Pastor Sullivan's Blog

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. The world is finished with its Christmas celebration by now and has moved onto its celebration of the new calendar year. But for the Church today is the sixth day of Christmas and the Sunday after Christmas. The appointed gospel lesson jumps ahead forty days after Jesus’ birth to Mary’s purification in the temple at Jerusalem. The text picks up in the middle of things. “ And Joseph and His mother marveled at those things which were spoken of Him. ” The words at which they marveled were the words of the aged priest Simeon, who had taken the child in his elderly arms and spoken the words which we now sing every Sunday in the Nunc Dimittis after receiving the Lord’s Supper where we see the salvation of the Lord prepared for all people.   In the Lord’s Supper we, like Simeon, receive Christ physically, but under bread and wine, and our sins are once again forgiven. After saying that the Lord can now let him d...

The Sunday after Christmas Luke 2:33-40 December 31, 2017 Grace and peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. In the twelfth chapter of Leviticus Moses wrote that forty days after a woman gives birth to a son, she is to appear before the Lord. He writes, “ When the days of her purification are fulfilled, whether for a son or a daughter, she shall bring to the priest a lamb of the first year as a burnt offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove as a sin offering, to the door of the tabernacle of meeting ” (Leviticus 12:6). Today’s Gospel lesson finds Mary and Joseph doing just that. After the days of Mary’s purification are complete, she and her husband, Joseph, are in the temple doing what the Lord has commanded them through Moses. They’re so poor that they can only afford to offer turtledoves, the cheapest of the assigned offerings. As they doing this an aged man, Simeon, approaches them. Simeon “ was just and devout, waiting for the Consolatio...