How AA Illumines the Feast of the Presentation

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When I was in seminary, we took courses on a lot of different subjects: Bible, liturgics, theology, Christian education, Patristics, music, and pastoral theology, just to name a few.

Of all of those, pastoral theology was a new subject matter for me.

For my bachelors and masters degrees, I had studied archaeology, religious studies, and Classical Greek. This left me very academically minded. I was used to studying history and theology, but pastoral care was different, because it wasn’t about learning facts and figures.

In that class, we learned about the 12 Steps programs. The first one, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), started in the 1930s as a way to overcome addiction to alcohol. Today, there are a variety of 12 Steps programs helping people overcome quite a number addictions, from drugs to sex to gambling. 

Surprisingly, the12 Steps are consistent with Orthodox spirituality.

In fact, they sound a lot like the advice the Desert Fathers gave to their spiritual children. Archimandrite Meletios Webber explores these similarities in his book, Steps of Transformation. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. 

For our purposes today, chapter 9, “Surrendering to God,” is especially important. It’s about Step 3, which is requires the alcoholic to make “… a decision to turn [their] will and [their] lives over to the care of God as [they] understand him.” Fr. Meletios explains,

“This self-will is expressed in a combination of stubbornness, irresponsibility, and the desire to control. Having been brought to his knees by his drinking, the alcoholic has no option but to turn over his life and will to a power beyond his own ego; his own ego is bankrupt.” 

How the alcoholic let’s go of his own ego may be a long process, but it begins with prayer: 

“God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage to self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of Life. May I do Thy will always!”

As the alcoholic slowly learns to let go of their ego, they realize that it’s not an experience of loss, but of freedom.

And that’s what it’s all about: being liberated from that which has enslaved them. This is also what today’s feast is about. 

Just listen to the phrases contained in the gospel reading:

• We hear about Simeon waiting for the “consolation of Israel.”
• We hear about our eyes seeing God’s “salvation.”
• We hear about everyone expecting the “redemption of Jerusalem.”
• And, finally, when we hear of Jesus being “presented,” it’s a surrendering to God that leads to freedom. 

As we know, first-century parents brought their first-born male child to the Temple to offer a sacrifice to God, to “redeem” the child. They did this because first-born male children belonged to God. This sounds strange to us, but the practice goes all the way back to the story of Exodus. 

At that time, Egypt had enslaved the Israelites. To convince Pharaoh to let his people go, God decided to take the life of every first-born male child. However, the Israelites averted the angel of death for their first-born sons by sacrificing a lamb. The memory of this event didn’t just live on through the celebration of Passover, but also through the presentation of first-born male children. Through this, people remembered how God had freed them from tyranny. 

But, for Mary and Jospeh, this wasn’t just about a past remembrance of what God had done for his people. It was also about an expectation to be freed again.

At the time of Jesus, the Holy Land was occupied territory. Judeans, Galileans, and Samaritans all lived under the boot of Rome, the new “Egyptian tyrant.” Their prayer was that God would act again to free his people.

Today’s feast tells us that Jesus was a first-born offering that freed God’s people, but not in the way they expected.

The surprise was that the real tyrant wasn’t Rome, it was sin and death. The offering of Christ we see in today’s feast foreshadows Christ’s final surrender to God on the cross. So, in many ways, this feast is the announcement that Pascha is coming. It’s an emancipation proclamation!

But, we don’t have wait until we die and are resurrected to experience Christ’s liberation. Like the alcoholic who surrenders to God and is freed, we too are invited to surrender to God and experience freedom in a way we never could have imaged.

It may sound easy, but it’s actually a bit scary. Fr. Meletios writes,

“The act of surrender of Step Three is like diving off a cliff. There are no assurances, no guarantees; and no amount of wisdom and knowledge is going to be of any assistance. Even common sense is of no use. Indeed, common sense is one of the things that has to be put aside, because it implies that we should aim to be in control of our own lives. … Step three is the point where the individual is invited to dethrone his own ego and to put his entire life in God’s care. … all the outcomes of all our plans are in God’s hand.”

Just as Mary and Joseph offered Christ for our liberation, we are invited to offer ourselves. To the world this doesn’t make any sense. It’s scary, and it sounds like a bad idea. But, the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world. 

Surrendering ourselves to God in order to be free makes sense only in the light of what Christ has done for us on the cross. It makes sense because Jesus has risen from the dead.

Because Christ is Lord, we have nothing to fear. We know that he is in control, even if the world seeks to enslave us. And, so, we surrender ourselves God in order to be truly free. Amen.