wrote with such precision about the Temple, its architecture, function, and ritual, more than two centuries before it existed, before David created a neutral royal city to avoid the claims of the individual tribes. Then again, the Torah ends with the Hebrew people going into the Promised Land, and a chastened Moses dying alone on the mountain, buried by God only She knows where, with no explanation of exactly who knew that part and wrote it down…
The truth is this ritual that supposedly went back twelve centuries or so really only went back about six or so, still a long time, to a period after the collapse of the Northern Kingdom, when what little was left of the declining kingdom once ruled by the great King David had absorbed the refugees from the destroyed northern half and reconstructed their national identity, rewrote history, as humans always do.
And, conveniently for the priests who played such a central role in this project of reconstruction, that history placed the Temple and the priesthood right at the center of everything. They even discovered a long lost scroll with what we now call Deuteronomy, and funny enough, it was filled with reasons to pay the priests, to schlep to Jerusalem with bulls and bread and beer.
Which of these things is true? The sweet little tableau of a happy family ritually celebrating their new child, ignoring the obvious question of paternity? Or the demanding and expensive rules that disrupted the lives of a poor young family to the benefit of the merchants who made their living at the Temple and the priests who placed themselves between humans and God?
And the answer, unfortunately, is both. Both of these things are true.
Ritual, distinguished from habit in that it is time and action set apart for a transcendent purpose, has the ability to locate us, to help us remember that while we are huge in our own story, we are relatively small players in a huge and living story: of our families, of the Park Church, of the United States, of a seemingly suicidal species of primates, of a planet that explodes with life (if we can just stop destroying it).
Ritual is almost always narrative, like the Yeoman of the Guard searching the cellars at Westminster during the State Opening of Parliament in the United Kingdom, a reminder of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, or the gathering at Christ’s Table, a reminder of his Last Supper, his courage, and the brutality with which the religious and government authorities tried to destroy him and the movement that surrounded him,
Ritual can also have lost its purpose altogether, or worse, serve an evil purpose, propping up injustice and lies.
The story that ritual tells may simply be untrue, or if true, so toxic that it no longer reflects our values. Columbus Day, so beloved by Italian-Americans, rests on the Doctrine of Discovery, the lie that the Italian explorer acting as an agent of the Spanish monarchy had discovered a largely empty continent. This would become the foundation for centuries of land theft and genocide that continues to this day. The United Church of Christ formally rejected this doctrine, though most Americans have not caught up, still wrapped up in the criminal narrative of Manifest Destiny and “settling the New World.”
The death and destruction our European ancestors brought to this continent doesn’t seem like a good reason to hold a parade, but Columbus Day celebrations originated in cultural acceptance of Italian-Americans after decades in which immigrants from Italy and Ireland were treated as unwelcome, as second class citizens. Columbus Day and Saint Patrick’s Day symbolized legitimacy for the communities, a cultural “coming of age,” so there’s that too.
And these Olympics, another complicated “ritual,” for the good, the celebration of human athletic achievement, the artistry and creativity, is matched with the bad, games that have become such a catastrophe for the host nation that few except autocracies can risk hosting, bringing us back to the games as propaganda, to Leni Riefenstahl and the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
And here is our challenge: to be attentive, thoughtful, prayerful about ritual, instead of opting for the smugness of the educated, for ritual has been part of the human story for as long as we have been, and will always be part of the human story.
It is our job to insure that our rituals contribute to thriving, individually, collectively, globally. That takes some attention and honesty, some holy creativity and heaping loads of divine love. May we have enough smarts and enough love to succeed. Our congregation, our democracy, and the countless living things on this planet depend on it. Amen.