This week in our Communion service we'll be marking Candlemas, which celebrates the moment the baby Jesus is brought into the temple in Jerusalem for the first time.  The account can be found in the gospel of Luke 2:22-40.

It's an incredible moment in history, when the God who creates heaven and earth enters into the temple that has been the central site of his worship for generations, not only spiritually, but literally.  It's a moment that fulfils prophecy and expectation (yes, Malachi 3, I'm looking at you, amongst others).  It's a moment that should send tingles down the spine when we imagine it - God, touchable, reachable, fully realised, and undeniably present in the central place of worship... and yet, it's also a moment that's incredibly underwhelming, because, in this moment, God also happens to still be a baby just over a month old.  He probably won't even learn to smile for another week or two, and still needs his head supporting... what use to anyone is a God like this?

The potency of God and the powerlessness of a baby is just one of the incredible opposites we can discern in this text.  The setting offers us another.  The backdrop is the temple in Jerusalem, a mighty and majestic building.  A building of such craftsmanship that in another 30 years or so it will cause Jesus' disciples to cry out in amazement and wonder.  Mary and Joseph wander up its steps able only to afford the pauper's sacrifice of two young pigeons to offer for the purification.  The temple riches accentuate the peasants' poverty.

When they arrive, of course, the moment doesn't go unnoticed - Simeon is there, who's been waiting for this child all his life.  We don't know from the text how old he is, but the tradition has always assumed him to be an old man - so the moment he takes the baby in his arms we meet another moment of contrast.  Two wrinkled faces stare at each other: one still unfolding from the constraints of birth, the other crumpling under the passage of time.  Even if you want to be pedantic and argue Simeon may not yet be old, Anna can always step in and take that mantle.  The prophet, now in her 85th year of life, must have seemed unspeakably ancient in her time.

Notice, then, what happens when we stand these two, Anna and Simeon, beside each other.  It's striking to find the words of prophecy spoken in both bass and soprano tones - male and female worship offered in tandem.  Like her age, Anna's prophetic authority may not strike our modern ears as so strange, but remember her culture would have allowed her far less voice than ours.

The words they proclaim yield another juxtaposition - they speak of 'redemption', 'rising', 'peace', 'salvation'; but also of falling, opposition, and the pain as of a sword through the heart for Mary.

Finally (though you may find still more examples), I find suggestions of contrast between Simeon and Joseph, and Anna and Mary.  We meet Simeon as a prophet and a poet; we know Joseph as a carpenter.  The mystic walks here alongside the pragmatist.

In Mary we have the archetype of mothers; Anna, by her long widowhood and reliance on the charity of the temple, suggests herself to us as childless...

Put it all together and here in this one moment we have power and vulnerability; wealth and poverty; youth and age; male and female; joy and sorrow; peace and conflict; mysticism and pragmatism; fertility and barrenness...  We have, in short, just about enough breadth to say that we have everyone and everything.  Yet all of these opposites are held together, without judgement or favouritism, in this one moment.  Difference is not ignored, but neither does it dominate.  It doesn't divide, but comes together in its worship of this tiny child.

We are called, it seems, into the presence of a God who, when he made himself manifest in his temple did so with a vulnerability and humility perfectly and precisely orchestrated to make sure that everyone - no matter which side of the lines (real or imagined) they were standing -  was included in that moment.  We are in the presence of a God who was willing to become the least, in order that he might welcome in the most.

What use to anyone is a God like this?  

A God who somehow manages to bring together such diversity in himself, without dissolving differences but encompassing them?  A God who shows a way to unity through acceptance and not argument?  A God who works his power through peace and vulnerability, and not strength or violence?  A God who invites us to hold him to ourselves as a baby, and not a weapon?

Right now, I think that sort of God, and people who worship him and yearn to be like him, could turn out to be quite a lot use, don't you?