A pure temple.

A Sermon for the Presentation of Christ

February 2, 2025 at Holy Communion

Psalm 48

“This God is our God for ever” (Psalm 48:13). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Notre Dame was a funny place to go to grad school, because it was simultaneously an active university and the epicentre of American Catholic media culture. If you’ve heard of Notre Dame, the odds are that it’s because of its football team, the Fighting Irish.

(I’ll tell you a story. I spent the summer before grad school painting home exteriors. I was standing around with one of my coworkers, and she asked where I was going to grad school. “Note Dame,” I say. “Haven’t heard of it,” she says. “Have you heard of the Fighting Irish football team, with the gold helmets?” “Oh yeah, I think I have. What are you going to do down there.” This is where I get a twinkle in my eye. “I told you,” I say, “I’m going to play football.” “There’s no way you’re going to play football for Notre Dame.” “Okay,” I say, “I’m going to be the fifth-string kicker, probably never going to actually play, but I’m on the team.” Anyway, I played it right. I broke the news to her on our last day of work that I was not, in fact, going to play Notre Dame football.)

On game days, you wouldn’t know that Notre Dame was a school instead of a fairground. Tens of thousands of Irish fans from around the United States fly in for the weekend to cheer on the alma mater, and the campus turns into a thousand-acre barbeque.

My Old Testament professor commented on the game day tourists in a lecture he gave on today’s Psalm. It’s a Psalm about “the city of our God,” that is, Jerusalem. He read the last two verses: “Consider well her bulwarks; examine her strongholds; that you may tell those who come after. This God is our God for ever and ever” (Psalm 48:12–13). He talked about the university’s motto: “God, country, Notre Dame,” and how the “Notre Dame” in question is both the university and “Our Lady,” the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.

As the alumni amble around their old stomping grounds, ogling the buildings and telling their kids stories, their attitude is unmistakably an attitude of *piety.* They revisit the university so that they can retrieve the sense of immersion in a consecrated space. The golden dome over the main administration building, the spire of the campus basilica: these are, for them, the way that they learned to encounter the Mother of God. In a sense, the buildings *are* Mary for these visitors, and so there is an ambiguity about whether “Notre Dame” is a university or a heavenly Mother.

This relates to Psalm 46 because this is how the poet describes ancient Jerusalem. If you “consider her bulwarks,” he says, you will be filled with awe that “this God is our God forever.” My professor made clear that, in Hebrew just as in English, the most straightforward way to take this is that *Jerusalem itself* is called “our God.” The psalmist had no confusion about God being a spiritual being, but the very stones of Jerusalem were so saturated with sacred associations that to see Jerusalem was, for the poet, to see the face of God. As a visible body it carried the invisible glory, and displayed it for those with eyes to see.

Today is a holy day in the Christian year with many different names. It is both the “Presentation of Christ in the Temple” and “The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary”, which is what we hear in the Gospel reading: on the fortieth day after his birth, according to the dictates of the Law, Jesus was presented in the Temple and his mother underwent her ritual purification after childbirth. This occasion belongs to both the annual cycle of holy days related to the life of Jesus and the cycle of holy days related to the life of Mary.

That same professor I mentioned also wrote a book called *Christian Doctrine in the Old Testament*, which included a chapter on Mary. His argument is that the way that ancient Jews talked about the Temple prepared early Christians to talk about the relationship between Jesus and his Mother. On one hand, God is God and Jerusalem is just a city. So Mary is just a woman. But on the other hand, Jerusalem and its Temple are God’s dwelling place, the carrier of God, the bearer of God to the world, the point of access to God.

But even the Temple’s ritual consecration couldn’t create an intimacy like the intimacy of Mother and Son. They share a body. God the word takes on human nature by taking on *Mary’s* nature, weaving her DNA into the visible face of divinity. Like ancient Jews who admired the stones of the holy city and saw the face of I AM THAT I AM, Christians look to Mary and see the dwelling place of the Father’s compassion and power. They see the burning bush, which fed the fire of God but was illumined rather than consumed.

Talking this way about Mary this way—although I admit that it likely seems novel in an Anglican context—is not just a curiosity, nor does it belong to Catholics and Orthodox Christians alone. Unless we understand how God wove Mary’s humanity into his own holiness, we may miss the gospel of human salvation entirely.

God came into the world to do to each and every human being what he did to Mary: to make us bearers of his holiness, transparent vessels of the fire at the heart of the world. And the evidence is in our Old Testament reading. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple … But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi” (Malachi 3:1–3). The Mother of God is purified, and we will be purified. The Mother of God is the unconsumed burning bush, and we too will feel the heat of the Refiner’s fire. The Lord did suddenly visit his temple when he descended into the Virgin’s womb, and he visits his temple again every time a Christian is born again—or rather, when Christ is born in him.

The goal of Christian life is to become so saturated with God, to let God weave himself so closely into the fabric of your flesh and bones, that you release what St Paul meant when he said that your body “is a temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19).