The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas),
1 February 2026, Eldroth, Clapham
There are those who come into church often, worshipping week by week or praying day by day. There are those who come occasionally, for special festivals or for family rites of passage. And there are those who like to visit cathedrals or little village churches on days out, or on holiday, who may light candles and write appreciative words in visitors books.
And there are also those people who at some point in their lives will make a one-off trip to places which are revered as being particularly holy, such as Lindisfarne or Iona, Jerusalem or Lourdes. We call these special kinds of visits pilgrimages. [1]
But whether it’s the weekly service or the festive occasion in the parish church, the holiday visit to the great cathedral, or the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage, people share the intuition that time spent in any of these places can help us find peace, hope, comfort, and understanding to take back into our everyday journey of life.
Those who come to their local church – their ‘mother church’ – at Christmas or for a baptism or funeral, come to reconnect with the special, spiritual, side of life, and to reinforce their ties with their nearest and dearest ones, and their community. Sometimes these moments can cause a person to change direction: I can think of times when hearing a sermon or a eulogy, or saying my godparents vows, challenged me to change my ways for the better… maybe you’ve had this experience too.
Those who come to their particular place of prayer week by week, or day by day, do so for probably all of the above reasons, but also because to us, coming to worship is an integral part of our regular journey through life. Almost as instinctive as breathing, is this desire to take time out of the ‘ordinary’ to place ourselves deliberately in God’s presence to seek his guidance and know his care. You could say that, if we see our whole life as a pilgrimage journey with God, then every place we stop for prayer is a Pilgrim Place.
The Temple in first-century Jerusalem was like the grandest cathedral you can imagine today. It was the most special place at the heart of Israel’s spiritual life. On that day when Mary and Joseph arrived we can imagine it being full of visitors, some of them making their pilgrimage, some of them there for their regular daily or weekly worship. And then we see Mary and Joseph, who were there for a family rite of passage: to fulfil the religious laws, forty days after his birth, to bring their newborn to the Temple and offer a sacrifice.
“They brought him up to Jerusalem,” Luke tells us, and very soon after “They returned to Galilee”. Mary and Joseph’s simple offering may have gone almost unnoticed in a small corner of that vast building with so much activity going on around them, but for this couple those brief moments had lasting significance – a significance underlined by the affirmation they received from two of the Temple’s elders. Simeon’s joyful prayer and Anna’s heartfelt praises were so cherished by Mary and Joseph that they eventually found their way into Luke’s gospel, and then on into the liturgies of the Church throughout the ages. Stemming from that modest moment in the Temple, Christians worldwide continue to sing Simeon’s enraptured words: “My eyes have seen your salvation … a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
What a great message – the central message of our faith – that The Father’s love is for all people. At this moment in our history when Christianity is once again being reduced to a narrow exclusive nationalism which turns hearts and minds against society’s most vulnerable ones, we do well to remember that the birth of Jesus shows “God becoming like us, revealing the infinite dignity of every person”. [2] When we hear politicians preaching to us about upholding “Britain’s Christian heritage” let us remember that that heritage starts with Simeon in the Temple, cradling the newborn in his arms, and with his message: that the light of Christ shines for all people; and that by trying to walk in the light of his love and his teachings, very different sorts of people discover we can live and flourish together.
You’ll have seen that with today’s Newsletter I’ve included a prayer card for you. It comes from a Church of England initiative called Faith in the North, which aims to celebrate the faith of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries who brought Christianity to our part of the world. [3]
The prayer cards tell us something about their faith: that they were in touch with nature, seeing God’s hand at work in all creatures; that they celebrated the cross of Christ which offers forgiveness and new life to all; that they valued prayer and meditation as ways to stay close to God; that they found God in special holy places which they travelled many miles and crossed many rivers and seas to reach; and that in their own place too, they found a sense of belonging to God just where they were.
They call them the Northern Saints, these early pioneers who helped to spread the faith through this part of the country, whose disciples made their way throughout the North preaching, teaching, and planting churches as they went, including the first buildings on the sites of the churches in which we now worship.
We don’t know the names, anything about, those who founded the first churches in our parishes – but we can nevertheless be thankful for their missionary activity which, by a long and rich pilgrimage through history, often fraught with drawbacks and danger, enables us to be at worship here today in this place. Their faith, their example, is our heritage.
We who find our church to be a place of peace, beauty and comfort know that God is also present in our daily lives and wants us to go on speaking, listening and learning more about him, and finding life in all its fulness with him in all our days. In the words of the Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric, ‘God’s house is our prayer-house. Nevertheless, those who believe may, in every place, pray to the Almighty who is there in every place for those who call to him.’ [4]
Notes
[1] Faith in the North: Pilgrim Places, accessed 31 January 2026.
[2] Pope Leo quoted in Solomon Hughes, Andrew Rosindell and the politics of selective Christianity. Morning Star, 30 January 2026.
[3] Faith in the North: Exploring Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: some prayers to try, 16 July 2025.
[4] Faith in the North: Pilgrim Trail Leaflets: ‘Discover the early Northern Saints: Signposts to God’, 14 November 2025.
