It's About Presence
Sermon preached in Christ Chapel
of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas,
by the Very Revd Titus Presler, Th.D., D.D.,
Dean & President and Professor of Mission & World Christianity
on the Feast of the Presentation. 2 February 2005
Lessons: Malachi 3.1-4; Psalm 84; Heb. 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40

"They brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord." <i>
And so today we celebrate the Feast of the Presentation.

Not that Mary and Joseph didn't believe that God was with them wherever they were,
but they needed, wanted, felt impelled to be in the publicly acknowledged God-space that was the temple
and there present the child Jesus to the Lord.
They needed to be before the presence of God
and there offer the presence of their son
and in that offering make a present of their son to the God who had come to them in their present time and presented them with the present of a son.

The word present arises from the Latin praesent,
which is a form of the verb praeesse, which means to be to be before.
The parents had received the present of the presence of a child.
They sought now to present the presence of that child as a present to the presence of the God who had been present to them in offering the present of this child.
What they were doing was all about being.
Their presentation was about presence.

Being present - that's the gift.
Being present - that's what relationship depends on,
that's what community depends on -
being present to the other,
being present to one another.

Presence - doesn't that connect with a longing for you?
It does for me: the longing to be truly present
present to life,
present to others,
present to God -
If I'm truly present, I will be present to life, to others, to God.
But it's about presence.

Over the last several years Jane's and my firstborn child, Emma, has given me a particular kind of present each Christmas,
a book of poetry, each time by a contemporary poet.
One was a book of poems by Billy Collins, who teaches at the City University of New York and was Poet Laureate of the United States in 2001.
Here's a poem by Billy Collins entitled, Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House:

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius. <ii>

Now that barking dog was certainly present to Billy.
The achievement of the poem, though, is that Billy Collins became present to the barking dog.
For Collins to write the poem, the phenomenon of the barking dog had to become a different kind of presence to him -
I imagine him capitulating to the presence of the barking dog,
accepting the presence of the barking dog, not as a good thing, but as a presence that could be in conversation with his own presence.
Being present to the barking dog's presence opened him to play, opened him to create,
and the edges of reality became more supple,
his imagination ran fertile,
and the fruit was humor, and the thing of rough beauty that is the poem.

Our daughter gives me these books with an agenda.
Part of it is that she knows that I've written poetry and hopes I'll write some more.
Beneath that, she wants me to be more present to life,
to receive life in that poetic stance that always makes of something more than it appears to be,
to rest and play in the givenness of life
rather than perpetually labor in the project of life -
and she's right about me and how I need more to be.
Her Christmas presents are about being present -
they're about presence.

Mary's consciousness has been the subject of endless pondering in Christian history -
astounded Mary at the annunciation,
groaning Mary at the birth,
presenting Mary today at the temple,
wondering Mary at the Epiphany,
fleeing Mary on the way into Egypt,
worried Mary looking for the 12-year-old,
domestic Mary in Nazareth,
frantic Mary on the edge of the crowd,
stricken Mary at the cross,
exulting Mary at the resurrection,
ecstatic Mary at Pentecost.
What was she thinking through all this? -
we want to know but we don't.
What we do know is that she was present -
present to herself, present to life, present to God -
it was her presence that let it all happen, even allowed it all to happen,
so that the edges of cosmic being became more supple,
so that we had among us Emmanuel, God with us.

Our Emma, now an art director at ESPN, had her own sort of January term this year.
To research design management among women in micro-enterprises she went to Pakistan and spent time among women in projects in Peshawar. <iii>
The hundreds of designs on shawls and other garments -
Where do they come from?
How much is drawn from the tradition?
How much arises from a person's own creativity?
When a group gets together to craft products for sale, who decides what the designs will be?
How do group members grow in their artistic sensibility?
She returned informed, but also transformed - she wants to go back and spend a year there.
It was about presence - she to them, they to her.

You heard it on Monday as the Middlers shared from their January experiences in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Kenya, Pakistan and South Africa. <iv>
For the speakers, it was about presence.
They backgrounded what they did - yes, they said, yes, they served meals and visited the sick and offered counsel,
but the foreground for them, the big thing, was presence -
how the homeless, or the children, or the people living with AIDS were present to them, the students!
They rejoiced in the encounters, in the gifts of being they had received from their sisters and brothers on the streets, in shelters, in orphanages and clinics.
They were there, mind you, because they were offering the present of their presence in the present,
but what they celebrated was the present of presence they received in their present - that presence in which they experienced the presence of Christ.
It was about presence.

Again, and finally, back to our Emma:
Birth is mysterious.
The mechanisms that prompt a woman to go into labor are mysterious, or at least they were in 1975,
and so likewise the mechanisms by which premature labor might be stopped were mysterious.
So when dear Jane went into labor at 28 weeks, she was rushed from Plymouth to the Boston Lying-In Hospital, <v>
where the most advanced birthing unit in the world tried to stop the labor.
Yet, should the child be born, the doctors brought by a seemingly endless series of protocols of new drugs that would strengthen the child in various ways,
and I would scan them frantically -
none of them said, "so that this child will be able to research design management in Pakistan," but that was the general idea -
and, of course, I signed them, as did Jane in the midst of the labor.
I was praying, "Dear God, please stop this labor, please stop it, please stop it, please."
That prayer was not fulfilled.
Emma came out voicelessly at 2 pounds, 4 ounces.
There was much to talk about, of course, and an anxious two and a half months before we could bring her home.
But what had Jane's prayer been during that labor?
Simply this, it turned out: "Teach me, Jesus. Teach me, Jesus, Teach me, Jesus."

That was her presentation in the temple of the labor ward and the delivery room.
That was her presentation to God.
Presented to us, of course, was our first child, who now makes presentations to us.
And so it is that the communities of family and neighborhood and church and world hold the possibility of becoming gifted and gifting circles of giving and receiving in an endless series of presentations.

In this temple here today, we are a community of call, vocation, ministry.
Everyone here has been presented by someone.
Everyone here is a presentation to the church and to the world.
Everyone here struggles with presenting ourselves - being present in the presence that we are called to be.
It's about presence.
And it's worth every bit of our labor.
Thanks be to God!

<i> Luke 2:22.
<ii> Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001): 3.
<iii> This was in service to a thesis project at the Pratt Institute of Art, Manhattan.
<iv> Second-year students at ETSS spend the January term in urban immersion experiences, many in Atlanta, some in Los Angeles, some in international settings, in this instance, Peshawar, Pakistan; Maseno, Kenya; Grahamstown and Klerksdorp, South Africa.
<v> Boston Lying-In was at that time a division of the Boston Hospital for Women, which later merged to form Brigham and Women's Hospital.