For those of you who notice details or are familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Episcopal worship you will have registered that the colors of our adornments are not green today, as would be the norm for the ordinary time of Epiphany, but have instead returned to white.

One reason for this, of course, is because we are baptizing Abe this morning.

But the other reason is because today is a feast day.

It is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple of course!

Didn’t you have this marked in your calendars?

Don’t you celebrate this feast every year along with Christmas and Easter?

Well, probably not.

We don’t even celebrate it on a Sunday every year.

We only celebrate it in church when it actually falls on a Sunday as it has this year.

And because we celebrate it so infrequently as a community, I think it would be helpful if I give some explanation about what this feast is about.

In a Jewish household in Jesus’ day and today all male babies are circumcised at eight days old as was begun back with Abraham.

Also, a month after giving birth to a male child, the birth mother was (and in many sects of Judaism still is) expected to participate in the rite of purification.

In addition, in Jesus’ time, parents would dedicate their firstborn male child to God, thus offering their first fruits.

Part of the purification rite was to sacrifice a sheep or, if one was poor, two turtle doves.

These liturgical traditions were and are a reminder that every Jewish child is born in the context of the covenant established between God and the people of Israel.

These worshipful acts are reminders that those participating in them are not alone in the universe.

They belong to a history that tells the story of Something Other at work in the world through a people that apart from that Presence is insignificant.

These acts of worship for those participating in them say that they are a people who find their meaning in their relationship with God.

They are acts of reverence before a mystery.

A mystery that is brought to the forefront of everyone’s mind when a child is born and thus should be recognized through religious ritual and worship.

Luke is the only Gospel writer to give us this story of Jesus’ presentation in the Temple and Mary’s purification, and he seems to conflate several Jewish practices.

Remember that Luke was most likely a Gentile.

But looking past some of the muddled details, there is a larger point.

Luke is trying to say that Jesus is very much Jewish.

He was born Jewish and raised Jewish.

His family were observant and faithful Jewish people.

And the rituals and practices of the life in which he was raised formed him in the story of the Jewish God, active in the history of creation.

The Jewish God who created, and loved, and redeemed because of this love.

The Jesus Luke is calling his readers to follow is a Jewish man, formed in the Jewish faith, not outside of it, who will reveal a God who creates, sustains, calls, and redeems the created.

A God who loves, especially those the world does not love: the poor, the oppressed, the prisoner, the captive, and the marginalized.

A God who chose to become incarnate in a poor family (remember they gave the offering of those with limited resources) outside of the halls of power.

Now, in Jesus’ time, and for most of human history, practicing religious rituals was the norm and not the exception.

The idea that there was something beyond the created world was not something to be believed in, it was an accepted part of life.

The transcendent existed and everyone knew it, and the appropriate response to the transcendent was ritual and worship of some form or another.

It was an accepted part of the human condition.

Something beyond the created world exists and that something has agency and acts in the created world.

And the created world could not exist without this Something sustaining it.

This is not true today.

Today we live in a world where the transcendent is presumed either not to exist or not to matter.

As science advanced, and we humans began to understand and therefore explain more and more of the created world, we also came to believe that this understanding would advance forever until we reached a point where through our own understanding and abilities we could control and fix everything in the created world.

We began to believe that we did not need God at all and perhaps that God does not even exist.

Or if God does exist the Divine contribution was simply to kick off creation and now is no longer needed except as an assistant to each of us in our own individual self-improvement programs.

God was relegated to the role of coach and guide or foolish superstition.

The center of our world today is the Self, the state, and a capitalistic economic imagination and our most prominent cultural rituals and worship reflect this.

Just look at the celebration of the Super Bowl which will occur next Sunday, which will bring together more Americans than perhaps any other event, and will lift up the ideals of strength, power, wealth, and consumerism.

It is not in God we trust but in the idea that we will be saved by rational, self-interested individuals in a global market.

But the thing is this, this center has begun to crumble.

Increasingly we have been shown that while a lot of good has come from these systems, ultimately, they cannot save us and in fact might at this point in history actually be destroying us.

Millions are angry because what they have been promised, a life in which they can support their family and have a reasonably comfortable life, is outside of their reach, and instead a very small few are getting richer and richer.

And millions, in the absence of something greater than themselves, and in the belief that our salvation lies in human hands, have put their trust in a strongman who promises a return to a time when they believed life worked for them.

We have reached the limits of what our modern systems can do, and we will either continue to blindly put these human systems at the center of our world to our destruction, or we will come to our senses and return to an understanding that there is something bigger than us and that this Something is the true source of life and hope.

And we will put our trust and faith in this greater Something and join in the action of this Creator to redeem us and bring us life.

We cannot save ourselves, but we do have a choice to make.

Can we acknowledge that God is an active agent in our world and that we need God for our very existence?

Can we accept that the Transcendent is real and all around us and life can only be found in seeking this Transcendence and joining in with the Divine work?

I think we can, and I think that is why we are here this morning.

Like Jesus’ family two millennia ago, who went to the Temple to join in with ancient rituals that reminded them of who they were and whose they were, we are gathered here this morning to practice two ancient rituals, Baptism and the Holy Eucharist.

Modernity may have told us that these rituals are not important or are simply for those who need a little coaching from God to improve themselves, but modernity is wrong.

These two ancient rituals are radical, life-shaping and life-changing acts given to us to remind us of who we are and whose we are.

In enacting these rituals, we join our lives to the life-giving Creator of all.

Our worship is not an individual self-improvement program, like a fitness class at the Y.

Our worship is an inbreaking of the kingdom of God right here and right now.

Our worship is an acknowledgement that we are not alone in the universe and are not the center of the universe.

We are not the center of our worship this morning, God is.

Jesus’ circumcision and presentation were an acknowledgement that he belonged to “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” a people that God had formed.

Abe’s baptism and our renewal of our baptismal vows are an acknowledgment that we belong to the God who loved us so much that the transcendent became human and ultimately died on a cross for us.

Like Jesus we too belong to a history that tells the story of Something Other at work in the world through a people that apart from that Presence is insignificant, a people that finds its meaning in its relationship with God.

A relationship that comes with expectation and responsibility.

God has given us life, and we are to use this life for God’s purposes not the purposes of the world.

Because God gave us life, loves us and sustains us we will “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves,” and we will, “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

And we will know that these things are hard and can only be done with God’s help.

And we will welcome Abe, and next week his father Andrew, into this community that recognizes and reverences that which is bigger than all of us, that which gives us life, and they will become a part of this family that is seeking to live into the responsibilities that come with our relationship with the One who created and sustains us.

And we will, as we do every Sunday, gather together around the table to share in the Lord’s Supper.

We will bring forward symbols of life, symbols of what nourishes us and sustains us.

We will dedicate these gifts of God to the God who made us and sustains us.

We will give thanks for the One with a love that is beyond understanding.

We will be reminded that it is God who sustains us and not ourselves or the systems of this world.

And we will be sent out to join this acting God in the work this God is doing in the world.

Humans worship.

Every human being offers devotion to something or someone above and beyond themselves, whether we name this as devotion or worship or not.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

The only true object of worship is God, though we all get confused from time to time about this.

We all get caught up in worship of that which is not worthy of our worship: money, possessions, status, power, comfort, safety and the like.

That is why we need to gather together as a community to worship that which is truly worthy of worship: God.

Worship exists for us, not for God.

God does not need to be worshipped, but we need to worship God.

Worship helps us to acknowledge the appropriate value of everything.

In worship we learn the human art of gathering.

We commit ourselves to something greater than ourselves, we acknowledge our utter reliance on the power of God working in and through us.

We bring to life God’s dream for us in which all are welcome to the Lord’s table.

And in a world that says that God does not matter or does not exist at all, when we worship, we enact something truly radical, revolutionary and life-giving.

Let no one tell you that coming to church on Sunday is boring or irrelevant.

If we truly take what we are doing and saying seriously and believe it, we are joining in with the power of the Universe.

If we truly take what we are doing and saying seriously, we ought to be ready to have our socks knocked off and to be changed in ways we neither expect nor imagine.

This is what happened to Mary and Joseph.

They certainly knew that God was doing something extraordinary and outside of the usual in their lives, but that is not why they go to the Temple that day.

They go to the Temple because as faithful God-following Jewish people that is what they do, and in doing what Jewish people do they find Simeon and Anna who tell them things that amaze them.

It is true that week in and week out ritual, our worship, can seem mundane, ordinary and well, sometimes even boring.

But that is because worship isn’t entertainment, it is part of what brings us into right relationship with God.

In our human relationships there are times of great connection and excitement and there are greater times of everydayness, putting in the time, and well yes even boringness.

And yet most of us don’t get rid of our human relationships just because they don’t bring us feelings of connection and excitement all the time.

We know that if we want to have good relationships with our family and friends we have to put in the time.

The same is true with our relationship with God, especially in a world that teaches us that we don’t need God at all.

As we are gathered here together week in and week out, we are shaped by what we are doing in ways that we don’t even notice.

We enact God’s dream for the world.

We are reminded that the transcendent is real and that we cannot save ourselves.

We are strengthened to join God in God’s work in the world.

And sometimes we will even have our socks knocked off and be amazed by what we see, hear, and experience.

And so, this morning we welcome you Abe and next week Andrew into this family and give thanks that you are choosing to join in this crazy worshipping family of Jesus-followers that call ourselves Episcopalians.

Together may we all become a little better at following the God who created us, loves us and sustains us.

Together may our worship bring us together to be the Body of Christ. Amen.